It appears that all these disputes with China follow a similar pattern: the US starts up some dispute with the Chinese and the Chinese react tit for tat. Our two countries operate with different value systems based on different historical systems. We built our nation on the backs of slaves and expropriated land from the Native Americans whom we rounded up and put in Bantustans and have proceeded to try and impose our way with bombs and bullets on weaker countries around the world as part of the general European colonial and imperialist world order. The Chinese are an ancient culture that was attacked and controlled for a century or more by this European order and has freed itself from it and is now standing on its own two feet independent of US world hegemony. Our news organizations report the news filtered through a bias against the Chinese system just as theirs do with a bias against ours. As long as Trump, or any American president, starts up a fight by poking the Chinese (kicking out their news people) they are sure to poke back (the same goes for the Russians -- smaller countries just have to put up with American bullying most of the time). If we want a more peaceful world all we need is for the USA to leave off its bullying and take any real problems to the UN or the World Court which other civilized nations are wont to do instead of bombing, assassinating, or trying to starve people through sanctions.
Thursday, March 19, 2020
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
Russian Constitutional Reforms
"Mr. Putin emphasized that the legislation allowing him to run again would have to be approved by Russia’s Constitutional Court. The legislation would also be part of the package of constitutional amendments to be voted on in a previously scheduled nationwide plebiscite on April 22." The collapse of the Soviet Union was an absolute disaster for the ordinary citizens of that country as the economic upheavals and anarchy of the 90s and incompetent Yeltsin government attests. Putin's government did in fact bring about stability and economic betterment to the vast majority of Russians and is still the basis of his widespread popularity despite a vibrant if small opposition movement including a
Communist Party in the Duma. The attempt by the new Russian ruling class to create a parliamentary capitalist democracy based on western European models has proven to be extremely problematic given the history of the Soviet Union and Putin is correct to stress that evolutionary developments in this direction are a continued necessity and probably require a stable temporary continuity of the present mixture of a strong presidential regime restrained by a semblance of popular control through parliament and by means of the Constitutional Court. The fact that the Russian people must approve of Putin's reforms by means of a national election is proof that the ideals of bourgeois democratic government are alive and well in Russia despite whatever historical constraints they still face. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation will, hopefully, continue to play a positive role in representing the working class and laying the foundations for a revival of socialism in Russia in the coming years.
Monday, March 09, 2020
Krugman & Piketty versus Marx
A good review for activists which will save us from having to go through a slough of 1000 pages of undigested speculation. As far as Marx versus Piketty is concerned Piketty admitted re his first book that he never read Marx! Krugman's review also indicates problems with understanding Marx: “In Marxian dogma, a society’s class structure is determined by underlying, impersonal forces, technology and the modes of production that technology dictates. Piketty, however, sees inequality as a social phenomenon, driven by human institutions.”— Sorry Dr Krugman, but Marx says that class structure is conditioned by human social institutions and is a product of historical development not determined by impersonal forces but by a dialectical interaction between material forces and human responses the most important of which is, with regard to the modes (means) of production the historically constituted social relations of production i.e., class relations involving who owns and controls the means of production. Piketty’s view “Inequality is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological and political.”- is only half right and represents the idealistic non materialistic flaws of bourgeois economics. The truth is Marx’s view that the inequality intrinsic to capitalism is a product of the interaction between economic and technological forces and the ideological and political forces engendered by this interaction.
Wednesday, March 04, 2020
We are all one (and hungry)
What makes a person a person is a sense of self (self-consciousness) i.e., a feeling of identity and having memories and an internal narrative and all this is conditioned by, or a function of, the hippocampus, when we find that the proteins and chemicals associated with self-consciousness show up in other forms of life we cannot rule out the possibility these life forms are similar to us —i.e., they are self-consciousness personalities in their own right. These chemicals show up in the brains of crabs, shrimp, lobsters, insects and “other arthropods, including centipedes, millipedes and some arachnids. Even vertebrates, including humans, have them in a brain structure called the hippocampus, a known center for memory and learning.” According to the lead scientist in this study: "Corresponding brain centers -- the mushroom body in arthropods, marine worms, flatworms and, possibly, the hippocampus of vertebrates -- appear to have a very ancient origin in the evolution of animal life.” We are all living unique personal selves, and we eat each other.
"All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all."
Bon appétit !
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all."
Bon appétit !
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