alanjjohnstone
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I’m pleased that the efforts to revive the potential of the WSPUS is bearing fruit. I hope that the links to it that I try to place on a number of progressive American websites has also helped a little bit.
If you visit the internet, which i think many of our members do, little extra effort is indeed required to draw attention to our existence. I’m not talking about spamming or trolling but where possible making a brief pertinent comment and adding our links.
50 members is half our active membership in the sense of those actually willing to return a ballot paper. And because they are already engaged, we cannot expect them to contribute even more of their time and energy. It is those members who are content to just be card-carrying members and decline to involve themselves in any activity whatsoever that we must inspire to do something. I’m sure they do but they want to feel that it is productive.
Some suggestions has been offered but they seem to be aimed at creating stronger bonds among members just to keep ourselves as a cohesive organisation rather than offering opportunities to promote the Party to a new audience.
Paddy and Bijou have raised useful ideas but it is getting members out in the streets that counts. I suggest the Party offer the whole street stall in a package to send to branches. The collapsible table, a weather-proof gazebo, some placards and a few vinyl banners, plus a wide selection of our literature, and even a trolley of sorts to transport the material. I know full well local branches can improvise very much cheaper by themselves but they aren’t, are they?
A street stall can be combined with an accompanying social event such as a pub or café but it can also be used for branch outings to various events around the country. We do quite few, Tolpuddle, Levellers, Miners etc, etc…and kudos to those who attend
Wigtown book festival is an example where members from Home Counties will travel hundreds of miles to attend and no doubt indulge in the hospitality of the local licensed hostelries…yet some Scottish members won’t catch a bus (and most are of the age they get that bus free) to go to share a few drinks with comrades that many have not even met before.
Apologies for being a doomsayer again But some things require said and we cannot go on acting under delusions that everything is alright. It is not just climate activists that are talking about a looming existential threat – we also face the same extinction risk.
Not so much a joke but as an irrelevance since even SPGB members, not to mention others in the WSM, do not even bother to visit this site and we receive no contributions from them. David-David’s posts are most welcome as they produce replies.
At times it is only you and me, Marquito, who appear to believe that it can be used to share information and news items. Occasionally there are worthy posts by others when specific questions are asked and these are greatly appreciated. I find them informative.
I have, in my small way, tried to maintain and and to return to update topics so as to provide ammunition for socialists to use as speaking points in their day-to-day interactions. I have tried to provoke discussions on subjects of interest which should be debated.
I have previously highlighted that the forum is no longer fit for purpose. That our Yahoo groups are equally inadequate mediums to express socialist thought.
Without visitors, without participation and with woeful traffic statistics, we must ask if this forum is performing as it should and perhaps something else must be designed.
But it is not so much the forum itself, but the lack of interest by those who very much should be caring about the transmission of socialist ideas and exchanges of views and opinions, even if at times it is only among ourselves. Internal self-criticism, itself, is commendable
J’Accuse my Party comrades for their prevailing political ennui
And no more excuses for this apathy, please. Lets have suggestions instead of how to kick start members out of their malaise. Robbo’s suggestion of 10 minutes a month for action on the internet, has fallen on stony ground.
Either re-animate and resuscitate the SPGB back into meaningful activity or put a stake through the heart of this walking-dead in an act of mercy-killing.
Can’t run from bad news and the doom and gloom implications of climate science
Is this the first hint of the unintended consequences of the climate crisis, the early signs of the disintegration of the nation-state?
Bolsonaro – sensational reporting in the international media “aroused our patriotic sentiments…They even called into question that which we hold as a most sacred value, our sovereignty.”
https://www.france24.com/en/20190924-un-united-nations-amazon-bolsonaro-brazil-humankind
Just speculating.
Sarcasm (and other nuances of speech) doesn’t work well on the internet, does it, as Rod now finds out with Brian taking him seriously. Or is it I who misread the comment?
My power has always been in my right hand and the wrist action, Bijou 😉
Assisted by listening to Hawkwind
I always liked Fear of Freedom by Erich Fromm
and
Listen Little Man by Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich in Sex-Pol describes class consciousness and explains:
“Everything that contradicts the bourgeois order, everything that contains a germ of rebellion, can be regarded as an element of class – consciousness; everything that creates or maintains a bond with the bourgeois order, that supports and reinforces it , is an impediment to class consciousness.”and again
“Against the principle of self-denial preached by political reaction, we must set the principle of happiness and abundance …Any socialist political economist can prove that sufficient wealth exists in the world to provide a happy life for all workers. But we must prove this more thoroughly , more consistently, in greater detail than we generally do”
and again
“Question: If two human beings , A and B , are starving, one of them may accept his fate, refuse to steal, and take to begging or die from hunger, while the other may take the law into his own hands in order to obtain food. A large part of the proletariat, often called the lumpenproletariat, live according to the principles of B. Which of the two types has more elements of class consciousness in him? Stealing is not yet a sign of class consciousness but a brief moment of reflection shows, despite our inner moral resistance, that the man who refuses to submit to law and steals when he is hungry, that’s to say, the man who manifests a will to live , has more energy and fight in him than the one who lies down unprotesting on the butchers slab …we have said that stealing is not yet class consciousness. A brick is not yet a house, but you use bricks to build a house.”
Pathfinders article sought to launch a personal attack on Thunberg – a very cheap shot, in my view.
Has she offered the socialist case. Of course not. The last Swedish socialist group associated with the SPGB disappeared sometime in the 1970s, almost half a century before she was born
But just what political beliefs did the author of Pathfinders hold at the age of 16? If he had a global audience, what would he be telling the world when he was still in school
Are some capitalists going to make money out of environmental destruction and supposed “solutions”. Yes. Is the charge that Thunberg is complicit and culpable? Has she sponsored any “green” businesses? When she discovered a for-profits company tried to use her she withdrew her approval.
Is she naïve. Most likely and so are 99.99% of the population but perhaps she is travelling down the path that will lead her to socialist answers. Far too early to tell and far too early to condemn her as some sort of political puppet.There has been many who have suggested that Greta Thunberg has been co-opted by political figures and even our own article in the latest Socialist Standard implies that she is no longer her own person and is being used but when she is given the platform to deliver her ideas, they aren’t as subservient to the powers that be which some wish her role to be.
“The message is that we have had enough.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/23/greta-thunberg-speech-un-2019-address
You come to us young people for hope. How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing.
“We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is the money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”“You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal.
“The eyes of all future generations, are upon you, And if you choose to fail us. I say, we will never forgive you!”Just to reinforce what Bijou says, we have had some terrific orators within the Party such as Tony Turner, who tried to sway the Party to his particular way of thinking — without success.
We have had Marxist analysts such as Hardcastle, who contributed so much to the theoretical basis of the Party, but when it came to refusing to heed the democracy of the Party, he was expelled along with many other speakers and writers who ignored the will of the majority within the Party.
Our future MPs are according to our rule book to act under the direction of the Party and not as independent political representatives
Rule 27. Candidates elected to a Political office shall be pledged to act on the instructions of their Branches locally, and by the Executive Committee nationally.
(just how that will be enforced is a matter of conjecture)
“…what if a single household, within the collective, disagrees, and wants a green house?”
If it is in Larkhall, Lanarkshire, it will have all its windows smashed by Orange bluenoses. 😐
This forum has over 2000 topics…(probably 1999 begun by myself, but I jest).
Do I believe in a division of labour? Yes. Do I accept the authority of specialists. Yes.
After all isn’t it Greta Thunberg who is just through telling elected politicians to accept the scientist’s findings and produce policies that produce their recommendations.
‘I don’t want you to listen to me, I want you to listen to the scientists,’ she said at a House hearing last Wednesday, ‘I want you to then unite behind the science – and then I want you to take real action.’
But does that mean I accept the tyranny of the technocrats? Of course not and I think such is a false dichotomy.
I acknowledge Bakunin’s contribution on this issue.
“A scientific body to which had been confided the government of society would soon end by devoting itself no longer to science at all, but to quite another affair; and that affair, as in the case of all established powers, would be its own eternal perpetuation by rendering the society confided to its care ever more stupid and consequently more in need of its government and direction…
…Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.”
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/various/authrty.htm
Similarly when it comes to Engels On Authority he refers to a ship’s captain,
“But the necessity of authority, and of imperious authority at that, will nowhere be found more evident than on board a ship on the high seas. There, in time of danger, the lives of all depend on the instantaneous and absolute obedience of all to the will of one.”
I am very much reminded of the pirates creed to how a captain is elected. I refer you to one of my Socialist Standard articles.
But just as apt is how a war chief of the American Indian is deposed. They stop following him and go home. But for you such a vote by the feet is
“alanjjohnstone wrote: “The freedom will be that the student can stop attending the lessons and lectures…”
Ah, the old bourgeois myth about ‘individual freedom’!”Marx himself recognized the need for a unifying specialist – the orchestra conductor.
“…A single violin player is his own conductor; an orchestra requires a separate one….”
I’ve tried to argue that there is no one-size-fit-all in the way we will administer socialist society. The world has too many diverse expressions of the popular will to declare one version the template for all. Workers councils was one version in one period of time in one particular region. Syndicalists and Industrial Unionists develop their own forms of industrial democracy. I actually believe that when the social revolution springs forth, social democracy will be exercised by the letting a thousand flowers bloom and we will choose the best suited for whatever situation or circumstance we are seeking to administer. Some choices will be mistakes and require rectifying. Some options will need adapted and adjusted a bit more. Who will decide those. The people it directly affects – the people actually on the ground.
As Robbo pointed out in reply to me, I ambiguously presented society in the abstract. I actually seek to think in more concrete specific concepts. Just as I have often referred you to the practice of democracy inherent within the SPGB and how it expresses itself on this forum. We have a party poll to control and instruct the Party, but we delegate certain functions such as a forum moderator to carry out the will of the Party. We can remove him or her at any time of our choosing. Equally he can resign the duty whenever he or she wishes to.
“Why is it that almost everyone in the SPGB, and its supporters, seem incapable of having a political discussion, without resorting to personal abuse?”
Are you including my good self in that charge, LBird? 😈
But you do realise that this exchange has been going on and on in numerous threads and countless posts for now…oh, how many years is it now…
Frustration does sometimes get the better of individuals when they believe they are hitting their head against a brick wall.
There must be a time to agree to disagree and shift the exchanges to topics where we do hold consensus views.
I’ve been surprised by the silence of Vandana Shiva who at one time was a very outspoken environmentalist. I genuinely thought something was the matter. But here is now her latest article
We Need Biodiversity-Based Agriculture to Solve the Climate Crisis
“…Our agriculture system is not primarily a food system, it is an industrial system, and it is not sustainable…
Not all those involved appear as naïve as some who are permitting themselves to be manipulated by political parties who jump on the bandwagon.
Some when given a platform speak the truth.
For instance, at the UN Youth Climate Action Summit one youngster said
“Dear world leaders, I ask you,” said one young activist. “What is the purpose of having this summit if two days from now you are letting fossil fuel corporations and CEOs of corporations take the stage along with member nations and allowing them to influence climate policy when they are the ones that created this crisis? You claim you want to listen to youth solutions but this feels more like a photo op,” she added.
