alanjjohnstone
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What made ER a " bit of a nuisance" if i can ask?Was it the confusion of his literature being a distraction or was it something more?
At least it offers an opportunity for our candidate to get a letter published in this local paper correcting the mistake and providing a brief history and background to the Great British Socialist Party which the editor cannot really refuse …although he may consider he was actually factually correct…We are British and we are the Socialist Party and we are great !!!
Great opportunity to quote the end of the division between town and countryside at this CPRE hustings…I suggest the candidate or the socialists in the audience swots up on a few appropriate ecology quotes from Marx and Engels…i love the one where they explain that capitalism is so inefficient it can't even use all the shit it produces as fertiliser.
Hmmm…wish we had had the idea first and put our own spin on the images…the Robber Baron…the Big Bad Knight…The Pretender to the Throne….oh, you get the idea of what i mean…too late now, alas…
Our SOYMB blog has many, many many posts on farming and agriculture and has been drawing attention to what is called food sovereignty and agroecology. The bloggers feel the issue is one of importance and relevance for the world socialist movement and have been making sure that the topic is well-covered. This merely one example of what has been discussed
Quote:Food sovereignty is about the right of peoples to define their own food systems. Advocates of food sovereignty put the people who produce, distribute and consume food at the centre of decisions on food systems and policies, rather than the demands of global markets and corporations that have come to dominate the industrial food system.There is now extremely good evidence that small-scale sustainable farming can deliver as much if not more food than large-scale corporate-controlled agriculture. For example, research by the UN showed that switching to agroecological farming methods has increased yields across Africa by 116% and by 128% in East Africa compared to conventional farming.There is also plenty of evidence that the livelihoods of farmers and communities can be improved, and that agroecology can deliver a huge range of other benefits, including reducing the gender gap, creating jobs, improving people’s health, increasing biodiversity, and increasing the resilience of food systems to cope with climate change.http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2015/03/forward-to-nature.htmlUse the blog's search facility and you'll find a rich source of information from a wide diversity of articles posted on it from a variety of authors and organisations.
Want to come around to my overgrown garden some day, Meel?…Happy to share the chores with you…Me watching you doing all the physical hard work, that'll be enough to tire me out
Just to add to this thread, came across this video of Chomsky discussing science and linguistics and evolution…Part 1 …go forward to 20 minutes or so for the start of it. https://zcomm.org/zvideo/971918/Always better to base views on what comes out of the horses mouth rather than defer to the "interpreters" and i found this typical of Chomsky…expressing complex ideas in simple terms that makes the subject interesting to listen to.
Perhaps it was my ineptitude in being precise in definitions but what i was getting at was this brief moment as described thus which i think is what you are getting at
Quote:you cannot carry on socialism with capitalist governmental machinery; that you must transform the government of one class by another into the administration of social affairs; that between capitalist society and Socialist society lies a period of transformation during which one after another of the political forms of to-day will disappear, but the worst features must be lopped off immediately the working class obtains supremacy in the State.http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1930s/1930/no-316-december-1930/parliament-or-soviet-reply-proletarian-usaIt is more fully explained by ALB
Quote:In other words, the transition period is a political form between the capture of political power by the working class within capitalist society and the eventual establishment of socialism, a period during which the working class has replaced the capitalist class as the ruling class, i.e. as the controller of state powerhttp://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2010/02/myth-of-transitional-society.htmlWe wield state-power but do not form a state…i fully understand that some may consider this position a distinction without a difference but it will become much more apparent as it actually manifests itself .
Taking control and using the state to establish socialism is after all just going to be a brief period at the beginning of the revolutionary process. Isn't that our message which we emphasise…and once that is accomplished the state is transformed in such a fashion that it can no longer be described a state.As for the manner of how we organise within socialism, there will be various means of administrating industry and civil society. I happen to believe workers councils will be strongly featured because workers are already effectively organised at the point of production.Without resorting to chapter and verse i have been given to think that if the democratic mandate of a socialist majority in the polls is resisted and the military stays neutral, it will be through industrial action and street protests and mass disobedience campaigns that we enforce democracy and our template would be the fall of Eastern Europe and Russia and several dictatorships like the Shah and Marcos and more recently albeit for the flaws that later developed…the Arab Spring. To maintain the structure and stability of society we will have to resort to various workers council systems and again learning the lessons of the Winnipeg and Seattle city general strikes…and our own 1926 General Strike and its Councils for Action. I am reluctant to surrender any possible potential weapon ..whether it is the vote or the strike or factory occupation …Circumstances will determine practiceOr should we all consider ourselves state-socialists, Vin? Now that would be confusing
Appears very sympathetic sounding but actually when we have "friends" like this , who really needs enemies. His summary against our approach is
Quote:One, because it's a massive distraction from the more pressing task at hand. Two, because its stated aim of making revolution entirely non-violent is a nonsense. And three, because if you want a system of recallable delegates, you should build that system rather than try to graft it onto a state apparatus that you in theory wish to dismantle.One – What is the greater distraction…supporting reformism and expending energy and time into reform campaigns that are acknowledged not to be solutions but in the hope that it may "encourage" consciousness through direct action. Over and over again we are counselled that there are more pressing tasks…but according to SolFed we must re-invent the wheel of work-place organisation and make existing unions and not the capitalist employers as our primary enemy. (surprisingly they have much in common with the Socialist Equality Party's animousity to trade unions)Two – As a syndicalist why does he not take aim at his own tradition. The whole theory of the general strike, otherwise known as the theory of folded arms- was to be a peaceful alternative to insurrection so does he consider his his ideological antecedents to be spouting nonsense? The proponents of industrial unionism certain believe their alternative of using industrial muscle would avoid bloodshed. Three – We have already built a system of recallable delegates…within our own structure as a political party, which is the first step of transferring the principle into the broader electoral process. Too often appreciation of ourselves as a fully democratic party that for over a hundred years has never been properly given the respect it deserves. And over these years we have adapted and not stood still despite the claimed we are a monument. Otherwise, i don't think i would have rejoined. I was going to post these comments on the website, but to be truthful, it wasn't such a long time ago that i engaged in a similar discussion there. But i do take the authors point that the coordination between parlimentarian activity and extra-parliamentarian action can be more fully explored and no doubt will be closer the time. We too have antecedents to refer to for experience of the snags and conflicts that may arise and it is from the relationship with SPC and the OBU. I certainly accept we have a gap in our literature about how we connect and combine inside and outside parliament. We will face the question of how we defend our immediate interests as a class with our aspirations and aims for socialism itself …and it won't be smooth sailing and may well result in repeats of past debates as in the case of the SLP v. SPA, and IWW v. Politics. We should be preparing now for a new synthesis and fusion of our strategy. So far we have limited ourselves to general and very brief remarks about it. Ideas have to be transposed into actual action to become effective. What we have done is not totally excluded one avenue on principle. The pragmatic and supposed practical reasons, IMHO, against political action in concert with industrial and , of course, community action simply have not been demonstrated sufficently to go solely down one road as argued on Libcom.
Strange…my morning perusal of the British press shows that it is Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP dominates the headlines…from a clumsy Daily Telegraph smear to plaudits that she is the new "Queen of the Scots" and the "king-maker"The referendum defeat has not made the nationalists go away but to the dismay of many, it has brought them to a new prominence Back in Glasgow, the discredited Sheridan urges workers to support the SNP and fallen out with SPEW http://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2015/04/tommy-sheridan-shameless-scottish.htmlHe too is studying to be lawyer , like Sturgeon, and i think it is only a matter of time before he takes the next step and joins her politically, after all Jimmy Reid of the UCS sit-in and Communist Party did. On another topic, i thought this podcast on the SSP website was a nice idea we may consider copyinghttp://www.scottishsocialistparty.org/category/news/
Quote:Voters were presented with a wide range of solutions to the malaise, from the cry for the abolition of all landlords by far-left candidate Bill Martin of the Socialist Party of Great Britain to a call for “discouraging people from moving here” by Greg CloughMaybe worth a letter distancing ourselves from the description "far-left" …http://www.islingtontribune.com/news/2015/apr/election-2015-despite-differences-parliamentary-hopefuls-agree-capital-grip-%E2%80%98acute-houDid Bill Martin ever ride with the James Gang?…from his pic i could easily imagine he did.
