europe

January 28, 2015

An Ageing System

Jack Graham austerity, capitalism, conservatism, corey robin, crisis, europe, evolution, french revolution, neoliberalism, production, SF, teenagers 0

It’s always puzzled me, this thing about people getting right-wing as they get older. You’d think that the opposite would happen.

I mean, as you get older, you notice that the world keeps having the same problems, and that they tend to have the same underlying causes, and that nothing is ever done about them. You notice more and more of the same kinds of scandals reoccurring over the years, time and again, and always based upon imbalances of power, and upon powerful people being unaccountable. You’re more likely to have a mortgage and debts, the older you are. You’re more likely to owe lots of money to banks and credit agencies, and to be crippled by these debts. You’re more likely to have health problems, and thus to need medical care, and thus to see that the Health Service is underfunded and overstretched. You’re more likely to realise that your investments and savings (if you have any) don’t pay off in anything like the way you’re told they will when you’re younger. You’re more likely to worry about how you will look after yourself and your partner in old age. You’re more likely to notice your retirement receding into the distance. You’re more likely to find yourself paying through the nose for medications that go with age, medications your parents didn’t have to pay through the nose for. You’re more likely to meet more and more people of different ‘races’ and nationalities, and thus to notice that they’re not too different to you. You’re more likely to have been mistreated at work, or sacked, or been forced to find second jobs or third jobs. You’re more likely to have seen talentless people around you rising while you stay still, simply because they were born with advantages you never had. You’re more likely to have lived through several wars and recessions instead of just one or two. You’re more likely to have observed the way the world’s weather systems have catastrophically changed even in the last few decades. You’re more likely to have seen friends’ lives ruined by discrimination or depression or stress. You’re more likely to have seen your parents face an uncertain and neglected old age. And you’re more likely to have kids and grandkids, and to see all the challenges they face. A restricted job market, more and more pressure on them to work harder to have a chance of being employed one day, the escalating cost of further and higher education, more debt earlier in life, less chance of being able to afford to buy a house or even move out of their parents’ home, spiraling costs of living, less social safety nets, a squeezed education system. And on and on it goes.

Decades of life means decades of observing the world getting worse, and the so-called solutions never working, and the so-called progressive parties always selling people out, and the persistence of poverty and corruption never being addressed, and inequality and injustice always being at the root of the problems.…

July 2, 2014

Victory of the Icon 4

Jack Graham british empire, conservatism, crisis, europe, imperialism, india, listen, reviewing doctor who episodes without having watched them, second world war, victory of the daleks, winston churchill, wwii 1

At the time, the liberals and the left thought of World War II as a battle between civilisation and barbarism, between progress and reaction. This is still the mainstream view today. But the leaders of the Allies did not think this way, if they were honest. For instance…

The Churchill who demanded a no-holds-barred prosecution of the war was the same Churchill who had been present during the butchery at Omdurman, sent troops to shoot down striking miners in 1910 [this is probably not true], ordered the RAF to use poison gas against Kurdish rebels in British-ruled Iraq [this is arguable], and praised Mussolini. He had attacked a Conservative government in the 1930s for granting a minimal amount of local self government to India, and throughout the war he remained adamant that no concessions could be made to anti-colonial movements in Britain’s colonies, although this could have helped the war effort. ‘I have not become the king’s first minister’, he declared, ‘to oversee the dismemberment of the British Empire.’ He told Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, ‘While there is life in my body, no transfer of British sovereignty will be permitted’.

In the Second World War, many – probably most – ordinary people thought of themselves as fighting the evil of fascism, but

the motives of the rulers remained very different from those of their peoples. This was shown in the conduct of the war. Between the fall of France in the spring of 1940 and the Allied landings in southern Italy in 1943 most of the fighting by British armies was in northern Africa. Why? Because Churchill was determined to hang on to the area with the Suez Canal and the oilfields. His worries were not just about Germany but also the US, as was shown by a bitter diplomatic tussle between him and Roosevelt over Saudi Arabia.

The invasion of Italy was itself a consequence of Churchill’s obsession with re-establishing British hegemony in the Mediterranean. He refused pleas from both Russia and the US to open a second front in France at the time when the most vital battles of the war were being fought in western Russia. Instead he claimed that Italy and the Balkans constituted ‘the soft underbelly of Europe’—despite mountainous terrain which was bound to mean bloody battles and a very slow pace of advance.

Churchill’s refusal to concede the principle of independence for India meant that in 1942, while the decisive Battle of Stalingrad was taking place, thousands of British-led troops were brutally crushing demonstrations in India instead of fighting the Nazis, and that an Indian ‘liberation army’ was formed to fight on the side of Japan. It also led to a famine which killed three million people in Bengal.

The quotes are from Chris Harman’s, A People’s History of the World.…

October 11, 2011

It was such a massive task to establish the Roman race

Jack Graham africa, capitalism, england, europe, exploitation, free trade, horkheimer, imperialism, marx, marxism, money, primitive accumulation, race, racism, slave trade, slavery, united states 0

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.

Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, &c., these children of the true manufacturing period, increase gigantically during the infancy of Modem Industry. The birth of the latter is heralded by a great slaughter of the innocents. Like the royal navy, the factories were recruited by means of the press-gang.

With the development of capitalist production during the manufacturing period, the public opinion of Europe had lost the last remnant of shame and conscience. The nations bragged cynically of every infamy that served them as a means to capitalistic accumulation. …[I]t is trumpeted forth as a triumph of English statecraft that at the Peace of Utrecht, England extorted from the Spaniards by the Asiento Treaty the privilege of being allowed to ply the negro trade, until then only carried on between Africa and the English West Indies, between Africa and Spanish America as well. England thereby acquired the right of supplying Spanish America until 1743 with 4,800 negroes yearly. This threw, at the same time, an official cloak over British smuggling. Liverpool waxed fat on the slave trade. This was its method of primitive accumulation.

Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.

Tantae molis erat, to establish the ‘eternal laws of Nature’ of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage labourers, into ‘free labouring poor,’ that artificial product of modern society. If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

– Karl Marx, Capital vol.1, Chapter 31. My favourite bit.…