why is Althusser here 😭

For gods sake, please read the flair.

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Having desperately clung onto power for months, Keir Starmer is finally going. But his likely successor, Andy Burnham, offers no real solutions. Rather than sowing illusions in this careerist, the left should fight for a clear revolutionary alternative.
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Andy Burnham’s victory over Reform in last week’s Makerfield by-election has started an avalanche in British politics, giving Keir Starmer the final push needed for him to resign as Labour leader and prime minister.

The scale of Burnham’s win put him in a very strong position personally. With the wind in his sails, The Man Who Beat Reform is now marching south to Westminster to seize the crown.

Last Friday, following the Makerfield result, Starmer was still signalling his intention to battle on. But the pressure over the weekend was too great.
With the threat of mass resignations from his cabinet, the PM was forced to announce his imminent departure from Downing Street this morning.

Those hoping for a smooth transition are likely to get their way. Rather than a bloody leadership contest, a simple ‘coronation’ seems to be on the cards, with potential challengers like Wes Streeting stepping aside.
Burnham could be moving into Number 10 as early as next month.

But far from calming matters, this changing of the guard is only going to light the fuse on a new, even more explosive period, as the crisis of British capitalism intensifies.

Time's Up

For months, until today, Starmer has clung onto power like a limpet on a rock.

This Knight of the Realm, possibly the most hated prime minister on record, had been burying his head in the sand. He was clearly a dead man walking for some time, yet was determined to keep stumbling on. Like all doomed men, he was hoping for a miracle to save him.

https://preview.redd.it/vdziv820qebh1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=aa63d6978f8cf1ef958a5a70aed3f3d129faeb65

But everything was stacked against him. A YouGov poll in May found that Labour members would back Burnham by a 59-37 margin. More than 100 Labour MPs, meanwhile, a quarter of the parliamentary party, had already called on Keir Starmer to resign in response to the Mandelson-Epstein affair.

Even Donald Trump was reading Starmer his last rites, saying in a social media post yesterday that the UK premier was finished.

https://preview.redd.it/eb1rz2e5qebh1.png?width=747&format=png&auto=webp&s=1668c799fb93a7ed91a0a173f4ff1873312baa51

Starmer’s dying days as prime minister – holed up in his Chequers retreat, desperately scrambling for support – had all the hallmarks of the satirical film The Death of Stalin.

If he didn’t stand down, the Labour leader would have faced a rebellion at his next cabinet meeting, scheduled for tomorrow. In the end, therefore, the limpet was forced to give up.

full article here, as usual

at 1:57 he talks about mamdani abolishing commodity form

A commodity is defined as something with use value and exchange value.

How tf would you abolish this form without the abolition of capital? even under mamdani's socialism the products are still sold for exchange so the commodity form still exists.

To abolish commodity form is to abolish capital itself

>The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an ‘immense accumulation of commodities,’ its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity