Tobacco advertising to end in UK

[Henry C.K. Liu]

The tobacco industry, a state monopoly, is very powerful in China.  China is
the biggest market for international tobaco. On this issue, China is among the
most backward nation in the world, although smoking has recently been banned in
public places in major cities.   The reason for this backwardness can be traced
to the use of tabacco by veteran revolutionaries to help them withstand the
hardship of their early struggles underground.  And after the revolution, by
the time tobacco smoking is universally recognized as generally not benign, the
leadership was unable to deal objectively with the problem.  When elders do,
youth follows.  Instead of bogus human rights issues, it would be more
constructive for progressives of the world to pressure China to face its
tobbacco curse.

Henry C.K. Liu

Chris Burford wrote:


> The UK government is to issue regulations today which will end tobacco
> advertising on hoardings and in magazines by the end of the year. This is 2
> years earlier than the EU deadline.
>
> There are embarrassments for Blair in this, because there will be
> extensions for certain sports including motor racing. Ecclestone, a racing
> capitalist, gave New Labour 1 million pounds.
>
> But hypocrisy is hypocrisy, and cannot be eliminated from politics, only
> made bare.  What do we expect?
>
> The good news is that this is further progress for what Marx called "social
> production controlled by social foresight".
>
> Perhaps I will quote the wider passage from his inaugural address to the
> First International 1964.
>
> A word of caution: in this context "middle class" means the capitalist
> class, not, as today, the educated layer of the working class who are
> "class conscious" in the negative sense of the term.
>
> "The struggle about the legal restriction of the hours of labour raged the
> more fiercely since, apart from frightened avarice, it told indeed upon the
> great contest between the blind rule of supply and demand laws which form
> the political economy of the middle class, and social production controlled
> by social foresight, which from the political economy of the working class.
> Hence the Ten Hours' Bill was not only a great practical success; it was
> the victory of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the
> working class."
>
> Chris Burford
>
> London