Saw a video of cupw workers hard picketing scabs and keeping them in a depot lol. I'm hoping there's a current of militancy capable of defying any strikebreaking legislation.
Bulletins and News Discussion from July 22nd to July 28th, 2024 - Fracas in Dhaka - COTW: Bangladesh
What's especially sad is that Alberta has a long history of labour action and was historically a left leaning social democratic province, a long history of labour militancy including strikes stretching from meatpackers to laundry workers to general trikes, and a small but growing communist party before it was censored and crushed by the red scare after WW2. They weren't always the Texas of Canada and we don't have to be forever.
This working class power can come back, but it will take a lot of work. Communists must be ready and organised as these crises occur to supply people with answers to these problems.
Just wanna say I skimmed it and that essay sucks ass, Jacobin has about a 90 percent miss rate on foreign affairs
ZA/UM's post-Disco projects
Y12: Cancelled. Full sequel to Disco Elysium, shelved after the departure of Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere.
P1: Cancelled. Sci-fi game headed by Disco Elysium producer and former ZA/UM shareholder Kaur Kender, who sued the studio after his departure. Staff folded into X7 following cancellation.
X7: Cancelled. Disco Elysium spin off/standalone expansion headed by Dora Klindžić and Argo Tuulik.
M0: In development. A smaller-scale Elysium game targeting touchscreen devices.
C4: In development. ZA/UM's primary remaining project, a large-scale RPG that is not part of the Elysium setting.
so the only disco Elysium content being developed is a mobile app. What happened to the original 3 devs, have they just disappeared or something
Considering that he was born in the USSR but immigrated to Israel later in life, yes it does matter that he is Israeli. He is of the opinion that it's good to settle in a country that floats on top of Palestinian blood.
Is there a source for this? In the news mega someone also claimed that they raised the salaries of workers and cut political salaries but that turned out to be bogus unfortunately
Ok I found one source, apparently it was a bank first established as a joint venture with Libya in the 80s https://libyaobserver.ly/inbrief/burkina-faso-nationalizes-libyan-arab-bank-commerce-and-development
Don't know a lot about Unz Review so if Hudson has actually said anything antisemitic I'd like that to be pointed out.
Is it fair to discount his ideas? because dumbass Nazis can take anything saying "hey rich people tend to have power and that's bad" and force that into their Global Judeo Conspiracy box. I'm sure you could find Nazis who would even quote Marx uncharitably, On the Jewish Question is very commonly misunderstood and reframed in ways Marx had no intention for.
I think Hudson's takes on early Christianity and debt are interesting historically and I have enjoyed reading them, especially put into the context of bronze age class struggles between farmers/debtors and creditors, how palace economies were a sort of proto command economy, what the role of "tyrants" were and the debt reformers of the Roman period, etc. Ancient slave and pre slave societies are something I haven't read a lot of Marxist analysis on (or even much class analysis as such) and so I feel exploring the material origin of debt has historical merit.
Hudson is focused on debt and this is both a strength and a weakness of his. It's not entirely wrong to frame the current age of capital in terms of debt since it's a form of economic penance I would bet almost everyone here has first or second hand experience with. But it is true that his critiques of capital are not particularly cutting, and this framing prevents a more full encapsulation of capitalism.
ramble
For a higher view I have been looking more to Michael Roberts lately, currently halfway through the book Capitalism in the 21st Century: Through the Prism of Value
What is important to understand is why debt is risen so highly to prominence in the west alongside various rent seeking behaviours, financialisation/rise of the FIRE sector which Hudson mentions, and a general stagnation of economic life for the last few decades. This is because capital must operate within certain laws, one of these is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
Firms in capitalism are constantly trying to increase their surplus value relative to their competition, and there are many ways to do this. One way of accomplishing this is with new technology. Imagine you and I are competing cloth makers. I produce cloth by hand, and you have a spinning jenny. Who will produce more commodities in a given time, be able to price their cloth lower, and therefore succeed in the market? I will have no choice but to either adopt the spinning jenny, or be forced out of business. Now, imagine someone else comes along with a steam powered cloth loom...
So capitalism has historically been real good at replacing human labour (variable capital) with machine work (constant capital) in order to temporarily increase a given firms profits. Over time the ratio of constant capital and variable capital (called the organic composition of capital) will tend in favour of constant capital, and the relative investment in labour falls. Astute Marx-enjoyers cry out - "Now hold on, I thought only human labour could produce value?" That is right and is exactly the contradiction capital falls into during its technological race.
As capitalists put relatively more surplus value into constant capital rather than variable capital, relatively less labour is employed to produce surplus value and the overall rate of profit falls, even as the mass of profits may rise. Put another way, if the organic composition of capital (how many machines there are) rises faster than the rate of surplus value (how much juice that can be squeezed out of a worker) then the rate of profit falls. This tendency eventually manifests a crisis in which capitalists have to find a way to juice their profits back up.
Note that this is only a tendency, and that capitalists can employ a few different tricks to temporarily stop and even reverse this process.
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lower labours costs of living (
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They can increase relative surplus value and pay people less and less and make them work harder (has a limit as paying too little means your workers die)
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try to increase absolute surplus and make people work longer (only so many hours in a day. also people die.)
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use foreign trade profits (harder and harder in a multipolar world)
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They can go abroad and enter less technologically intensive countries and appropriate surplus value that way. (ditto)
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they can flee into speculating on fictitious capital where the points are made up and the rules don't matter (this is by and large the stock market and FIRE sector fyi)
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war, and destroy all the constant capital like ww2 europe
This is why the capitalists are doing the things Hudson talks about, western capital is stuck in a drawn out sinking of profit rates and, as they are not leashed a la China, flee into things like finance, bitcoin, nft, saudi golf course ice sculptures, wework, internet and technology startups, whatever the fuck promises a way to juice your rate of profit. Industrialisation is gone, China makes everyone's shit already and what's left here is basically the high fructose corn syrup version of capitalism
I see your point but you could probably make it without needlessly insulting @DivineChaos100
Yllych
joined 4 years ago
I would be surprised if prices went down significantly, seems like the oil corps operate as an unofficial cartel. There's not much compelling them to cut prices unless there's a huge drop in demand like a second pandemic, or some kind of government intervention (lol). There's still much oil storage capacity left in Alberta.