FOREST COMMENT

  This is still a crucial question we need to think about.  'My own view sits between the second and third positions. Given what we know about the limited net surplus actually squeezed from agriculture and the scale of human loss, a softer, more balanced socialist strategy looks economically plausible and morally preferable. A reformed NEP with hard investment targets could have delivered comparable industrial capacity by the early 1940s, with fewer long-term distortions and a very different distribution of gains. But plausibility on paper isn’t the same as political feasibility in 1928–32. Information was thin; the leadership’s worldview was siege-minded, which was hardly irrational given the collapse of collective-security efforts after 1933 and, ultimately, the 1941 German invasion; and incentives inside the party-state pushed toward command solutions. From that vantage point, the crash path felt “inevitable,” even if it wasn’t in a strict economic sense. The late-1980s deb...

  Roger Boyd outlines the impact of restrictions on oil supplies. Despite Trumps bravado - the USA is much more vulnerable than Trump says. 'As the last of the pre-war Gulf deliveries have ended, the draw on the US reserves of oil and especially oil products will intensify. At the same time, the US has a relatively fixed oil refining capacity in the short and medium term, so as regions such as Europe and Asia become more and more desperate for oil products they may bid away supply from domestic US consumers. US jet fuel supplies are already near critical levels (with the Us having a limited jet fuel import dependency), diesel stocks fell by 4.5 mb in the most recent week to 103.6 mb, and gasoline stocks fell by 6.1 mb to 222 mb (with a critical level which will drive price escalation seen as 210 mb). The result may be rapidly escalating gasoline, diesel and jet fuel prices, and possible shortages, during the peak US summer domestic travel months; political poison for the US adminis...

 

  Warwick Powell looks at how anti-fascist social advance can be secured through Parliamentary Democracy? We have been here before... 'The ghosts of the 1930s return, but they return to a world where the stage is crowded with new actors who remember colonialism and intend to write their own futures. Whether the Western left can marshal a meaningful anti-fascist politics based on a defence of liberal parliamentarism without the material legitimacy it has squandered — and without falling into the very authoritarian traps it claims to oppose — remains the open question of this terrifying start to the 21st century......... An anti-fascist politics is needed. But, an anti-fascist politics cannot be viably created if the aim is to somehow return to a  status quo ante  within the parameters of existing economic settlements, parliamentary institutions and prevailing coalitions of political constituencies. The rise of fascism is precisely against the institutions of the  stat...