Party news
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This factual account isn’t showing the party in a good light. It’s difficult to get across the message that we want a society without money, when we have assets of £2.6 million and only 157 voters. I don’t think it’s our wealth that’s the problem, it’s our lack of popular support when compared with our wealth. Have we become a party that gets rich achieving nothing?
It’s difficult to get across the message that we want a society without money, when we have assets of £2.6 million and only 157 voters..
And a mere 290 members at the last count.
CPUSA has more assets and they do not advocate for a moneyless society. In a poor neighborhood they have a mansion that they use in order to provide meetings and political classes to their members, and community orientations to the people from the neighborhood. They had a marxist bookstore. Some of their members include them in their wills and living trust, and that house was donated to them
All political parties and organizations need money to survive in a capitalist society, how are they going to pay their bills ? We can not make money from the thin air. None of them receive funds from the state or governments, they depend on their membership, and sometimes they have to run campaigns to collect money from the workers.
To advocate for a post capitalist society without money does not mean that any organization must run their operation without money and without cash reserve, some have used labor union printing shop, but they have also placed lien in their properties
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RCPUSA sometimes they run a campaign to collect 50,000 and 60,000 dollars and they have achieved their goals, and they have a large membership and most of them are young, and they had bookstores in different places, and the bookstores were used to provide political classes to the peoples living in the neighborhood, or other political affairsThere are some leftist parties in the third world who have more members than the SPGB but they cannot print a newspaper, some must incur debts in order to print a paper, some of them have used mimeograph to print their papers, and members must sell papers in the corners to have funds to pay their expenses, but the bourgeoisie political parties had a lot of money in the bank, ( 2.5 millions is a petty cash ) they have cars, trucks, different branches, and social clubs
In the old days they had branches in overseas, and the branches in overseas were financing the headquarters because most of their members were poor workers and poor students
In the old days several organizations were receiving money from the Soviet Union, China and Albania to finance their operations and to support the cadres, but they are not getting money any more, CPCML used to print a daily newspaper and they were sold at the newsstands, and in the third world countries many members went to jail because they were selling newspapers for their organizations, the papers were used as evidences to file criminal charges, and most were poor students or poor workers
https://surveyla.mindmixer.com/ideas/7439/red-house. This is the CPUSA house
https://collections.mcny.org/asset-management/2F3408LYACF. This was the Harlem Headquarter of the CPUSA
https://collections.mcny.org/Collection/Communism-Party-Headquarters—NYC-24UFQE6A98M.html. This is the old
headquarter in mid Manhattan
Pathfinder Bookstore had different stores all over the USA and they belonged to a Trotskyist groupThere was a groups in ChinaTown of Maoists who had a large office and a day care center, and a community center, most of them were women who dedicated their life to the organization and to the community
The CPUSA has a better office on 23rd Street in Manhattan, and they have more resources and many members offer voluntary works for the party, and most of them are retiree or poor workers
There are hundred of community organizations and cultural club in New York and Chicago who were built, founded and financed by leftist groups, and there are two school of Law that were also founded by Marxist Leninists to have public defender and their graduate can not become judges, or magistrate, and some of them prefer to become paralegal to help the community , and they are members of political organizations
At the present time most organizations are losing members, the political fervor of the workers has drastically decreased, and it is very difficult for them to obtain new members, as well, it is difficult for the SPGB/WSM to get new members and sometimes we get one or two and they are abandoned, our anti Leninist stand is one of the main problem to recruit new members, and the second one is our stand regarding reformism and support to governments and pro capitalist candidates.
Actually the figures are not as good (or as bad) as they might seem. We are not just sitting on a large sum of money and doing nothing, as not even the BBC reporter claimed.
For a start, half of the £2.6 million is the notional value of the premises we have owned since 1951. This £1.3 million cannot be spent. In fact owning property costs money, as on maintenance and taxes.
And we don’t do nothing. In fact our spending as on publishing the Socialist Standard, elections, meetings, publicity, etc. is, and has been for a number of years now, more than the income we get from what members pay and income from the sale of pamphlets and subscriptions to the Socialist Standard. This used to be covered from the money we hold in bank accounts.
But when we received a couple of large legacies (normal in an organisation that has been going for so long) we decided to invest some of the money and use the interest to cover our ordinary deficit. This hasn’t yet done so but may well in the next few years with the higher interest rates now being paid. It might even become enough to employ somebody.
I don’t think that article does us harm. Comrade Cox was able to get over that we stand for a stateless world society based on common ownership where money will be redundant. And he neatly dealt with the issue of so-called “ethical” investment by pointing out there is mo such thing.
“This factual account isn’t showing the party in a good light. It’s difficult to get across the message that we want a society without money, when we have assets of £2.6 million and only 157 voters. I don’t think it’s our wealth that’s the problem, it’s our lack of popular support when compared with our wealth. Have we become a party that gets rich achieving nothing?”
That’s the beauty of the Socialist Party, there is no leader to tell you what to do and what not to do. So if any member feels that we are not carrying out enough activity, the solution is quite simple, go off and carry out the kind of activity you think is lacking. If it needs more than one person encourage other members to assist you. That’s really the essence of the socialist case.
I don’t think it is difficult to get the across the message that we want a society without money, when we have assets of any amount. It woudl be a hell of a lot harder to get the message across without any assets. It also shows that as socialists, even within the constricts of capitalism we can democratically manage our resources effectively and appropriately.
As to how it looks, a report ont eh BBC will hit thousands of people, who knows, a few might check out our website, one or two might even look in on this forum. No publicity is bad publicity, as they say.
I also noticed that there is a link in the article with the word campaigns, which goes to the party website. What’s not to like!
I know Cde Cox stated that there is no desire to sell up at Clapham High Street. I personally think we should sell up and buy something that is more suited to our needs and doesn’t require the refurbishment that the current HO needs.
A quick look on the net and I came up with this option, which would leave us £300,000 to the good, if the valuation for Clpaham High Street is correct, and not taking into account the fact that we might be able to get it a bit cheaper:
https://www.loopnet.co.uk/Listing/399-401-High-St-London/27999763/
The BBC is part of the capitalist press, and they are not going to say anything positive about a socialist group, and most of those journalists they do not have a clue of what socialism really is, they just repeat like parrots
Probably this distorting article might be positive for the SPGB because peoples who are reading the articles might look into our websites, our articles and pamphlets.
The Socialist Party is not seating on a rocking chair, with the limited resources that we have we are doing a lot of work, and we have several members working almost full time in the internet and several social media, and they are sending the socialist message to workers living in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Australia, and Europe
We can not grab the workers by the hair and force them to vote for us. I do not think we are getting rich by doing nothing, we are doing a lot of things, and we need money to survive in this capitalist world, and we need new technology to propagate our message and that cost money too
We are going to send our socialist message thru a big combination of locations and social network known as Fediverse/Mastodon.
We must propagate our socialist message thru Groups IO too, most organizations are moving away from this type of platform and they are joining groups io like in the old days of yahoo groups, even more, many organizations are moving away from Facebook and Twitter despite the fact that they are very popular but they do not provide so much freedom and flexibility as open source
We only have 290 members, but I know organizations which only have a few members and they make a lot of noises in the streets but they are not propagating socialism in the same way that we do, and I know about some organizations that had thousands of members and they have vanished from the face of the earth.
The DSA is getting new members and young peoples but they are collaborating with the Democratic Party, and we do not collaborate with any capitalist party and we do not support wars and killings
The SLP of America had more resources and manpower than the SPGB and they lost everything including the office that they had in Palo Alto, and they can not print their monthly newsletter, but we have continued publishing the Socialist Standard every month, and we have members doing research and writing articles.
I think the concept of companion parties is not working any more, we should become one solid group and all members should be part of that organization, we can not be romantic attached to the past, we must move forward, we must adopt an international name and our journal should adopt an international name too
… would leave us £300,000 to the good …
And then what? More propaganda?
Look, there’s no way people are going to choose a society that has not been tried and tested, and which to them appears to be a prescription for cloud cuckoo land.
And just in case you think that by “no way” there’s still a remote chance, there isn’t — none, zilch, nada, rien, nichts, niente, not going to happen.
What if you have £300,000,000 to spend instead of £300,000?
Still nothing!
A quick look on the net and I came up with this option, which would leave us £300,000 to the good, if the valuation for Clpaham High Street is correct, and not taking into account the fact that we might be able to get it a bit cheaper:
https://www.loopnet.co.uk/Listing/399-401-High-St-London/27999763/
…………………………..
That does look quite an attractive option actually. I have never really liked the narrow frontage of HO
And just in case you think that by “no way” there’s still a remote chance, there isn’t — none, zilch, nada, rien, nichts, niente, not going to happen.
What if you have £300,000,000 to spend instead of £300,000?
Still nothing!
…………………………….That’s just a ridiculous thing to say. In any case, why do you care? You never have anything positive to say about the SPGB anyway.
Whoever has used the word reserve does not know what he/she is talking about, or does not know anything about business accounting
In Finance and Banking term, it means cash, or monetary assets for future eventuality, even more, banks put a cash reserve to cover some loans that they have loaned to some borrowers , or what is called bad debt, some banks borrow money from other financial institutions in order to finance infrastructure, and they keep the money in reserve for future eventualities
The SPGb does not have 2.5 im reserve, they are including the market value of a piece of real estate that was purchased for $4,000 .( it is like the term GDP on which they include debts which is wrong ) it might become reserve if the property is sold at the actual market value, and it might go down too, as it happened during 2008 crisis
The real reserve is what the SPGB might have in a bank account, which would be saying I have a reserve of x amount of money in my saving or checking account.
Most socialists and leftist organizations receive money from their members, and some members endorse, or designate a beneficiary in their wills for their own organizations, even more, some members have donated their own house to a socialist organization without having any bank lien, it is nothing new
Some workers ‘own’ a $2 millions home, and they do not own anything, they just own a title or a deed of trust, and they need a salary in order to be able to pay the loan, and to pay property taxes, and insurance, but if they miss a few payments, the acceleration clauses is immediately applied and the bank initiate a process of foreclosure, during the crisis of 2008 some workers lost their homes when they only had a few more payments to be made, but they did not have a job to produce any income
https://finance.cornell.edu/accounting/topics/reserveaccounts
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/what-is-a-reserve-in-accounting
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