Ted Grant posted:

The fact that it was Mountbatten who was involved in this projected conspiracy is not an accident. Mountbatten was very close to the Royal Family, an uncle in fact of the Queen’s consort, Prince Philip. The ruling class has been very careful to preserve the monarchy’s powers of veto. This was shown when they were used in November 1975 in Australia—through Sir John Kerr, the Governor-General appointed by the Queen—for the dismissal of the Labour government led by Gough Whitlam. In the same way in Britain, the monarchy still formally has the power to select who should be prime minister and the power to dismiss a prime minister and the government. In the event of a royalist plot of the character that has been suggested, the monarchy could be used at a time of desperation on the part of the ruling class exactly as it was used in Australia to dismiss the government there.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/grant/1981/04/coup.htm

John Pilger posted:

The following year, Rammell employed the same sleight of hand that the Wilson government had used to expel the islanders in the 1960s, when he sent an order-in-council to the Queen for her rubber-stamped approval. This overturned the Chagossians' high court victory of 2000 in its entirety and and banned the islanders from ever returning home. The order-in-council appeared on a list of innocuous royal decrees, between an amendment to the royal charter of the College of Optometrists and the appointment of Her Majesty's education inspectors for Scotland. No reason was given; a privy councillor simply read out the fate of thousands of Her Majesty's most vulnerable, abused and wronged subjects.
http://johnpilger.com/articles/out-of-eden

Nobnob posted:

So, Russia and NATO are thinking about playing the war game again. Obviously people are scared of the russian troops on the border to the Ukraine and after the Russian representatives lost their right to vote in the Council of Europe Putin is a bit upset.



I really wonder how far the western countries will go to deny the Russian annexation of the Crimea and how Putin will react. No matter what happens on the political level, the real damage in form of the segregation of the Ukraine is already done and will not be repaired easily.

warderenator posted:

I recently noticed that someone vandalized the statue of Lenin in Seattle, probably in response to events in Ukraine.

Editors of the New International posted:

Who Is Guilty?

It would be as absurd to assign degrees of responsibility and guilt among the rival imperialisms as in the case of gang warfare. If two gangs of racketeers were in control, respectively, of Chicago’s North and South Sides; and if the South Side gang, finding pickings too slim to sustain operations, were compelled to muscle in on the North Side, we would not argue over who was guilty nor would we worry who fired the first shot. We would condemn the system of racketeering, and assign equal guilt to both the gangs that operated branches of that system.

So also in the Second World War. If Hitler has appeared usually as the “aggressor,” this is only because he has had nothing that Britain and France want, whereas they have, as a result of their prior aggressions, what he needs. If we are both hungry and you, having all the food, refuse to give me any, then I will naturally have to appear as aggressor if I try to take some from you. To complete the analogy, however, it should be remarked that all the food has in the first place been stolen from the original producers whom we both intend to go on robbing.

To subject, first Germany itself, then Austria, Czechoslovakia, Danzig and Poland ... to Nazism is indeed a crime against humanity too black to be painted. But it is a crime of exactly the same character as Versailles, which subjected half of the world to the British and French imperialists.

Sometimes it is argued that even if Versailles was a crime, that crime is in the past, over and done with, and should be, if not forgotten, at least tolerated to avoid still worse crimes of the present and future. This argument is not merely sophistical but false. The crime of Versailles was not finished when the treaty was signed—that only began it. The crime lives day by day in the starvation, misery and oppression of the hundreds of millions in India, Africa, Ceylon, Indo-China, who are crushed beneath the boots of British and French imperialism.

It is the system of imperialism which is responsible for the war. It is the rulers of that system, the big-businessmen and bankers of London and Berlin and Paris and Rome and New York, who are guilty. The blood stains all of their hands alike.

im gay posted:

objectivism.jpg

Karl Marx posted:

One of the essential conditions for the existence of the factory system, especially when the length of the working-day is fixed, is certainty in the result, i.e., the production in a given time of a given quantity of commodities, or of a given useful effect. The statutory pauses in the working-day, moreover, imply the assumption that periodical and sudden cessation of the work does no harm to the article undergoing the process of production. This certainty in the result, and this possibility of interrupting the work are, of course, easier to be attained in the purely mechanical industries than in those in which chemical and physical processes play a part; as, for instance, in the earthenware trade, in bleaching, dyeing, baking, and in most of the metal industries. Wherever there is a workingday without restriction as to length, wherever there is night-work and unrestricted waste of human life, there the slightest obstacle presented by the nature of the work to a change for the better is soon looked upon as an everlasting barrier erected by Nature. No poison kills vermin with more certainty than the Factory Act removes such everlasting barriers. No one made a greater outcry over “impossibilities” than our friends the earthenware manufacturers. In 1864, however, they were brought under the Act, and within sixteen months every “impossibility” had vanished.

“The improved method,” called forth by the Act, “of making slip by pressure instead of by evaporation, the newly-constructed stoves for drying the ware in its green state, &c., are each events of great importance in the pottery art, and mark an advance which the preceding century could not rival.... It has even considerably reduced the temperature of the stoves themselves with a considerable saving of fuel, and with a readier effect on the ware.”

In spite of every prophecy, the cost-price of earthenware did not rise, but the quantity produced did, and to such an extent that the export for the twelve months, ending December, 1865, exceeded in value by Ł138,628 the average of the preceding three years. In the manufacture of matches it was thought to be an indispensable requirement, that boys, even while bolting their dinner, should go on dipping the matches in melted phosphorus, the poisonous vapour from which rose into their faces. The Factory Act (1864) made the saving of time a necessity, and so forced into existence a dipping machine, the vapour from which could not come in contact with the workers. So, at the present time, in those branches of the lace manufacture not yet subject to the Factory Act, it is maintained that the meal-times cannot be regular owing to the different periods required by the various kinds of lace for drying, which periods vary from three minutes up to an hour and more. To this the Children’s Employment Commissioners answer:

“The circumstances of this case are precisely analogous to that of the paper-stainers, dealt with in our first report. Some of the principal manufacturers in the trade urged that in consequence of the nature of the materials used, and their various processes, they would be unable, without serious loss, to stop for meal-times at any given moment. But it was seen from the evidence that, by due care and previous arrangement, the apprehended difficulty would be got over; and accordingly, by clause 6 of section 6 of the Factory Acts Extension Act, passed during this Session of Parliament, an interval of eighteen months is given to them from the passing of the Act before they are required to conform to the meal hours, specified by the Factory Acts.”

Hardly had the Act been passed when our friends the manufacturers found out:

“The inconveniences we expected to arise from the introduction of the Factory Acts into our branch of manufacture, I am happy to say, have not arisen. We do not find the production at all interfered with; in short, we produce more in the same time.”

It is evident that the English legislature, which certainly no one will venture to reproach with being overdosed with genius, has been led by experience to the conclusion that a simple compulsory law is sufficient to enact away all the so-called impediments, opposed by the nature of the process, to the restriction and regulation of the working-day. Hence, on the introduction of the Factory Act into a given industry, a period varying from six to eighteen months is fixed within which it is incumbent on the manufacturers to remove all technical impediments to the working of the Act. Mirabeau’s “Impossible! ne me dites jamais ce bęte de mot!” is particularly applicable to modern technology. But though the Factory Acts thus artificially ripen the material elements necessary for the conversion of the manufacturing system into the factory system, yet at the same time, owing to the necessity they impose for greater outlay of capital, they hasten on the decline of the small masters, and the concentration of capital.

Notorious QIG posted:

Communocracy posted:

I took this at this year's May Day rally in Toronto. This is a booth apparently run by the people who produce the Spartacus Trotskyist newsletter. One of these things is not like the other... One of these countries does not belong...

Gazpacho posted:

Volcott posted:

gently caress off grandpa anime games are the way of the future.

Meme Emulator posted:

boom boom boom posted:

Not enough

Baracula posted:

Well a poster from the time they were busy suppressing all opposition with brutal violence is maybe not a good idea and perhaps this fetishism for the bolsheviks and their propaganda is actually unhelpful? Nope, probably just dumb hippies lol



E: my anarchocommunist fetishism is okay though