Journal BlackHat's Journal: He's stuck on it/Repeats until he fails 2
Moving our focus[and timeboat] to Georgia of the late 1870's. We'll just sail in and get my boot fixed here in this nice village. Ha, there's a cobbler.
While it has been fun to focus my sole attentions on the Right (Nabob and Nob) we should include the Left in our criticism. While I am not above 'kicking them when they're down' I draw the line at kicking them before they have arrived. The 1850's marks[hehe] the beginning of Socialism and the formation of the various Labour movements. Before that point popular revolutions (and revolutionaries) could hardly be called Left by the modern definition.
Once on the map, the Left, and the highspeed presses get developed, it all creates quite a number of problems for the established aristocracies. The Nobs have already been under threat by a number of forces; each other, tradesmens daughters, the gentry etc. For the most part everyone in the list wished to adopt the lifestyles of the top of that list. So the initial reactions to the left as it formed was quickly hostile. Many of the radicals were also less than keen on the imperialist practice used locally and abroad. Which won them little ground from the new middling classes. Many early Leftist-thinkers go on in time to point directly to; USA, Boxer, India, Afghanistan, Crimea etc. as clear examples of the failures of the absolutist-establishment to address change in their own local conditions. The key problems [I have] with these early lefty thinkers can be reduced to two items:
(1) In dismissing the establishment as corrupt and unworkable they often forget that the majority of their followers aspire to that class and/or the benefits of that class. People like hierarchies. Thus Socialism will devolve to Communism or Fascism in many cases.
(2) Many of the Socialists, Christian-Nationalists of Socialist leanings, and Proto-Anarchists will assume that goods appear just as they always have. Any imbalance in distribution[famine, loss, waste] was the result of archaic practices of the aristocracy or industrialists. Each community could, they argue, stand on its own two feet if unhindered by convention and corruption. This Macro-Self-Sufficiency looks like it will work on paper but has some very naive assumptions about the infrastructure needed to make it all work. Especially any place larger than a postage-stamp. In addition a real hole in their heads about people liking things that are from somewhere else better than local goods.
Marx having spent most of his years at the hub of a hyper-consumptive empire was a fish in water in this regard and missed both completely. So did many of the others who will go on to form the USSR.
Quote:
Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.
The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.
No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class -- the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants -- all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by the new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.
The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.
At this stage the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie. Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.
But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (Trades Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the contest breaks out into riots. --K. Marx
And knock him back down the church steps. We will let Colin Mooers do that in the next JE. Utopians often believe that good things move all by themselves. Hand a 'lefty'-one a horse and he'll likely let it go. Nice for the horse. Who then proceeds to trample his children while he must then walk home. Well, back into the boat folks and on to another day. We'll leave Gori, for that's the place we stopped, behind and fly to Moscow. Oh, the Cobbler? Did you check out his wife? Preg'gers. The brat she is carrying will grow up to start a popular newspaper and he will be *very* involved in politics.
News:
Tories look up! I knew Blair would start in on Blunkett. He was looking to good in the press. So saddle him with the boon'ers.
Kurds point finger.
While the Bushbaby fingers the public purse.
With so many fingers and probing it will surely rip.
"They were in good form," General Baba Jan, Kabul's police chief, told Reuters. "They said they were kept in a separate cell from the elderly inmates and were allowed to play and have fun." Games such as 'DeltaDeathWing:The Waiting' for Xbox?
Of course in the zee'z, little Howie' and his kin just pick on the girls.
Can you name an alternative crop that will generate ~200 billion for the Afghan economy in replacement?
Texttoon:
Fumetti : Stock photo of George W. Bush talking to the press. Overlayed speech bubble has him saying; "I'm here to say y'all owe five hundred billion dollars."
But... (Score:1)
Just a short time ago it was around 380 billion, now it's well over 500 billion. This is without the costs of the Iraq war and the adjustment of the minimal tax.
Re:But... (Score:2)