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The MoA Week In Review – (Not Ukraine) OT 2022-209
Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
> Last summer in the Donbas region, the Ukrainians were firing 6,000 to 7,000 artillery rounds each day, a senior NATO official said. The Russians were firing 40,000 to 50,000 rounds per day.
By comparison, the United States produces only 15,000 rounds each month.
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The shortage in 155-mm artillery shells “is probably the big one that has the planners most concerned,” Mr. Cancian said.
“If you want to increase production capability of 155 shells,” he said, “it’s going to be probably four to five years before you start seeing them come out the other end.” <
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Other issues:
Energy as a weapon:
Late:
Russia:
Spies:
Renewables:
China:
Woke:
- French man wins right to not be ‘fun’ at work – Washington Post
The man, referred to in court documents as Mr. T, was fired from Cubik Partners in 2015 after refusing to take part in seminars and weekend social events that his lawyers argued, according to court documents, included “excessive alcoholism” and “promiscuity.”
Use as open (not Ukraine) thread …
Another excerpt from Yefremenko’s article: “…what some described as double circulation, implying that prosperity will be based on domestic demand and technological independence (internal circulation), while foreign trade and investment abroad (external circulation) will help balance supply and demand at a higher level…” Most countries do not have large internal demands and even fewer have technological independence. For that, even the US depends on a steady drain of educated personnel into its university system. As recently as the Thirties last century, US physicists learned German.
Yefremenko later coyly refers to the massive decrease in the overall world economy, waving it away with some nonsense about “BRICS” (which is a group of letters not a policy-making body, much less a policy-executing one!) making provisions against hunger. As for the notion that external foreign trade will magically solve the problem of capitalism in one country? Hasn’t since the fifteenth century. Yefremenko doesn’t even hint I think that only a handful of players will have the weight to play this game. Most of the nations of the world are to follow some other.
History shows as a rule, the capitalists of not one country will be able to export their surplus capital and restore their profit rates by lowering domestic competition with other capitalists. They will not even be able to stabilize the prices of necessary imports of raw materials, lowering the organic composition of capital, restoring profit that way. They especially won’t be able to restore profits by lower investment in foreign production relying on free trade—also known as fair trade, where commodities are bought at cost price—to redistribute surplus value. (The lower rate of relative exploitation of surplus value in poorer countries is thereby offset…but the premise of ‘double circulation’ is not free/fair trade.) Accumulation of capital has always relied on primitive accumulation, which is not just domestic but international.
Here’s another excerpt: “Of course, this is not a return to Bretton Woods I, that is, to the gold standard based on fixing the price of the troy ounce in the base currency, although the role of gold in ensuring the stability of the new basket of currencies will be significant. Other metals, hydrocarbons, uranium, electricity, possibly food reserves, and water—everything that is in demand in the real economy and becoming increasingly scarce amid the growing imbalances of the previous model of globalization and disrupted logistic chains—will begin to be used as assets ensuring the stability of the ‘asset-backed’ currencies. One should expect digital currencies to be used widely in hedging euro-dollar risks.” The notion gold stabilizes the value of money should have been buried since the Price Revolution of the Fifteenth Century. But apparently fighting for capitalism requires self-lobotomy. But then, the notion that hard-money is the meaning of economic life. There is one truth buried in here, that credit money is more ‘stable’ when there are actual assets backing the loans. But in practice, this kind of fictitious capital is necessarily based on the liquidity provided by government securities, which means the current budget balance is even more important in this kind of shrunken and more unequal world. Why cryptocurrency, backed by nothing with any use-value, makes an appearance here is a mystery. The good credit of a state, the value of its money, is backed by the power of the state, which means, in the end, imperial money is backed by blood. The death of the dollar is like the death of Mark Twain: Yes, the dude really is dead, but is the announcement premature?
To conclude with the excerpt already given: “.. the Russian leadership must realize that it will have to face increasingly growing public demands. It is very unlikely that the “deep people” will demand pluralistic democracy and liberalization of the political regime; rather they will demand social justice, rejection of the elites that have discredited themselves, the unblocking of social mobility elevators for those willing and able to become useful in the situation of the most acute confrontation with the West, and, on the contrary, the purging of the public administration system of incompetent and corrupt functionaries. These are the basic things constituting an emergency social contract that will have to be concluded in some form in order to save Russia during the transition to world order Z.” It is remarkably suggestive to wonder who the ‘deep people” might be? There are many petty bourgeois/bourgeois forces that would favor more parties as their vehicles for their favored policies. Liberalization of the regime seems in practice to mostly mean, rotation of office. It does seem there is only a limited support for this sort of thing. The higher-ups in society (who might be the opposite of the ‘deep people?’) thought count for more in bourgeois societies, though.
Social justice really does have a mass constituency but it’s also expensive, and ultimately incompatible with a society centered on production for profit. That’s why the Yefremenko’s hate and fear Communism. Further, the so-called unblocking of social mobility elevators is BS. There is no bourgeois society where it’s all chiefs, no Indians. The problem is never the blocking of elevators, unless you’re in a feudal or other pre-capitalist society (there’s a reason why capitalism was an advance!) There might be a temporary mass constituency for this, based on illusions. But the simple fact there aren’t enough rooms on the upper floors will present the need for those who take up residence first, to block the elevators again, in defense of their rightful place, as they see it. Anybody who advocated this vague nonsense is substituting political cant for a real program.
There is always a pretense of universal support for removing incompetent and corrupt officials, to be sure. That is, until there really is a radical turnover in offices, as in the October Revolution or under Stalin. The real policy later was, stability of cadres. This may be modified by a selected, tested Loyal Opposition being allowed to occasionally take a seat. (Think the occasional Democrat taking an office in the FBI or the military or Treasury or whatever.) But in a bourgeois democracy, an office holder who actually gives out universal benefit (even if the well-to-do get disproportionately more) is pretty universally regarded as a briber of the filthy masses and a corrupt monster and even a Socialist/Communist/Satanist/pedophile. (Think Biden.) This is not a real program, but a pretense to fool people.
Last and least, democratic and oligarchic are not opposites but inextricably blended. They are a dialectical unity. This was true in ancient democracies. It was plainest in Sparta but it was true too in Athens and other Greek states. It was true in the Roman Republic, with its Senate. It was true in the US in its first revolution, and it’s true today. Pretending there is some principle of true democracy is a defense of capitalism/imperialism.
Posted by: steven t johnson | Nov 28 2022 14:51 utc | 149
As it happens, I am currently re-reading (after nearly fifty years) Trotsky’s Dictatorship versus Democracy. This is also known as Terrorism and Communism. This is a polemic in reply to Karl Kautsky who also firmly believed socialism was true democracy. Lenin’s Theses on the Constituent Assembly and his The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky come to mind as well. To repeat, democracy and oligarchy (also, fascism) are points on the political spectrum of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. That’s why revolutionism, the commitment to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, is the dividing line between Communists and “Socialists/Social Democrats/True Democrats” etc. I suppose it’s possible Yefremenko is being arch, meaning to point out the profound political weakness and deranged folly of the bourgeois-democratic system in Russia, including Putin personally, slyly hinting for a new Soviet. What is not possible is that the national oligarch are any less bourgeois democrats than the internationalist oligarchs. They are both committed to the defense of private property in the means of production, i.e., capitalism.
Now although it’s barely possible Yefremenko was being tricky in putting forth someone else’s position to covertly explode it, it is not possible to draw a parallel between how the Russian workers somehow have a vital interest in solidarity with some oligarchs with the US workers having a vital interest in siding with some oligarchs (meaning Trump or whoever is eventually agreed upon.) Unfortunately at this time, the US workers virulently share the bourgeois-democratic hostility to Communism, even to the point where many accept that “democracy” is defined by the rule by minority vote! Currently, the majority accept that trampling on private property is tyranny. All capitalist factions in the US are pro-imperialist and the world decline of capitalism impels all factions to imperialist war. The notion that all that is happening is the relative decline of the US and national bourgeoisie from other countries will rise with “their” rising capitalism is a utopian projection. Only the most radical destruction of “surplus” capital (surplus to profit-making, that is, not to human need) can restore a period of capitalist growth. WWI, WWI, hybrid WWIII, the pattern and model is plain I think.
Not only is the idea of trying to not just sell the workers’ bodies to “their” capitalists, but to sell their souls by turning them into robot reactionaries spouting ignorant, backward invective and tormenting other people, including other workers, by dividing the working class by nationality, gender, religion, even, astonishingly, allying with billionaires and millionaires against the dread threat of people having sex or wearing funny clothes. This is the flip side of woke. The fact is, that people don’t obey the ruling-class moral codes, they have no ultimate interest in doing so and their obedience, nay, their tendency to sadistic enforcement of their rules is just the same phenomenon as a worker in a reactionary party. The real workers include women, other races, other nationalities, and yes, sexual minorities. True democracy (I’m forcing myself to adopt this idiot phrase without scare quotes) is accepting all people for who they are. The working class, and the working class as the universal class destined to carry humanity forward, is the tribune of the people.
Posted by: steven t johnson | Nov 28 2022 18:04 utc | 161
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