Tiny Tips (2023)

The Tiny Tips column from the August 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Klimt’s Lady with a Fan, which became the most expensive work of art sold in Europe. The portrait of an anonymous woman, also known as Dame mit Fächer, fetched £85.3 million from a Hong Kong collector at Sotheby’s auction house in London" (tinyurl.com/279ubrrk).

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"Mecca pilgrimages are a major source of income for Saudi Arabia, which is embarking on an ambitious plan to overhaul its largely oil-dependent economy. The hajj and year-round umrah rituals generate an estimated $12 billion annually" (tinyurl.com/4cem98ej).

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"The most tantalizing feature of the ancient Indus Valley remains is what they appear to lack: any trace of a ruling class or managerial elite. This defies the longtime theoretical assumption that any complex society must have stratified social relations: that collective action, urbanization, and economic specialization only develop in a very unequal culture that takes direction from the top, and that all social trajectories evolve toward a common and universal outcome, the state. Yet, here was a stable, prosperous civilization that appeared to remain that way for centuries without a state, without priest-kings or merchant oligarchs, and without a rigid caste system or warrior class. How did they manage it?" (tinyurl.com/2ewf2run).

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"Decades of social mobility research has come to the same conclusion: we are born into an economic caste system and our future success is largely determined by our parents’ income and by the nature of the neighbourhoods in which we grow up. Race is not the determining social factor in individual success: it is, at best, a poor proxy for the real causes. Privilege is very real. But it’s based on class, not race" (tinyurl.com/4sr9cudz).

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"The state that absurdly claims descent from the ideas of Marx and Engels anachronistically boasts of 969 billionaires, putting even the epicentre of capitalism in the shade (691 billionaires in the US)… Workers’ democracy was never part of the agenda under Mao or any of his successors in the new People’s Republic. The post-1949 regime would evolve into a state-capitalist formation, paying lip service to Marxism but primarily committed to making China a self-sufficient state that could ultimately compete with the other great powers" (tinyurl.com/mr24kzye).

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‘The Russian Revolution’ is something of a misnomer as, strictly speaking, there were two such eruptions in 1917: a genuine, spontaneous revolution in February, and the planned coup d’etat by the Bolsheviks in October that founded the Soviet state… It was Lenin, not Stalin, who founded the Cheka (the secret police), who first extorted grain from starving peasants and insisted that revolutions could only be made by firing squads. The machinery of repression and mass murder was in place by the time he died in 1924. All Stalin had to do was use it" (tinyurl.com/yc3dkb4b).

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"Zelensky has banned opposition political parties

He arrested political opponents

He banned all unfriendly media

He shut down Orthodox churches

And now there will be no Presidential election next year

At what point we call him what he is?

A dictator (tinyurl.com/2t469msb)."