The Guardian really knows how to push those hot buttons, doesn’t it?
The dead zones of hypercapitalism – in pictures
It’s pictures of trade happening, of ports and containers and lorries and…..
That is it’s fucking trade, markets, not sodding capitalism.
Why in buggery did Stalin build the White Sea canal if socialism doesn’t have trade?
Please note: all those ports, containers and lorries are neoliberal ports containers and lorries. Also in a tweet yesterday Tony Yates asked if some of the cranes on construction sites in London might not be neoliberal cranes. A very pertinent question, I thought.
At the risk of an early Godwin, would the Soviet gulags and Nazi concentration camps be pictures of dead hyper-socialism ?
I assume then that the Guardian only carries advertisements from independent organic farmers and mom & pop shops, and is not financed by “hypercapitalism.”.
All in all just a neo-Liberal brick in the wall.
Presumably these Guardian wanks want an end to International trade?. A circumstance that would quickly put paid to their nice lifestyles.
There’s a story which by now I suppose has reached apocryphal status in which some senior apparatchik under splotch-head was given a tour round New Covent Garden Market early in the morning while streams of articulated lorries were driving in and out carrying the bountiful produce all over the country. How did the government provide all these lorries? says the commie. No, no, comes the reply, they all belong to the supermarkets and retail distributors. Yes, OK, but how did the government provide the supermarkets with all these lorries?
I find the sight of the container park in a large port like Rotterdam or Felixstowe to be an awe-inspiring thing. All that order arising spontaneously, with a great deal of the regulation being generated endogenously. No wonder it gives Grauniad types the willies.
BiCR,
“I find the sight of the container park in a large port like Rotterdam or Felixstowe to be an awe-inspiring thing. All that order arising spontaneously, with a great deal of the regulation being generated endogenously. No wonder it gives Grauniad types the willies.”
It’s a few years since I was there but if nothing has changed Hong Kong makes Rotterdam look like a corner shop when it comes to shuffling containers around.
I now live in Port Chalmers which has a fairly small container dock.It is amazing to watch the ships being handled and the speed at which the containers are moved. When I moved here I was able to track my belongings as they were transported from the UK. All developed in the last 30 years or so and not a Government committee involved at all.
Not so apocryphal. It was to one of Maggie’s advisers and he was asked “who is in charge of bread supply for London?” and the questioner simply could not grok the idea that no one was.
“Why in buggery did Stalin build the White Sea canal if socialism doesn’t have trade?”
He did it in order to kill dissenters. The whole canal thing was economically not useful; it was too shallow for transport vessels. Purportedly it was also built for military purposes, but it was also too shallow for any militarily significant ships and has never been used for such.
But the forced labour camps used in building, those where important: they were the testing grounds for GULAG. There the Soviets conducted human experiments like “if I split these men into three groups and give each group different bread rations; then I see how quickly each of them is killed”.
The Nazis visited these camps to learn the trade that they then utilized in their own camps. The Nazi camps were then liberated by war; the Soviet camps were not.
Stalin’s canal works killed so many people that there was approximately one dead prisoner per 1.8 meters of constructed canal. The dead were often simply buried in the timber-built banks of the canal. You can think of it as one giant grave, where the condemned are buried, head next to the next one’s toes, along the canal.
And then those that would not starve in time were taken to places like Sandarmokh, to have a bullet in the back of the head and a shallow grave in the forest.
I visited the canal (and other places in the area) last month, here are some pictures from the trip:
https://picasaweb.google.com/100879296407342756006/Russia#
And in 1942 the canal looked like this:
https://picasaweb.google.com/100879296407342756006/WartimePictures#6196523946945582114
Not much of a canal for trade, really…
Lately I’ve been reading a lot about the German Soviet war, what we call WWII.
The Soviets produced about double the amount of good tanks than the Nazi’s did. In the beginning of the Great Patriotic War the Nazi’s were better at shooting and eliminating tanks in actual combat than the Soviets, but that changed as the war dragged on.
So, trade and production of stuff is not just the forte of capitalism.
Not a single picture of the tar sands? Just airports and sights that the average person would look at and think “progress” Sure you don’t want any of them out side your house, but they aren’t. Getting really sick of the childish filth who attack everything that make our society what it is while benefiting from every single one of those things.
Should imagine these scenes look so dead because they are almost devoid of human figures.
You’re right: its difficult to tell if they’re socialist or capitalist but why should you be able to?
I cannot see how you can have markets without capitalism: you would have no price competition and everything would be the same price.Not much of a market although everything might be uniformly cheaper .Look at the property market which enrols people in debt slavery or indentured servitude yet sellers compete to put prices up.Corbyn is on to this and thousands of Priced out young people also conned into debt for university may one day hold the right-wing con artists to account.
DBC reed – the price of houses is high because of green belt planning policy. There is no free market in land.
No free market in land. Hmm. Up to a point, Lord Copper: here’s a polder I made earlier, and a skyscraper I built last week,
“The Soviets produced about double the amount of good tanks than the Nazi’s did.”
Though the Soviets made those tanks largely from sheet steel imported from America in the lend-lease scheme.
“So, trade and production of stuff is not just the forte of capitalism”
Sure, not, though that particular examplae mostly shows that capitalism isn’t all about trade, it may also be about donations for what is considered a charitable cause (because that’s what the lend-lease was).
@Sm
Property prices also go up in relatively underpopulated areas like Australia and in nice villages in the English countryside. Henry George saw the problem at work in California when the population was in the hundreds of thousands. Give yourself a break and read some Henry George: it must be confusing to go round thinking that filling in the London Green Belt will put house prices down in Bermondsey.
Mind you creating some entirely new land in polders in the Thames Estuary is feasible (see EL)
pjt Great to see the American push to take over British and European markets post-war as entirely charitable.Enoch Powell saw the US as the ultimate enemy and thought we should ally with Russia.Orwell was right : there were more than two sides in the war.
“So, trade and production of stuff is not just the forte of capitalism”
Wow! tanks. Don’t forget the plane and small arms production.
The Soviets cleverly or luckily achieved the optimum of lots of a few simple models rather than a more limited output of dozens of variants. To their credit. Pity they couldn’t do the same with actual tractor production.
Prior to the era of “white heat of technology” Wilson, Progressives admired mass production. It was a sign of progress. Today progressives admire cottage industries and loath the alternatives. In that they share more with Stalin’s opponent.
DBC
I presumed he meant “planning chitties”.
Ie, if no planning restrictions, then (outside of high demand areas with little land, like cities) there is no material uplift from “agricultural land value” to “value of land with planning”. And which usually comprises the majority of any “excess” in terms of “price” over “total land & construction cost” in the UK.
Hence, allow building freely on the green belt (and either side of it), and very quickly there is less excess demand over supply – which immediately puts downward pressure on prices, and which will impact (to greater or lesser extent, depending on the city) all the way in towards the city centres.
A trillion or two (or more?) of negative equity in the UK, a lot of it in the south, but that’s a different issue!
Actually, that’s exactly what would happen, to “some extent”.
Let me correct that – a trillion or two of “reduced value”, not necessarily negative equity, as clearly a good percentage of people don’t have large mortgages.