Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Variable Labour=Variable Captial

Just when you thought that the American worker could not get squeezed for any more juice, major retailers have come up with a new cost-savings innovation to apply more pressure on their workforce. Indeed, staffing is the latest area where big retailers like Wal-Mart, Target, and Payless hope to wring out a few pennies with new operational efficiencies.

Major features in the Wall Street Journal and the San Francisco Chronicle this week reveal that new computerized scheduling systems will move many American workers from a predictable work shift to staffing based on the number of customers in a store at any given time. The system will allow managers to start the business day with a few employees on hand, then bring in "on call" workers when business picks up during the course of the day. Once commerce lags, the manager can send workers home until further notice. In short, it matches staffing to more closely match customer demand.

"The whole point is workers were a fixed cost, now they're a variable cost," Kenneth Dalto, a management consultant told the Wall Street Journal. "Is it good for workers?" he added. "Probably not."

Labour under capitalism has always been a variable cost, which Marx called variable capital, it is the source of profit. This is an example of the speed up of production and the use of flexible labour time as is done in factories now applied to the social factory of the service/retail industry.

Variable capital means that proportion of capital which is invested in wages, in the purchase of labour-power. Marx called this capital “variable” because it is this proportion of capital which, if it is used wisely may produce a new, surplus value in the course of the labour process, over and above the “necessary labour time” which the worker needs to live and is paid in the form of wages. This investment is the only one which creates new value, because the worker is able to produce more than he needs in order to live.

So for example, let us suppose a worker earns $100 and consumes $1000 worth of materials and components to produce a product which is sold for $1300. This value could be represented as constant capital ($1000) + variable capital ($100) + surplus value ($200). That $200 of surplus value was added to the product solely by the activity of the worker. That is, of the capitalist’s investment of $1100, only the variable capital, $100, expanded.

Marx represented this relation symbolically:

c + v -› c + v + s

The ratio of constant to variable capital, (c/v), he called the “organic composition of capital”; the ratio of surplus value to wages, (s/v), he called the rate of surplus value, or the rate of exploitation of labour, and s/(c + v) the rate of profit.

The contradiction brought out by this analysis is this. Every capitalist works might and main to reduce the wages bill, and turn over as much material as he can, investing in expensive machinery and increasing c to cut labour costs, v; this produces a general increase in the “organic composition of capital”, c/v. However, since it is only the variable capital that produces profit, the result is a falling rate of profit.

Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - Chapter Eight


Thus all workers produce capital and thus capitalism. This is what made Marx revolutionary, in identifying the proletariat not the capitalist as the source of capitalism. Even if work is not productive in the traditional meaning of producing goods, in the expansion of capitalism into all social relationships, the commodification of all our being, every worker who is also a consumer is the producer and product of capitalism.

It is this social relationship that means all workers, whether in a factory or in retail store, are the greatest threat to the functioning of capitalism. Which is why revolutionaries call for the General (ized ) Strike by all members of society against the system which exploits us as cogs in the machine.

A tip o' the blog to my co-conspirators at News Trolls for this.

See:

Suplus Value

Labour Produces All Wealth

Libertarian Labour

Peter Drucker RIP

It's the Labour Theory of Value, stupid




Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Un-Strike

Suppose they called a strike and no one showed up.......
ACTRA on strike, but most actors still working Film, television and radio performers were in a position to strike in three provinces early Monday, but there was not a picket line to be found across the country.
This is the ideal strike for those who oppose unions, because strikes inconvenience the public.

See

Unions

Labour

Strike


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , ,

Temporary Workers Exploitation

Here is why the Governments temporary foreign worker program is legalized exploitation.

Maple Leaf ends Chinese worker program over job fees
Maple Leaf Foods has shut down a program to import workers from China after discovering that 61 employees at its Brandon, Man., pork processing plant each had to pay a $10,000 fee to get the jobs. "Are you going to wait the four to six years to emigrate? Or are you going to choose the quicker and the faster [option] and pay the premium?"

While the Harper government has deported undocumented foreign workers it is encouraging foreign temporary workers to come to Canada, who are exploited by those 'importing', them. In the same fashion that undoucmented Chinese workers coming to Canada are exploited by Snakeheads in their own country.

See:

Alberta's Free Market In Labour

The Labour Shortage Myth

AFL Agrees With Me

Monte Solberg




Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Monday, January 08, 2007

Real Costs of Bio-Fuels

The Green Party strongly supports the development of biofuels

But at what cost? The death of the Wheat Board so that the big agribusiness corporations that are producing bio-fuels, like Archer Daniels Midlands, can gain more state subsidies

And increase the profits they make as the
market price for grain increases in response to market speculation on state funding of bio-fuels.

Not for farmers of course, but for the big agribusiness buyers and sellers,
who also dominate the bio-fuels market.

"The Wheat board's marketing efforts are worth $500 million a year to farmers,"
said Green Party leader Elizabeth May. "The question is why is Stephen Harper so intent on selling out
Canadian farmers to agricultural conglomerate like Cargill and ADM?"

The answer is Bio Fuels, which the Green Party supports. The problem is that they are not economical, without massive state subsidies. And the Green Party knows that.

Major food processors like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland Company are investing heavily in biofuels. On the energy front, Chevron and BP are pouring millions into biofuels production or processing.

Ethanol is the best reference biofuel when discussing options for biodiesel support. In the last 3 years, Canadian ethanol capacity has grown from 175 million litres to 1.2 billion litres. To initiate the rapid growth of a Canadian ethanol industry, the government of Canada provided $123.9 million in capital subsidies to corporations during the first two rounds of the Ethanol Expansion Program ethanol production has increased as a direct result of the capitalization assistance

"Ethanol Production Update"

Currently, 110 grain ethanol biorefineries have the capacity to produce more than 5.3 billion gallons of ethanol ethanol. An additional 79 (81 according to their latest update of their list) construction projects are underway that will add nearly 6 billion gallons of new ethanol production capacity.

Archer Daniels Midland remains the largest producer with 1,070 mgy of capacity at six sites and 275 mgy under construction or planned. VeraSun comes in second and US Bioenergy third, each with less than half of ADM's capacity.


And the biggest critcs of the biofuel hoax are environmentalists, not political opportunists like May and her Party.


Biomass for biofuel isn't worth it

Although Pimentel advocates the use of burning biomass to produce thermal energy (to heat homes, for example), he deplores the use of biomass for liquid fuel. "The government spends more than $3 billion a year to subsidize ethanol production when it does not provide a net energy balance or gain, is not a renewable energy source or an economical fuel. Further, its production and use contribute to air, water and soil pollution and global warming," Pimentel says. He points out that the vast majority of the subsidies do not go to farmers but to large ethanol-producing corporations.




See
ADM

Wheat Board

Farmers

ind blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , ,
, , ,




Editorial Comment

I see my editorial comment on Peter MacKay's secret surprise unannounced propaganda visit to Afghanistan has upset some partisan Blogging Tories, in particular BBS and Steve Janke. Hello its called editorial comment.

And Mr. Janke is concerned I am implying Peter MacKay is a pedophile. But child brides are ok in Afghanistan. That is the real crime. Which was my point, stated in a pointed way.

You can't be a pedophile if its ok in the country you are in to marry a child bride can you? And if it is pedophilia then I would expect Janke to be outraged, as I was, over the conditions of exploitation girls and women still suffer under the Karzai regime. But of course Janke wasn't nor was MacKay.

Janke would rather attack me personally and then attack the NDP as if I was a partisan blog for the NDP, which I am not. Missed my post on partisan blogging did we Steve. Missed Libertarian Communist Blog in my header did we.


The Harper government continues to prop up a misogynist anti-women regime that allows child brides. But the silence of the Harper government over the lack of womens rights in Afghanistan is deafening. But then they don't believe women's equality is important in Canada so why should it be important in Afghanistan.

Peter MacKay zooms over for a Harper propaganda photo op handing out some token funds to women, while avoiding the issue of the current famine and drought and families selling off child brides to survive.


Of course child brides are an offense to all right thinking folks, which was my point. But clearly my supposedly besmirching Mr. MacKays reputation is more important to a partisan hack like Janke than the condition of girls and women in Afghanistan.

Nothing new there, both BBS and Janke are Blogging Tories.


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , ,

Tiger Tiger Burning Bright


This is from my fellow News Now contributor Phil Davis.

There are only 4000-5000 Tigers in the wild,they are being poached at the rate of one per day.They are being killed for their skins,which people wear to show their wealth,also for their body parts being used in traditional chinese medicine.There is no proof to show that consuming Tiger parts cure anything,as there are alternative medicines.also we should not be killing TIGERS period.WE NEED WORLD HELP,PLEASE HELP THE TIGER,WE NEED TO ACT BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.You can find out more about our projects at www.tigerawareness.co.uk.

There are half a million seals in Canadian waters that the Green NGO's will once again mobilize to protect from nasty brutish seal hunters.

But there are far less Tigers. Real endagered spiecies like Tigers, Wolves, Bears, and Primates that need protection and the worlds attention.

More than the cute cuddly poster seals who are commercially exploited by the Green NGO's to line their pocketbooks.



The Tiger

TIGER, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake. 1757–1827



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , ,

Sunday, January 07, 2007

Kananaskis Protest Redux


Kananaskis likely meeting place for leaders of Canada, U.S. and Mexico

The G8 meeting in 2002 was held in Kananaskis and was met with mass protests, time to recycle those old protest signs and make this another memorable meeting.

The protests did, however, manage to direct the media's attention to the issues of human rights, social justice and environmentalism that motivated the protesters; the small activist community in Calgary was also bolstered by the demonstrations, leading to the largest protests in the city's history the following year.


Given the current illegal government of Mexican President Calderon is continuing the oppression of the people of Mexico this will be an excellent opportunity to show our opposition to all Three Amigos of the Neo Con Agenda of Deep Integration and a North American Union.

See:

G8

Harper Supports Calderon

What About Mexican Human Rights Mr. Harper



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , ,

Peter MacKays Child Bride


So Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay has made another of the governments surprise visits to Afghanistan.

Being a single guy I wonder if he was looking for a child bride.




See:

Our Allies In Afghanistan Oppress Women


Womens Oppression Continues In Afghanistan




The image “http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4319/673/320/2006-08-31-Troops.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , ,,, , , , , , , , , ,

CN Song

A day can't go by without another story about CN.

No injuries, no environmental damage in Quebec derailment, says CN


High Hopes

With no apologies to Frank Sinatra.

Next time your found, with your train on the ground
There a lot to be learned, so look around

Just what makes E. Hunter Harrison,
Think he'll move
that that train down the track

Anyone knows CN, cant
Move that train down the track

But E. Hunter Harrison,
got high hopes,
hes got high hopes

Hes got high apple pie,
in the sky hopes



So any time your gettin low
stead of lettin go
Just remember that CN
Oops there goes another train off the track


Perhaps they should change their name to Canada's National Disaster.



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , ,
, , , ,

Elizabeth May Closet Liberal

Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party, interviewed on CTV's Question Period today spent most of her time attacking Jack Layton. Using Liberal talking points.

Like how the NDP brought down the government last year just when the International Climate Change Conference was happening, why that's straight off Scott Reids talking notes for the 2006 election. A challenge that the Liberals have used for the past year in attacking the NDP.


And how the NDP and Conservatives are collaborating on the Climate Change Accord in order to prop up the Harper government. Straight from the Liberal press clippings.

Clearly she see's Jack Layton and the NDP as her biggest threat.

She admited that the Greens took votes from the NDP and Conservatives in the London byelection. And she is thinking of running again there.

Is there a potential merger here between the Greens and Liberals......since they share the same talking points and share a common opponent; the NDP.

Luckily Jack and the NDP can take credit that they get things done in parliament, something neither Green Party or the Liberals can.

See:

Green Party

Elizabeth May





Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , ,

UKRAINITZKI RIZDVO

Merry Ukrainian Christmas. Z Rizdvom Khrystovym!

Well at least here in Western Canada, the largest North American Diaspora of Ukrainians, who kept and grew their identity while in exile. In the rest of the world it is Epiphany and the Orthodox Christmas.

Ukrainian Christmas is of course not a Christian celebration at all but rooted in the old pagan traditions. The twelve course dinner we eat is vegetarian, saving of the meat slaughtered at harvest, for the mid winter, late Feburary early March coinciding coincidentally with Easter/Spring. It represents the circle of the year quartered.

My relatives once explained the twelve seasons were the Apostles. A bit of syncretism if not outright recuperation by the dominant Religious State/State Religion.

In reality it is part of the pagan roots of all Ukrainian culture and its motifs.

The twelve course meal is celebrated with friends, relatives and the community, with local carolers visiting, not unlike Mummers in Newfoundland, and a priest blessing the house with water, salt and a evergreen branch.

The meal itself is part of the old pagan gift economy, where we shared the wealth of the harvest at this dark cold part of the year, feasting in preparation for the spring.

The symbolism of the birds on the babkas and paskas, the sacred breads of the sun which are made from the wheat, the life of the earth, are with us still and used at Christmas, Easter, for weddings and funerals.

Rich in pagan heritage, Ukrainians are again embracing their pagan past, and its vital link with today.

So from a heathen and a pagan I say to you,


Recited After Caroling

vinchovanye from the Carpathian Mountains (rec. by Vol. Shukhevych. Hutsul'shchyna. Lviv: NTSh, 1904. v.4)

English Translation: (two separate very old greetings combined)


Wishing all of you health, wealth, happiness, bliss,
for you and your family, your garden, your farm animals,
even your bees, and may there be a wedding soon in your family!




Dai zhe ty, Bozhe, ta v khati sytno,
U khati sytno, na dvir prybytno.
Dai zhe ty, Bozhe, na khati zilia,
Na khati zilia, v khati vesilia!
V pasitsi bzholy yz royechkamy,
Yz royechkamy, paroyechkamy!
Oi dai Bozhe!

Vinchuyemo ty sh'ystiem-zdorovyym,
Sh'ystiem-zdorovyym, Rizdvom Khrystovym!
Dai zhe ty bozhe, v horodi zelo,
V horodi zelo, v khati veselo!
Podai zhe, Bozhe, vsim zdorovyuchko,
Na khudobochku, na dvir sh'yst'ychko,
Na khudobochku, na rohovuyu,
Na chel'ydochku, na domovuyu!
Oi dai Bozhe!




A Merry Ukrainian Christmas to all

On Christmas Eve, called "Sviat Vechir" (Holy Eve) in Ukrainian, the family gathers together to share a traditional meal and to sing carols. It is customary to wait until the evening star appears in the sky, as this is thought to represent the star of Bethlehem which guided the Wise Men to the Manger. The meal is called "Sviata Vecherya" which means "holy supper".

It is always a lenten meal as there is a fasting time which leads up to the Feast of Christmas on the 7th. The most important food which must be present and usually sits in the center of the table is called "Kutia". It is a sweet pudding made of boiled wheat, honey, nuts and poppy seeds. The other traditional food is a fruit compote of simmered dried fruits called "Uzvar". These two foods symbolize the bounty of the harvest and offer a prayer for a plentiful harvest to come in the New Year.

A chair and place setting is usually left empty to symbolize the hope that the souls of deceased relatives will visit and partake of the holy meal along with the family. Pagan Ukrainians worshipped their ancestors and believed that their spirits could be propitiated in order to benefit the family.


Tree of Life

"The Tree of Life, the Sun, the Goddess: Symbolic Motifs in Ukrainian Folk Art," now at the new Ukrainian Museum, taught me how to "read" a bride’s costume. It allowed me to see symbols that evolved from at least as far back as the Linear and Trypillian cultures from 6000-3000 BCE.

All these pagan symbols reside in textiles and ornaments dating from the late 19th to early 20th century from a country that was converted to Christianity in 988 CE.

The goddess motif, a torso, often vegetative with curved arms held on either side of the head, can be found on the bottom edge of a cream-colored coat (svyta) from the 1920s or recognized in more abstract forms on painted Easter eggs (pysanky). A goddess figure often shows up in textiles as rhomboids, where hook-like extensions take the place of uplifted arms. In the same manner, she appears in sashes and in the embroidery on the sleeves of women’s shirts and ritual cloths.

The tree-of-life designs play an important role in many cultures. A pillar or tree, an axis mundi, is seen as connecting the world above (gods or benevolent spirits), the earth (man’s domain) and the underground (ancestors or evil spirits).

In Ukrainian folk art, the tree-of-life is often found on ritual cloths, usually with red embroidery on a white ground. These cloths were found everywhere in traditional villages. Some were hung in houses at weddings and births; others were placed on coffins; still others were put atop markers at the edge of small towns to welcome visitors. One ritual cloth (rushnyk) from the 1930s is a riot of tree-of-life motifs along with other fertility symbols -- flowers, vines and birds.

Unveiling the Mother Goddess from her

4000-year Black Earth Cover

It is awesome to think that while Sumerian culture had only begun developing and when the Egyptian pyramids were yet to be built, dozens of Trypilian towns in Ukraine had already sunk into oblivion and their ruins were covered with the grass of the forest-steppe stretching between the Dniester and Dnipro rivers.


Moist Mother Earth - Slavic Myth and Religion

http://www.psywww.com/psyrelig/ukraine/pagan.jpg
These old Ukrainian fertility gods are located in Kyiv at the Ukraine History Museum, near St. Andrew’s church. (The statues are outdoors, and have been placed under the hoods in order to reduce wear from the elements.) Many--perhaps even most--religions and churches encourage fertility. Historically, fertility was an important way to maintain the continuity of the community. This tradition continues today, of course.

Scythia and the Scythians - Encyclopedia of Ukraine

The Anthropogene

There was a time when cities were being built in the Southern Ukraine long before the kingship descended to Eridu in Sumer. We are accustomed to thinking that "history began in Sumer", but there is a time of cities and peoples that have been lost and re-discovered. We don't need to look for a mythical Atlantis to discover lost realms.

Around 5400 BC there must have been a great forest in the Southern Ukraine and while this is pure speculation, the people of the Black Sea Diaspora must have made made their migratory ingress into these territiories, moving up the great rivers of the Danube, the Dnieper and the Dneister. To the ancients who were making the switch from a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence to an agrarian lifestyle, the rivers were the highways, the safest way to travel and the riverbanks were the best place to grow grains.

In case the term Black Sea Diaspora doesn't mean anything, we now know that around 5600 BC the New Euxine Lake, as that freshwater sea was known, was permanently changed by the opening of the breaching of the Bosphorus Straits. There is quite a bit of controversy on the exact manner of how this happened. Was it gradual? was it sudden? Was there a prior flooding from the Caspian Sea? etc.... But what we do know, thanks to Robert Ballards efforts in undersea archeology, is that there were human settlements in the shallow regions of the northern Black Sea that are now 140 meters underwater.

Yara's Forest Song Reviews

"Just as every tree is different in a forest and you have to learn to recognize it, so every person is different and has its own place, time and unique voice which you must also learn to recognize. The idea that today we are destroying the forest, uprooting trees, and uprooting humanity, is central to the production of Lesia Ukrainka's Forest Song, the Ukrainian-America collaborative project of the Yara Arts Group from La Mama Theatre in New York and the Kurbas Theatre from Lviv..

Lesya Ukrainka - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Larysa Petrivna Kosach-Kvitka (February 25, 1871 [O.S. February 13] – August 1, 1913 [O.S. July 19]) better known under her literary pseudonym Lesya Ukrainka , was one of Ukraine's best-known poets and writers and the foremost woman writer in Ukrainian literature. Ukrainka also wrote epic poems, prose dramas, prose, several articles of literary criticism, and a number of sociopolitical essays. She was best known Lisova pisnya (1912; The Forest Song), whose characters include mythological beings from Ukrainian folklore. Ukrainka actively opposed Russian tsarism and was a member of Ukrainian Marxist organizations. In 1902 she translated a Communist Manifesto into Ukrainian. She was briefly arrested in 1907 by tsarist police and remained under surveillance thereafter.


And the ancient godess returns in modern form;Yulia Tymoshenko: Goddess of the Orange Revolution As I also commented on here.



See

Merry Ukrainian Christmas


Yes Colby Cosh there is such a thing as Ukrainian Christmas


Christmas


Pagan

Ukraine


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , ,

Palace Casino Strike


There is an ongoing strike at the Palace Casino in West Edmonton Mall. It is another strike in Alberta by workers for a 'FIRST' contract. We are one of the few provinces that does not automatically give workers a first contract once they successfully win union recognition. Nope, you can join the union and then have to fight to get a contract.

Which means that first contract strikes are dragged out by management, as they are in this case. The strike started back in September.

Well this is an ugly little strike because while the Palace is operated by a private company, in fact it is run by a tax avoiding Income Trust, it functions with State support and sanction. After all the Alberta government makes more money off gambling than off the Oil Sands.

B.C. Business Magazine says Gateway Income Trust, based in Burnaby, B.C., was the third most profitable business in that province last year, posting profit of close to $20 million in the first half of 2006. The company also operates the Baccarat Casino in Edmonton.


And UFCW the union involved is faced with non-profit groups and charities needing to use the casino to raise funds for things like school books, yep in Alberta the biggest users of casino fundraising are school parent groups trying to offset the provincial governments underfunding of public schools.

And it appears management at the Palace is googling Doug O'Halloran, who is President of UFCW. And how do I know this, well they visited my blog.

magnify this user static-68-179-10-233.ptr.terago.ca (Palace Casino)

Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, 0 returning visits

Date Time WebPage
6th January 200715:40:16plawiuk.blogspot.com/2005_10_09_plawiuk_archive.html
www.google.ca/search?q=doug%2Bohalloran&hl=en&rls=
SUNA%2CSUNA%3A2006-16%
2CSUNA%3Aen


Instead of googling UFCW the Palace Casino management should be bargaining with their workers.

Once again this shows that the Alberta Labour Relations Board is the tool of the bosses, and labour should abandon it for Direct Action.

Every strike is a battle in the Class War!








The IWW Edmonton holds public solidarity pickets every Sunday afternoon at 2pm at West Edmonton Mall to support the striking workers, join them.

"The longer the picket line the shorter the strike."

See

Unions

UFCW

Strikes

Labour




Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , ,

State Capitalism in the USSR


There are varying conflicting debates on the left as to when the Soviet Union became State Capitalist.

Of course amongst the Trotskyists it was always a Degenerated Workers State, even under Stalin.

The theory of Bureaucratic Collectivism, State Capitalism, etc. all evolved out of the debates with Trotsky in the Fourth International during the 1940's by various factions.


Outside of the Trotskyists, Council Communists or Left Communists, as Lenin called them, already defined Bolshevism as State Capitalism and in some cases Nationalist Socialism, as Otto Ruhle did.

Anarchists point out that Lenin himself described the Soviet Union as State Capitalism;
"socialism is nothing but state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people,"

Rosa Luxemburg herself a contemporary in the Social Democratic Movement with Lenin, accused the Bolsheviks of creating State Capitalism in the Soviet Union.

This new type of capitalism--properly called state-capitalism--persists to the present day in the ideological dress of 'socialism."

Well here is an interesting historical flashback from Time Magazine, I found on the web. We can officially date State Capitalism as being fully implemented under Stalin in the summer of 1931. Though it was already evolving from earlier decisions the Bolsheviks made.


TIME.com: Stalin Shifts the Helm -- Jul 13, 1931

Captain Lenin, Captain Trotsky and today Captain Stalin have never been afraid to alter Russia's course—the course of over one-seventh of the world—by a sudden titan's tug at the helm. Last week Captain Stalin tugged.

He issued no decree. He permitted the Press of Russia to disclose a speech he had made June 23 to a group of Soviet industrial executives. So awful is Comrade Stalin's power that not one of his many hearers had publicly breathed a syllable. His words, according to Moscow correspondents, will soon be law:

¶ "We have not yet reached our Communist goal," said Stalin with devastating simplicity. "Meanwhile emergency measures are necessary. ... It is unbearable to see a locomotive driver receiving the same wages as a bookkeeper!"

The wages of Soviet locomotive drivers and other skilled proletarians will be raised, Stalin indicated, above the wage level of unskilled proletarians and despised white collar yes-men. Up to last week the theory of Soviet wage scales (varied some-what in practice) was approximate wage equality between the skilled and the unskilled. With a mighty tug Stalin seemed to shift the whole Soviet wage structure —in a direction seemingly opposite to Communism.

¶"Break up the family!" was one of Russia's bywords when she went on the Five-Day Week (TIME, Oct. 7,1929). Factories began to run every day of the week with four-fifths of their personnel, the other one-fifth resting. Thus each man or woman has, under the present Five-Day week, one day of rest after each four of work; but the "rest day" of husband and wife may not be the same, thus tending to disrupt the family.

J. Stalin, happy family man, now said that factories in which the Five-Day Week does not seem to work well should return to the old system of five days' work and the same rest day for everyone at once.

¶. Still more striking was the Dictator's word that management of factories a la Soviet by voting councils of the workers must in some degree give way to management by a manager with power to manage and responsibility to show a profit. Obviously this is "State Capitalism." The State being the owner for whom the manager must earn a profit.



See:

State Capitalism

Trotskyist



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Saturday, January 06, 2007

BioFuel and The Wheat Board

Is there a connection between the Harper announcement promoting bio-fuels and the push to kill the Wheat Board. Why of course there is. Its called Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) who is a shareholder in Agricore the Alberta based Wheat and Barley exchange, and they are the largest processor of bio fuels. They also have Brian Mulroney as a board member. This article is from the U.S. but note the conclusion

Ethanol's roots in ADM lobbying

Grist features the origins of U.S. government subsidies for ethanol fuels and their benefits to Acher Daniels Midland (ADM) and its former CEO Dwayne Andreas (the man who provided the $25,000 for the Watergate 'plumbers'). Includes links to the 1995 Cato Institute study of Carter administration support to ADM, as well as this year's study by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, Biofuels - At What Cost? (Oct. 25, 2006).

The latter estimates federal support for ethanol to total between $5.5 billion and $7.3 billion each year, and the benefits to ADM which (according to the article) contols about 1/3 of the ethanol market.

The article suggests that the federal government could do more to fight greenhouse gases (GHG) if it used the money to buy carbon offsets. Of course, that's not the administration's goal in supporting ADM and ethanol, is it?

How cash and corporate pressure pushed ethanol to the fore | By Tom Philpott | Grist | Main Dish | 06 Dec 2006


Also check out this World May Be Facing Highest Grain Prices in History


See
ADM

Wheat Board

Farmers

ind blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , ,








, , ,