Farage cashes in on Labour’s neoliberal delusionNIGEL FARAGE today parked his tanks on the territory Labour had already conceded when it opted to continue the Tory two-child limit on child benefit and when it removed pensioners’ universal winter fuel allowance. Long a reactionary and demagogic critic of the so-called “benefit culture” and an active mimic of the narrative so actively promoted by the monopoly media and the Tories that castigates claimants as “scroungers,” the Reform UK leader has, as is his wont, performed a policy switch. His shameless rationalisation claims the volte face is “not because we support a benefits culture, but because we believe for lower-paid workers, this actually makes having children just a little bit easier for them. It’s not a silver bullet. It doesn’t solve all of those problems, but it helps them.” He is cashing in on a gift Westminster Labour gave him when it deployed Rachel Reeves’s “fiscal rule” to make the poorest and most vulnerable pay the price for an economy skewed in favour of the rich. Labour’s maladroit signalling that these benefit cuts may now be revised shows the weakness of the original justification made for them.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/farage-cashes-labours-neoliberal-delusion Estonian state strips Russian minority of voting rights – no to national division! Before this amendment, non-Estonian citizens aged over 16 living in Estonia on a permanent residence permit had the right to vote in local elections, although not in parliamentary or EU elections. As of 2024, there were over 161,000 citizens from non-EU states residing in Estonia, out of which around 70,000 were Russian citizens and around 60,000 had no specified citizenship. The amendment will mean the loss of all voting rights for 11.85 percent of the population immediately. Another 4.6 percent will lose these rights after the upcoming elections, as residents holding ‘grey passports’ – those without specific citizenship of any country – will be allowed to vote one last time this autumn. Estonia is home to around 300,000 ethnic Russians, and many more who are not ethnically Russian but who speak Russian as their mother tongue. This is primarily due to Estonia having been a part of the USSR, as workers migrated freely between the Soviet republics. The Baltic Soviet republics were rapidly industrialised after the Second World War, with workers coming from other parts of the Soviet Union to work in the new factories, power plants, etc. After the collapse of the USSR, a number of these workers and their families emigrated back to Russia, to other ex-Soviet countries, or to western Europe. But many stayed, having spent most of their lives in the Baltics and considering it their home. Lithuania was the only Baltic country that granted citizenship to everyone residing within its borders in 1991. In Estonia and Latvia, only those who were citizens before 1940 when the ‘Soviet and Nazi occupations’ began, as well as their descendants, automatically became citizens of the newly ‘independent’ countries. Everyone else either received Russian citizenship – as Russia offered passports to any former USSR citizen upon request – or became essentially stateless, with an option of becoming a citizen by naturalisation at a later date.
https://marxist.com/estonian-state-strips-russian-minority-of-voting-rights-no-to-national-division-2.htm J. V. Stalin: Dialectical and Historical MaterialismDialectical materialism is the world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party. It is called dialectical materialism because its approach to the phenomena of nature, its method of studying and apprehending them, is dialectical, while its interpretation of the phenomena of nature, its conception of these phenomena, its theory, is materialistic. Historical materialism is the extension of the principles of dialectical materialism to the study of social life, an application of the principles of dialectical materialism to the phenomena of the life of society, to the study of society and of its history. When describing their dialectical method, Marx and Engels usually refer to Hegel as the philosopher who formulated the main features of dialectics. This, however, does not mean that the dialectics of Marx and Engels is identical with the dialectics of Hegel. As a matter of fact, Marx and Engels took from the Hegelian dialectics only its "rational kernel," casting aside its Hegelian idealistic shell, and developed dialectics further so as to lend it a modern scientific form. "My dialectic method," says Marx, "is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, … the process of thinking which, under the name of 'the Idea,' he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos (creator) of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of 'the Idea.' With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind and translated into forms of thought." (Marx, Afterword to the Second German Edition of Volume I of Capital.) When describing their materialism, Marx and Engels usually refer to Feuerbach as the philosopher who restored materialism to its rights. This, however, does not mean that the materialism of Marx and Engels is identical with Feuerbach's materialism. As a matter of fact, Marx and Engels took from Feuerbach's materialism its "inner kernel," developed it into a scientific-philosophical theory of materialism and cast aside its idealistic and religious-ethical encumbrances. We know that Feuerbach, although he was fundamentally a materialist, objected to the name materialism. Engels more than once declared that "in spite of" the materialist "foundation," Feuerbach "remained… bound by the traditional idealist fetters," and that "the real idealism of Feuerbach becomes evident as soon as we come to his philosophy of religion and ethics." (Marx and Engels, Vol. XIV, pp. 652-54.) Dialectics comes from the Greek dialego, to discourse, to debate. In ancient times dialectics was the art of arriving at the truth by disclosing the contradictions in the argument of an opponent and overcoming these contradictions. There were philosophers in ancient times who believed that the disclosure of contradictions in thought and the clash of opposite opinions was the best method of arriving at the truth. This dialectical method of thought, later extended to the phenomena of nature, developed into the dialectical method of apprehending nature, which regards the phenomena of nature as being in constant movement and undergoing constant change, and the development of nature as the result of the development of the contradictions in nature, as the result of the interaction of opposed forces in nature. In its essence, dialectics is the direct opposite of metaphysics.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm