The north/south battle of recent days set up a dyamic in which the government could not be seen to compromise. The continuous thread running back to 1979 is one of authoritarian leadership. Indeed, the flipside of marketising everything is a centralising state. At first tooling up to see off pesky and uppity labour movements, later it moved to tackle alternative bases of authority within the state's institutions by abolition, muzzling, selling them off, or subjecting them to market mechanisms. Councils are one such unreliable arm of the state and different Prime Ministers have enjoyed bashing local government for cheap political points. Boris Johnson's riding roughshod over Manchester is the latest in this inglorious tradition. Unfortunately for him and previous occupants of Number 10 in recent decades, this leads to brittle government. The executive in its overweening arrogance not only dissolves opposition to it within the state system, it centres not just authority but also responsiblity on itself. And once authority is lost, the government and the Prime Minster are held responsible for everything and its position is unrecoverable. Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Dave, and May, all lost it by accident or by badly conceived design and the furies came for them. Johnson's barrelling approach to everything is the repetition and reiteration of Number 10's authority. If he is seen to climb down in a big way, such as conceding to Andy Burnham's demands for adequate compensation, or the two-week circuit breaker favoured by SAGE and Keir Starmer, a slippage in Johnson's authority can snowball into an avalanche. Being seen to win is pathetic and reckless, but for Johnson authority is all. On this there can be no compromise.
The second is, naturally, the Tory base are shielded from the hijinks. Nine seats out of Greater Manchester's 27 is nothing for the Tories when there are 71 others to fall back on, even if the 1922 Committee's Graham Brady is among the potential collateral. What does this matter for the coalition of radicalised pensioners elsewhere? Not much. And even, materially speaking, it does not impact much for elderly Tory supporters in the seats directly affected. If there's anything we've learned about the last 10 years in British politics, as long as they're shielded from cuts (or, to be more precise, feel they're shielded) the bulk of older people will merrily vote for the party kicking their children and grandchildren in the teeth. I know this, you know this, and Dominic Cummings knows this.
And by the Tory base, we can't forget our jolly old friend capital. There are no worries on this score. The petty capitals of small-scale landlordism are fine (no one-third rent cut for this most parasitic of strata), and the big interests of finance, property, and the City are absolutely dandy too. Manchester is a provincial backwater compared to the metropolis, and even if Sadiq Khan has to be stitched up as per Andy Burnham, their operations are unaffected. The speculation, debt payments, rents, and transaction fees will flow Covid or no. The only possible blip is if the Burnham-led opposition spills out of Greater Manchester and ignites generalised regionalist grievances across the north of England and the Midlands, and Labour show a deftness of foot so far lacking in its interventions to position itself as the vehicle for that opposition.
This brings us back to the authority question. For Johnson, there cannot ever be a King in the North nor anywhere else in England. If stomping on councils and metro mayors is what it takes, his blighted government are going to do it. Yet here is the problem. Authoritarians cannot live by authoritarian means alone forever, and the more he blunders about smiting all and sundry, the higher the well of resentment fills. Manchester is the latest victim. Might it be the tipping point?
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26 comments:
I hope & pray it will be the tipping point at last. Each day is unbelievable as the government tears apart anything decent & moral to help those they are meant to serve. I have never been a Tory supporter, especially after living through the nightmare of Thatcher destroying industries here in the North & brutalising the Miners & their communities. I hoped never to see such cruelty again but BJ & cronies are taking it all higher until our country will be bankrupt & ruined. At 60 I may not live through the worst that is yet to come but my Sons will & I fear for their future as there will be nothing for them. Thankyou for such informative articles. I pray for our freedom not to be taken & for justice for all who are suffering at the hands of the corrupt government.Being disabled I have lived in fear for years due to Tory cuts & cruel handling of those of us unable to work now & reliant on benefits to survive & I foresee things getting much worse. God bless & stay safe.
“Tipping point?” Have you forgotten how FPTP voting works, Phil?
Go back 15 years. Due primarily to the Iraq War, the years 2003 to 2005 had not been good ones for Blair and Labour. By the time of the 2005 election, Labour’s overall 1997 vote of 43.2% had dipped to 35 %. But Labour still was able to hang on to power with a majority government and 355 seats, even though 65% of voters had chosen other parties. (For example, the Lib Dems under Charles Kennedy got 22% of the total votes, but only 62 seats. Kennedy was a leading opponent of the Iraq War: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/02/charles-kennedys-2003-speech-on-his-partys-anti-iraq-war-stance )
What of Johnson and the Tories in the years ahead as a result on their COVID-19 botch, this current punch up over Manchester, the fallout over Brexit …. and who knows what else lies ahead for them and the British people?
In 2019, the Tories also got 43% of the total vote. Next time around? A total of 65% of voters (or even fewer) could vote for other parties --- with Starmer’s Labour getting the largest share --- and a Tory vote of 35% could be quite sufficient to have another Tory majority until 2029. Frightening!
Proportional representation is at least part of the answer. In fact, more and more people think it is time to GET PR DONE!
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/time-to-get-pr-done
just to bang on about this.
The government is caught between a group of public health officials who seem to have completely lost the plot and the Treasury which is looking at the numbers. PH officials have no idea how to end this. They all seem to be invoking magic. The magic of a vaccine, which will miraculously appear out of a lab one day, not need 2 years testing, and will confer magical anti-viral properties on all who take it. Or the magic of testing, which will deliver instantaneous 100% accurate diagnosis, or the magic of a fully functioning track and trace which will allow us to stop the virus in its tracks. Anthony Costello has been on again saying a 'Circuit Breaker' would only work if a magical track and trace system could be invoked.
Without magic, this virus is here to stay. In which case all these lockdowns are simply prolonging the inevitable of this virus becoming part of our daily lives. And at a massive cost.
What are the criteria for emerging from a tier 3? Would it be a reduction in cases? In which case we have already reached the exit criteria in many cases where tier 3 is about to be imposed. Is it deaths? In which case by mid October we were marginally above normal and not showing any evidence of a 'second wave.'
Life is a risky business, Success in life, both personal and professional, is about balancing risk and returns. The notion of some risk-free space where we can all happily live a life of riches and happiness without any of us having to make an effort is a left-wing delusion. We are seeing a master class from the collective UK civil service/academic/political class on how to screw things up through wooly thinking, fear, and an inability to take hard decisions.
I'm not trivialising the virus. But we know now that people under 40 are no more at risk of this than other diseases in the general environment and stand much greater risk from their mental health being undermined. We know that the people at risk are the old and immunologically challenged and we need to shield them. And shield them for a long time.
"Councils are one such unreliable arm of the state and different Prime Ministers have enjoyed bashing local government for cheap political points."
We have long ago given up on municipal politics. Each successive central government since 1979 has reduced the power of local democracies and stripped them of most of their functions. They have been systematically hollowed out, with most of their services commissioned-out to private contractors. We should look back to the 1980s to explain how and why local civic representation became a problem for central government. Labour as well as the Tories have been part of this dismantling process.
In the 1980s, despite a prolonged period of Thatcherite hegemony, many activists felt compelled to enter local politics in order to confront the cuts in public expenditure and to explore the potential of municipal socialism. As a result, there was a short burst of local radicalism in many urban areas in the early 1980s, which led to a show-down and the the rate-capping of some local authorities who attempted to thwart cuts in welfare services. These councils, if you remember, were called 'Loony Left' by both the Tories and Neil Kinnock. The GLC was closed down by Thatcher and since then there was an extended period when central government reasserted its tutelage over truculent local authorities.
New Labour continued the process. It encouraged, what it called 'public-private' partnerships, which in effect meant all but statutory requirements were tendered-out to private contractors. Blair brought in PPI, schools were academised and local politics became nothing more than managerialism. Local elections are mostly meaningless because it makes no difference which political party implements the austerity measures imposed by central government.
In reality, Andy Burnham was posturing because the days of popular local uprisings have long gone. We are all under the yoke of authoritarian centralism, cronyism and under-regulated corporations exerting undue influence.
If they wish to be shielded. They may not wish to and that should be their choice.
I think the Great Barrington Declaration should be pursued.
Dipper,
We don't need magical systems, just ones that work. It is that simple:
test system where results are provided within 24 hours (or quicker)
Track and trace which actually does what it says
South Korea got these systems up and running within days/weeks and have not had to lockdown. We've had 7 f'ing months and they still don't work. This is what happens when you have a government that abrogates it's responsibility and sees the private sector as the only solution to any problem even when the whole of the public sector is stepping forward saying we can do this.
«But Labour still was able to hang on to power with a majority government and 355 seats, even though 65% of voters had chosen other parties.»
In the particular case that was because the Conservative vote dropped even more then the New Labour vote, as while Tony Blair was already electorally toxic in 2001, before Iraq, the Conservatives still were even more so as they had crashed house prices in the 1990s, and Gordon Brown had managed to pump them up again, counterbalacing Tony Blair's electoral toxicity.
But in general when Conservatives or Labour or New Labour govern with a plurality, even a smallish one, that's not a big issue, because most voters for the third party, SDP, Libs, UKIP, are actually Conservative or Labour voters in a protest mood, and they don't object that much to the government.
So in the 2000s the big LibDem vote was mostly Labour voters who despised Tony Blair but would rather have New Labour than the Conservatives in government, and in the recent past most UKIP and LibDem voters were Conservatives voters. So for example in 2015 the "right" (Conservatives + most UKIP) won, just as in the 2000s the "centre-left" (New Labour + LibDems, under Kennedy fairly leftish) won, etc.
Switching away from FPTP is seen by LibDems as a ruse to become the most important party, as with some form of PR both Conservatives and Labour would need the LibDems as coalition partners.
But I think that's an illusion: PR would actually lead to the disappearance of the LibDems, because currently most of their voters are disappointed Conservative or Labour voters, and with PR they would split in two, and most LibDem voters would switch to either the less right-wing side of the Conservatives or the less socialist side of Labour.
«The notion of some risk-free space where we can all happily live a life of riches and happiness without any of us having to make an effort is a left-wing delusion.»
That seems to me an ill-informed hallucination to me, and this is a pretty good description for me of what "the left-wing delusion" actually is:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/24/labour2001to2005.news
«A Labour government should not be talking about escape routes from poverty and deprivation. By their nature they are only available to a highly-motivated minority.
The Labour Party was created to change society in such a way that there is no poverty and deprivation from which to escape.”
That to me is not a promise of "riches and happiness without any of us having to make an effort", but one of a *reciprocal* safety net for both currently rich and currently poor, an insurance pool to ensure that none of us has to suffer the risk of poverty and deprivation and can thus take more risks, try harder for better things, improve themselves with more education, be less vulnerable to bullying, be more entrepreneurial, etc.
«many activists felt compelled to enter local politics in order to confront the cuts in public expenditure and to explore the potential of municipal socialism. As a result, there was a short burst of local radicalism in many urban areas in the early 1980s, which led to a show-down and the the rate-capping of some local authorities who attempted to thwart cuts in welfare services.»
Those will soon seem to you the good old days, much worse is to come: the right-wing plan now is to ensure that tax raising and spending become increasingly locally managed, rather than centrally managed, because in the past 40 years there has been quite a bit of de-mixing of areas by income so there are now many more areas with mostly low income residents or mostly high-income residents.
This means that when local councils with mostly low-income residents raise local taxes, they don't affect many higher-income residents, and those who are affected are incentivised to move to a local council with other higher income residents.
That success is why Osborne and successors have been cutting to nearly zero the central government grants that were designed to make the spending power of local councils for lower income residents more similar to that of local council with higher income residents.
The overall goal is to achieve a brazilian (or texan) style situation: the many lower income people living in favelas with poor council services as their tax base is poor, the few higher income people living in posh areas, and no cross-subsidy between the two, and a central government that just spends on the military, police, courts, foreign relations, and projects of use to the higher income elites.
"The Labour Party was created to change society in such a way that there is no poverty and deprivation from which to escape.”
No it wasn't. The LP was created by the trades unions that had previously being supporting the Liberals. The trades unions insisted that no commitment to socialism that organisations like the ILP and SDF had wanted to include, was written into the party's Constitution, the vague, meaningless Clause IV, Section 4 that so much hot air was spouted over.
The LP was set up with basically the same ideology that the Liberals had been espousing and that the trades unions are set up to achieve, which as Marx points out is merely to bargain over prices for commodities, within the context of the capitalist market place. As Lenin describes it, it was set up to be, and is and always has been a bourgeois workers' party, just as trades unions are bourgeois workers' organisations.
That is why trades unions always have to accept the logic of capital in determining their demands for wages etc, its why Labour always subordinates the interests of workers to those of capital when in office at local or national level. If that requires workers to be impoverished by austerity, or rent or rate or tax rises, so be it, Labour argues, because its only by the growth and prosperity of capital that workers longer term interests are served.
If you believe that capitalism is a natural condition and here for eternity, then, of course, as Marx describes in Wage Labour and Capital and elsewhere, that is actually true, which is why Marxists are not "anti-capitalists", and do not seek to restrain its development, as the petty-bourgeois moralists do. Instead of trying to restrain capitalist development or to favour backward forms of it, such as favouring small capital over monopoly capital, Marxists simply propose the idea of replacing capital with Socialism, whose economic foundations are already imminent within that very monopoly-capital, and simply require the control of it by workers, something that the Labour Party has always militantly refused to advocate.
“the Tory treatment of Manchester by forcing the city into Tier Three without engaging with local leaders in good faith,”
WFT is this nonsense? Seriously? Why wasn’t arch Blairite scum Burnham complaining to the government that Manchester wasn’t in tier 3 lockdown? Why wasn’t he screaming at the government, the cases are rising here our people need protection, why are we only in Tier 2!
Why do the government need to seek the approval of 1 man when implementing science based policy decisions that affect public health, in the middle of an unprecedented global pandemic? Burnham should do whatever they fucking tell him.
If he doesn’t he should be taken out and strung up from the nearest lamppost.
This virus is not like Flu, it not only kills more people but sends many many many more needing hospital treatment. I know a 28 year old who is in hospital with blood clots in his lungs and legs. He will likely survive, but if the genocidal policies of people like Boffy are implemented then he would probably die in his bed as the hospitals would be overflowing!
Burham is a disgusting opportunistic creature and people like him are putting the useless shit we don’t need to consume over public health.
Socialism is a complete and utter break from the capitalist system, if it wasn't it wouldn't need a revolutionary class to overthrow it! What Boffy offers is simply capitalism without the capitalist, something Marx continually railed against.
From the Brexit scum to the 5 million business owners and their families and boffy, they simply offer us genocide. The genocide of the weak, poor, vulnerable and unlucky.
And they do this by trying to tell us that without space hoppers, beer gardens, plastic halloween shit and all that other production Boffy laughably deems essential, the human body would wither away and starve.
In order that the 5 million business owners and their families and boffy can claim this shit they have to suspend biological laws, just like Boffy and his sock puppet Carty suspend the laws of Physics to try and pretend everyone in the world can live at 11.8kw of energy.
Their whole ideology is an affront to science, its like a religion, not a concrete materialist conception of society. It is pure unadulterated idealism and poppycock!
If anyone can find anything in that bowl of drivel from Sentinel/BCFG that even comes within a million miles of anything I said, good luck to them.
«Socialism is a complete and utter break from the capitalist system, if it wasn't it wouldn't need a revolutionary class to overthrow it! What Boffy offers is simply capitalism without the capitalist, something Marx continually railed against.»
So when is socialism, either yours or his, going to happen? In a few years? Next century?
And if it is more than a few years, what do we do in the meantime? Just maintain ideological purity?
It's ironic that BCFG praises lockdown as a means of the destroying the mindless consumerism which he despises (something which incidentally Boffy isn't a fan of either) when what lockdowns actually do is to destroy social activities while leaving people perfectly free (via Amazon and other online retailers) to accumulate all the made-in-China tat that they could wish for.
Blissex,
As Lenin points out, Marx never made predictions, because such an approach is alien to historical materialism. Lenin notes that, Marx's comment about the "inevitability" of Socialism was not a prediction but a statement that it had already occurred, and was merely in the process of its mature development.
In Capital III, Marx notes that socialism evolves out of capitalism in the same way that one species evolves out of another as a consequence of natural laws. He describes the forms in which this socialism manifests itself in the shape of the cooperative and joint stock company (corporation).
“The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.”
(Capital III, Chapter 27)
And, Lenin continues this theme using the theory of historical materialism.
"..history ... has taken such a peculiar course that it has given birth in 1918 to two unconnected halves of socialism existing side by side like two future chickens in the single shell of international imperialism. In 1918 Germany and Russia have become the most striking embodiment of the material realisation of the economic, the productive and the socio-economic conditions for socialism, on the one hand, and the political conditions, on the other.”
“. . . State-monopoly capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no intermediate rungs”
(Left-wing Infantilism)
As Marx and Lenin say, economically, socialism is already here, in the form of the large monopolies, its only a question of workers recognising it, and asserting their political control.
"It's ironic that BCFG praises lockdown as a means of the destroying the mindless consumerism which he despises"
The reason I support lockdown dummy is because it prevents a deadly virus spreading (why is that so difficult for you to grasp), it is not because I detest mindless consumerism. Which I actually do not detest and indulge in myself now and again. But there are limits right, I mean tell me you have limits!?
What I detest is the utter idiocy of Boffy who would have us believe that all the useless shit that does get produced is somehow essential and therefore prevents us taking action to stop a deadly virus or taking action against climate change, extinction events etc. The reason Boffy is against lockdown is the same reason the 5 million business owners and their families are against lockdown, he is a fanatical neo liberal, which I have been arguing a long time and this pandemic just confirms.
The reason lockdown is such an issue is because we live under capitalist conditions, where you stand and fall in the marketplace.
I am arguing and have argued for many years that we need a communist system where the anarchy of capitalist production is ended and the productive powers unleahsed are consciously controlled. This is all in Marx and is something neo liberal, ultra ultra right charlatans like Carty and Boffy ignore. Just like carty and Boffy totally ignore the issues with energy usage, they don't let natural laws interfere with their ideology.
When i see Boffy utterly misquoting Marx in a letter he wrote 150 years ago in order to justify his genocidal no lockdown policy today how can anyone react but with utter contempt? Seriously what is the appropriate reaction to that level of idiocy?
An update: Andy Burnham’s utter disregard for public health is not being treated as a terrorist incident.
“As Lenin points out, Marx never made predictions, because such an approach is alien to historical materialism.”
As for making predictions, Boffy does this all the time on his own blog! He even has a section, my predictions for the coming year, most of which turn out to be nonsense but which Boffy with his customary duplicity makes it appear he got everyone spot on! So not only does Boffy think you can make predictions, he is even dumb enough to believe those predictions can turn out to be accurate!
See here as an example:
https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2020/01/predictions-for-2020-prediction-4-pound.html
I guess Boffy is admitting here that he is no historical materialist! A rare show of honesty from the high priest of duplicity?
Sentinel/BCFG claims that I misquoted Marx "Marx in a letter he wrote 150 years ago". The comments above were from Capital Chapter 27.
I assume that he means, therefore, Marx's Letter to Kugelmann setting out the Law of Value, where he writes,
"Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish."
Its a direct quote, as anyone can see.
Once again, Sentinel/BCFG simply lies, and every time he puts finger to keyboard just exposes what a lying moron he is.
I do mean that quote and it is a quote you posted on this site in another thread to justify lockdown!
Do I need to explain why your justification for lockdown based on that quote is idiocy of the highest order?
Can you not remember posting that quote? or you just making this shit up as you go along?
So in the middle of a deadly pandemic, rather than sober considered thought you are just pasting any crap that comes to hand in a bid to justify your genocidal ideas. And then the day after you forget you made that argument. I suppose this is another example of historical materialism!
I wonder how BCFG sees all those countries where very harsh lockdowns have totally failed to bring the virus under control: ones like Belgium, Spain, Peru and Argentina? In fact lockdowns haven't really worked anywhere in Europe or the Americas.
If this virus is too deadly for the "shield the old and vulnerable, until herd immunity can do its thing" approach (that of the Great Barrington Declaration) to be acceptable, then we need to learn from the real suppression success stories of the Asia/Pacific region.
The one thing that almost all those successes have in common (other than their geographical location) is that the locked up anyone who tested positive (even if asymptomatic) in centralized quarantine facilities, rather than leaving them at home where they would infect other members of their household.
It is notable that even Wuhan's harsh lockdown only reduced its R value from 3.9 to 1.3, which of course isn't enough: it was only when they introduced centralized quarantine that R dropped to 0.3 and the virus was ultimately defeated.
George,
"It's ironic that BCFG praises lockdown as a means of the destroying the mindless consumerism which he despises (something which incidentally Boffy isn't a fan of either) when what lockdowns actually do is to destroy social activities while leaving people perfectly free (via Amazon and other online retailers) to accumulate all the made-in-China tat that they could wish for."
You have to remember that Sentinel/BCFG is just a troll. He has no ideology he just writes crap and lies to provoke a response for his own entertainment. Look at the crap he's now written. He puts down a comment referring to me misquoting Marx, but the quote he refers to, he then has to admit was not even in the comments in this thread, but in some other thread on some other day!
And, when its shown that it wasn't a misquote, but a direct quote, he then does what all trolls do by going off on to an irrelevant rant.
But, in everything he writes his own values shine through whether he's writing as the fascist BNP supporting Sentinel, or as the petty-bourgeois "anti-American, Anti-imperialist" BCFG, or CAAC etc. Those values are reactionary and authoritarian. So, in responding to you, he talks about his desire to dictate to people what they can or can't consume. But, in doing so, he also fails entirely to see the point that its not about what people can or can't consume, but for a socialist is about all those workers whose jobs will be lost as a result of closing down the economy! Nowhere does he talk about the effects on workers rather than consumers.
Every so often I find it useful at time of my onw choosing to point out that he's a troll with this multiple disorder of personalities from the fascist to the anarcho-capitalist, to the anti-imperialist, to the apologist for clerical-fascism, and to highlight the obvious lies and absurdities in anything he says.
Now he's claiming that I have been supporting lockdowns, just as in the past he claimed I was supporting Brexit. He's like Trump, he lies so readily that he doesn't seem any longer to realise that he's doing it, and tying himself up with them.
Boffy,
I know full well that BCFG is a troll, but I feel that refuting what he says in his rants may be useful to other readers. (And what makes you think that he and Sentinel are one and the same individual: have thry posted under the same IP addresses,)
And rather than describing his values as "reactionary and authoritarian" I'd regard it as more insightful to describe him as a zero-sum thinker, which in his case (like with many others) is driven by thoughts of scarcity driven by environmental limits (BCFG has often cited energy consumption to justify this) .
Fascists seek to protect or extend the living standards of their own people by sacrificing the living standards (and usually the lives) of foreigners whom they see as less worthy: for example the German Nazis wanted to exterminate most of the Slavic population so that Ukraine could become Germany's breadbasket.
Anti-West ideologues (his support for ISIS is based purely on hatred of the West, not on apologia for clerical-fascism) believe that developing countries can only increase their living standards if living standards in rich countries are drastically curbed: they follow the same zero-sum logic as the fascists but switch the peoples whom they regard as "worthy" and "unworthy".
George,
When I was new to the world of blogging 12 years ago, I thought the same as you, here. The concept of trolls was one I hadn't encountered. I too thought that it was worthwhile refuting their moronic rants. That's when I first encountered Sentinel/BCFG (and the answer to your question is yes, one reason why he never, in any of his established persona comments on my blog now, though he has used many others years ago to do so, but there is other evidence too).
If you look back at the lengthy responses to him as Sentinel, BCFG, and so on, back then, you will see I made the same mistake. I remember talking to Phil one night at an NSTC meeting, and he said he didn't know how I had the patience to do so.
I then found that he was following me around the internet to other blogs using some of he same persona, and others. What I also found was that its pointless trying to refute what he says, because he deliberately puts up lies and ridiculous statements purely for the purpose of drawing people in to responding to him. No matter how bullet-proof your response, he will just respond with more crap, claiming black is white, drawing you into pointless you said this, and meant that, whilst I said this discussions that quickly descend into labyrinthine complexity and irrelevance. He will just move on to some other claim about what you have said, what you really believe and so on. None of it is intended to prove any point or for any rational discussion, but simply to fuel his mania for engaging in such rants.
He is clearly a moron, as anyone who knows anything about anything can see from what he says. But, for him it doesn't matter, because that just provokes others to respond to the moronic things he says. A good example is his comments about Marx and "predictions", for example, which he doesn't seem to understand is about "predictions" about the oath of social development, as determined by historical materialism, i.e. the process of social evolution, and not about predictions about whether the Pound will be up or down next year, which could never be determined on he basis of historical materialism. And, of course, Marx himself made such predictions, because he speculated in he stock market - not very successfully by all accounts.
That's why I refuse to feed the troll by engaging on such pointless responses to him. I just point out periodically that he is a troll, whose disordered multiple personalities are pretty well known, and the new ones he creates are easily discernible from his style of writing, what is called in literary circles the author's "voice". His latest lies claiming that I am in support of lockdown, put forward because his lie in relation to Marx's Letter to Kugelmann are a case in point of how even when you show he's lying, he just moves on to some other lie to cover his arse. Its like his claim about me supporting Brexit. Both are intended to provoke me into responding to him.
Cont'd
Cont'd
Another of his tactics is that he clearly spends a lot of time reading my blog - someone who follows you around the internet for 12 years like this clearly has some kind of mental disorder - whilst not commenting on it, because he knows his IP address will give him away. He then picks up a phrase. In the past its bee "idiot anti-imperialists", or "Civilising Mission of Capital", which he then uses as the basis for his inane rants elsewhere. For example, in relation to the first he talked about "sensibles", he went on about the second interpreting it as something to do with colonialism/imperialsm, when it refers to something entirely different. he's pcked up my comments that brexit is being driven by the interests of the 5 million small capitalist businesses, and so now tries to claim that I am advocating for that group and so on. In other words, whatever it is he posits the opposite to provoke a response.
The Nazis didn't protect or extend the living standards of many German workers either, because their function was to promote the interests of large scale German industrial capital. There is plenty of evidence of his apologism for clerical-fascism as well as his anti-Westernism, which in itself is evidence of his authoritarian and reactionary underlying values. He has no ideology, which is why he can write as a fascist as easily as a libertarian. His only motivation is to provoke a response, so as to engage in endless futile series of rants, and compare the way he does that and the way it was done by Sentinel and you will see the identical voice and method.
I will ignore Carty's lame science, and his repudiation of the basics of how viruses spread and his utter distortion of all the facts. I will also ignore his attempst to label me an ISIS supporter, though I suspect carty was a strong supporter of ISIS in Syria and is no doubt a strong supporter of the Western ideology that brought ISIS to life.
But he makes one and only one good point,
"And what makes you think that he and Sentinel are one and the same individual: have thry posted under the same IP addresses"
So Mystic Boffy, answer carty's question. Have they posted under the same IP address?
My belief is that Sentinel is Boffy's own character. the fact he insists it is me every single time makes me believe this.
He certainly uses this Sentinel character to deflect the argument away from his own idiocy and his own duplicity, as can be seen here. I mean he makes grand claims about historical materialists not making predictions, i show how he makes predictions all the time and he responds with Sentinel blah blah blah.
So answer carty's question.
Boffy,
Actually the Nazis rose to power on the back of a three-part electoral coalition. Big industrialists were indeed one part of that coalition, as they sought to destroy the labour movement, and in the longer term their competitors in France and Britain.
IG Farben was an interesting case: even back in the 1920s they were worrying about Peak Oil, and to that end had developed the Fischer-Tropsch process to produce oil from coal. Although this process would later be used by countries cut off from oil imports, like Nazi Germany itself during World War II (later on Apartheid South Africa) it couldn't compete on price with imported oil (especially after the big oil discoveries in Texas in the late 1920s), which meant that IG Farben needed an explicitly protectionist government (like the Nazis) to get a return on their investment.
The other two parts of the Nazi voter coalition were the petty-bourgeoisie (motivated largely by fear of Jewish competition) and small peasant farmers (hoping for new larger farms in conquered Eastern Europe, that would allow them to compete better with farmers in the Americas). The industrial working class were never a significant contributor to the Nazi vote during the Weimar Republic.
Also, which IP address are BCFG and Sentinel using?
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