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436 [lbo-talk] KVH hearts Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems -- rank: 1000

It would be hard to understate just how bad Labour's meltdown is. They are suffering both the disappointment of those who thought they were the good guys, and also the target for those who loathe all politicians. In the European elections in 2009 the crank United Kingdom Independence Party beat them into third place. Most compelling has been Tory leader David Cameron's inability to close the deal. Though the press are now pretty solidly behind him, he has struggled to get a decisive lead. That i ...

Document Size:	5729
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Apr 19 09:24:47 PDT 2010

437 [lbo-talk] Nick Clegg at the Nation - working for Chris Hitchens! -- rank: 1000

Nick Clegg's answer: "You're right, there are now a lot of interns working very hard and getting paid little or nothing for it. The danger is ending up in a situation where internships are exclusive to those young people whose parents can afford to help them. Internships can be an amazing way of getting a flavour for a possible career when you're young and that option should be open to as many young people as possible. I know myself how fantastic that experience can be - I got to intern in ...

Document Size:	5831
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Apr 19 09:10:06 PDT 2010

438 [lbo-talk] KVH hearts Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems (but I don't) -- rank: 1000

My local council (ie municipal authority) Islington is held by the Liberal Democrats with a slim majority. The Labour group pushed a proposal for free school dinners (as a pro-health measure) which seemed like a pretty good idea to me: the borough's school children are mostly poor and would gain by it. The Lib. Dems. fought a long rear-guard action against the popular measure, though they quickly dropped the slogan 'there's no such thing as a free lunch' for its connotations. At the last minute ...

Document Size:	6059
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Apr 19 09:05:45 PDT 2010

439 [lbo-talk] agricultural productivity -- rank: 1000

I agree with Chris Doss, when he says "I think people are conflating technological development and capitalism, which are different things." I don't want capitalism (which seems destructive and oppressive in so many ways). But I do think we need the technological developments that have (in however grudging a way) been introduced under capitalism (and also under other social systems). That is why it seems to me that even if it was largely introduced under selfish capitalistic interests, ...

Document Size:	5633
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Apr 19 08:33:31 PDT 2010

440 [lbo-talk] agricultural productivity -- rank: 1000

I said: 'The four billion human beings alive today because of the greater productivity of human labour, have better lives that they would have had without it.' To which Alan replies: 'Please go to the slums of Mexico City, or a raft of other cities across the South, and tell this to the burgeoning population who, however relatively impoverished, used to life off their own land, in their own communities, relying on each other, and most often in healthier conditions with access to cleaner water ai ...

Document Size:	7326
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Apr 19 06:09:15 PDT 2010

441 [lbo-talk] agricultural productivity -- rank: 1000

Alan wrote: 'Increased agricultural productivity under capitalism has been exclusively subordinated to the production of surplus value, are you arguing otherwise?' I should have added that not all increased agricultural productivity took place under capitalism - much of it was down to the People's Republic of China. Socialist goverments used the same mix of fertilisation and motorisation that increased output in the west (though thanks to its poor distribution network, a lot of Soviet produce ro ...

Document Size:	5306
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Apr 19 00:30:03 PDT 2010

442 [lbo-talk] Saving the Chagos Islands ... from the Chagos Islanders! -- rank: 1000

'The UK government has created the world's largest marine reserve around the Chagos Islands. The reserve would cover a 545,000-sq-km area around the Indian Ocean archipelago, regarded as one of the world's richest marine ecosystems. This will include an area where commercial fishing will be banned. But islanders, who were evicted to make way for the US air base on the island of Diego Garcia, say a reserve would effectively bar them from returning.' continues at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8599125 ...

Document Size:	5264
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Apr 18 22:26:52 PDT 2010

443 [lbo-talk] agricultural productivity -- rank: 1000

Alan writes: 'Increased agricultural productivity under capitalism has been exclusively subordinated to the production of surplus value, are you arguing otherwise?' No. But capitalist development, as Marx said, leads not only to the growth of the productive forces, but also the all round development of the human being - however qualified. And this is a case in point. The four billion human beings alive today because of the greater productivity of human labour, have better lives that they would h ...

Document Size:	6565
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Apr 18 21:54:38 PDT 2010

444 [lbo-talk] in the American grain -- rank: 1000

Carrol: 'The Right to Laziness, must be the slogans of the struggle for freedom.' This doesn't make me think of Lafargue, so much as Bukharin, for whom the 'economic theory of the leisure class' meant the economic theory of the capitalist class. Leisure, idle consumption, is the life of the parasitic, exploiting classes. Creativity is the goal for me, which is not the abolition of work, but its reappropriation.

Document Size:	4943
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Apr 18 15:54:06 PDT 2010

445 [lbo-talk] agricultural productivity (was Thatcherism) -- rank: 1000

Michael Perelman: 'I argued against the Green Revolution back in the 60s' Really? You argued against increased grain yields? Or against the use of fertilisers? Considering the millions who owe their lives to increased yields, aren't you glad you lost the argument? 'There are 6.6 billion people on the planet today. With organic farming we could only feed 4 billion of them. Which 2 billion would volunteer to die?' the late Norman Borlaug

Document Size:	5107
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Apr 18 14:50:11 PDT 2010

446 [lbo-talk] Then end of Stalinism was a good thing -- rank: 1000

Chris Doss writes: The Soviet economy was growing under Brezhnev Statistics are deceptive on this since nominal growth in output fails to register the poor quality of the goods being produced (to the point where even newly made goods needed to be repaired, and much of output was simply useless). The economy's failures were (within the constricted terms that anything was debated) widely recognised since at least 1977, and stagnation was first named, not under Gorbachov, but Andropov, and by econo ...

Document Size:	5728
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Apr 18 14:22:15 PDT 2010

447 [lbo-talk] The end of Stalinism was a good thing -- rank: 1000

CG Estabrook writes: 'Surely part of that was the active policy of the Clinton administration to reduce Russia to the status of a third-world country. ' No doubt it was, but Clinton could not do worse to the Russian economy than Breznhnev, Chernenko, Gorbachov and Yeltsin did between them. The Soviet economy was already screwed by the time of 'stagnation'. Blaming the failures on the west was by that time a pathetic alibi.

Document Size:	5073
Author:	JAMES Heartfield
Date:	Sun Apr 18 10:42:44 PDT 2010

448 [lbo-talk] agricultural productivity -- rank: 1000

Alan writes 'The point left-populist, left-weberian, anarchist and socialist scholars have been making for 100 years is that increasing productivity and rationalization in agriculture - because of the contradictions of the system - causes hunger, malnutrition, obesity and generally shitty food.' If that were true, it would only reflect badly on those 'scholars'. Increased productivity is not in itself a bad thing, it is the subordination of productivity of use values to the production of surplus ...

Document Size:	6134
Author:	JAMES Heartfield
Date:	Sun Apr 18 09:00:22 PDT 2010

449 [lbo-talk] The end of Stalinism was a good thing (was Thatcherism) -- rank: 1000

well, if you think that Stalinism ended in 1953, it is hard to see what you object to in the proposition that its ending in the last 30 years was a good thing, apart from historical innacuracy

Document Size:	4989
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Apr 18 06:48:52 PDT 2010

450 [lbo-talk] The end of Stalinism was a good thing (was Thatcherism) -- rank: 1000

Chris Doss objected when I included among a list of positive advances: 'The last thirty years have seen the end of Stalinism in the East' But then, as Russia's Vladimir Putin says: "Our people, who endured the horrors of the civil war, forced collectivization, and the mass repressions of the 1930s, understand very well -- perhaps better than anybody else -- what [execution sites] like Katyn, Mednaya, Pyatikhatka mean to many Polish families, because this sad list includes sites of mass exec ...

Document Size:	5402
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Apr 18 06:18:24 PDT 2010