alanjjohnstone
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Further to what i was saying and also why the media are providing him with such a wide-ranging platform, Russel Brand is no threat whatsoever without a movement. Offering him an access to the newspapers and television is a luxury and indulgence capitalism can well afford with the comforting side-effect of making it appear liberal and democratic. If there does become a prairie-fire of revolutionary organisation around Brand, be rest assured, the corporate media have lined up a lot more than the likes of Johnny Rotten Lyndon to take Brand down.
SP was being sarcastic about the millions, referring to a discussion he has engaged in on another thread with certain other party members. .I think we can take it for granted tat one of the "crimes" of Leninism and Trotskyism has been the legacy of confusion over Russia with socialism, and it suited the pro-capitalist intellectuals to reinforce that misrepresentation. I think it still lingers even for the younger generation. Isn't Orwell's Animal Farm still on the school curriculum and Koesler's Darkness at Noon, to continue the misinterpretations.But be intereting to know the figures. They say the idea of socialism has a rising approval rating in the USA with the young.
I was reminded by another website of this comment by Chomsky.Chomsky in an interview witth David Barsamian said four years ago that “there is no real left now” in the U.S… “If you are just counting heads,” Chomsky elaborated, “there are probably more people involved than in the 1960s, but they…don’t coalesce into a movement that can really do things.” And another line from Chomsky: “One commonly hears that carping critics complain about what is wrong, but do not present solutions. There is an accurate translation for that charge: ‘they present solutions and I don’t like them.’” I think quite honestly, the prospect of Brand getting aboard with ourselves is fantasy…not until we have that movement with solutions he agrees with. We are neither that movement and i doubt very much if our principles would convince him of expressing anything more than perhaps sympathy to our ideas. Our objective is all too rather vague for him to offer up as a viable vision, and our means to achieve it possess too many nuances for him to issue as media sound-bites.These ar our problems that we need to address, not Brand's, therefore i refrain from criticising him too much.On another thread ALB described quoting Gramsci as pretentious but i will commit that crime, again picking up something from another website.“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” He rephrased it “This crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”Dark shadows are already looming and a divided and disorganised movement will be all too easily defeated. (Doom and Gloom Johnstone, as they called me). What we require is inspiration to restore confidence. But at time i think when we witness such things as Brand's ability to express hope, all the various recent struggles from Zapatista's, Occupy, Rojava, the construction of spaces where we can raise the arguments of long forgotten or ignored people…Debs, Bookchin and Pannekoek, to name just a few and merge their ideas with our own case for socialism and the future. To go beyond mere protest and to begin to build. We need to offer feasible alternatives that for all their flaws serve as an example of what we are trying to strive towards…workers' self-organisation. If we ourselves keep offering nagativity, then that is what we will receive in return. It doesn't mean not being critical but it does mean offering that criticism comradely. Highlighting the positive, while correcting the weaknesss, and that may mean participating, not simply as individuals but as a party. The reality is that wherever there is resistance we are ceding ground to the reformists. We saw it with Occupy, there lofty aims reduced to currency crankism and one issue campaigns. No pat answers from myself. These are questions and problems that have to be tackled and solved collectively. And we will make mistakes…To quote Luxemburg: "Social Democracy becomes the haven of all discontented elements in our society and thus of the entire people…But socialists must always know how to subordinate the anguish, rancor, and hope of this motley aggregation to the supreme goal of the working class. The Social Democracy must enclose the tumult of the nonproletarian protestants against existing society within bounds of the revolutionary action of the proletariat. It must assimilate the elements that come to it." and to paraphrase "the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest [political party]"We are hopelessly small and our sympathiser from the US is clutching at straws instead of wondering why Brand seems so alone. (He actually reminds me of Oscar Wilde)My thought for today
Quote:No-one wants to work in an unhappy environment and socialism by its nature gives everyone power over their actions and decisions in this regard. Not only will people not produce anything in an 'unhappy' way but the consumers would never choose to consume a product that was created under such situations.I think this expresses the reason why i think we will switch eventually to vegetarianism in a socialist society (perhaps not totally vegan but getting close to it)Who will want to work in an abattoir, slaughtering animals? Who would wish such a thing on another person? Perhaps there will be some small scale DIY butchery in some local communities for the occasional local meat-feast but nothing on the scale of the industrialised system of dismemberment that at the moment prevails. Those who persist in being flesh-eaters will have to take the responsibility of rearing the animals and doing the task of killing themselves. It won't be a matter of enforcement of a vegetarian diet, simply that work will be voluntary and i do not foresee too many volunteers for that sort of job. Gradually the culture of flesh-eating will fade away. (I myself remember as a youngster that chicken was reserved for once a year, at Xmas…where i lived turkey was never on the menu, much less a christmas goose. Our 'daily' meat was mostly adulterated with non-meat fillers.)
The collapse Jones warns Scottish Labour about begins to set in. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-29765415
For those who would not have read the Scottsh tabloid, the Daily Record's Sunday Mail , this article by Jones on the Scottish Labour Party will be of interest.http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/owen-jones-scottish-labour-face-4463712
Quote:They face an existential crisis. Greece and Spain provide examples of how traditional social- democratic parties – when they turn on their own supporters – collapse and are surpassed by more radical rivals.Whatever happens, the tradition of working people in the UK uniting against their common enemies – today, bankers, tax dodgers and poverty-pay firms stripping workers of rights and security – must surely be strengthened.It is up to Scottish Labour to decide whether they will be part of that, or whether the party of Keir Hardie and Jennie Lee face a long, painful period of terminal decline.DJP, i was specifically referring to Parecon and other similar models who retain prices and offer the reason that it is for determining externalities and criticise moneyless free access system. What Parecon call indicative pricing,…" meaning that they strive to indicate the various impacts of one or another choice. Markets ignore the effects beyond the immediate market exchange, and in fact there’s a name for these outside effects: externalities. They are clearly external — outside — the immediate exchange, and markets therefore ignore them…The greater the negative impact of each component, the higher the component price and the overall price.""Parecon is designed to assign "prices" to goods and services by finding convergence between supply and demand and assessing externalities in a direct democratic fashion…Parecon solves the problem of assigning prices to externalities by allowing the community to assess how much the externalities impact them. This assessment is then included in the prices of the given goods and services."http://www.wsm.ie/c/economy-revolution-pareconAnd this from the horses mouthhttp://zcomm.org/wp-content/uploads/zbooks/www/books/pareconv/Chapter8.htm
Quote:prices are “indicative” during the participatory planning process in the sense that they represent the best current estimates of final relative valuations. As the process unfolds these estimates become steadily more accurate. Indicative prices in a parecon are also flexible in the sense that qualitative information about the actual conditions of labor and implications of consuming items provides important additional guidance. We do not use quantitative prices alone, and the mechanism of arriving at and refining quantitative prices has checks and balances. Indicative prices (measuring social opportunity costs) … we need not only set quantitative prices but also continually socially reset them in light of changing qualitative information about work lives and consumption activity, the burden of distributing information in a participatory allocation procedure is considerably greater than in a non-participatory economy which simply disregards such matters. Not only must a participatory economy generate and revise accurate quantitative measures of social costs and benefits in light of changing conditions, it must also communicate substantial qualitative information about the conditions of other people.Quote:Productive decisions in socialism would not be made by isolated "consumers" choosing products as the appear at the end of the production process.I thought this was indeed Robin Cox's point…that we will judge what to produce from stock-levels on the shelf, what stays and what leaves and at what frequency and all added up gives us a social demand to meet. This is fed back into the system of production. What Pareconistas have said is that would not be a responsible way of quantifying the social costs. While we argue that cost benefit analysis would serve but this article raises the possibility that a mere bar-code could offer a solution (this where i might have it wrong)The article says the consumer can have a way of looking at the amount of labour time…for sure not all the social necessary labour time, but more than enough of the collective labour to reflect whether the tin of sardines should be chosen than say the tin of anchovies.
I'm very happy to declare i personally know more than many workers and a lot less than other workers. Politically i am more aware and more active than many other workers, not in simply promoting another social system but engaging in the present one via trade unionism (or i did before i retired but i didn't retire from the world, only work). And often my concern is my own personal interests. It is that they overlap with other's personal interests and become group interest, identified by certain common traits, and so they become class interests.Some will be curious why i have frequently posted on migrants, asylum seekers, immigration and nationalism on the blogs i contribute to. Easily asnwered. They effect me one way or another directly personally. I share common cause with other victims of visa law and border controls. They have become collective concerns for me and others …workers' interests. And again i plead guilty to having a fuller awareness of the position than many other workers who claim to know better than me and declare they are anti-immigrant, anti-migrant, anti-refugee, and want Fortress Britain, or if they are "really" progressive…Fortress Europe. Does it make me arrogant or elitist to challenge the majority view and try to educate (persuade) them they are indeed wrong-minded?Too often material conditions are raised as objection to a freer mobility of peoples..over-supply of workers, more competition for employment – less wages, less benefits and worsening contracts. Often these are mistaken criticisms but even when true, there are other material conditions of greater import…solidarity against our rulers, irrespective of our own nationality or the employer's. Pannekoek writes about this concerning a Belgium sympathy strike somewhere or other …we sometimes sacrifice short-term personal gain for a more fundamental and powerful purpose but we all can recall the remarks of many co-workers during the 80s miners strike when it was suggested other industries come out in support of them…as the miners themselves (and my own union branch) did to show support for the nurses. We have to win a battle of ideas and Rod raises the point that i ahve done …how do we transform this knowledge into actual practice. I posted on another thread an articl by Mickey Z specifically because he tries to address the question…what is the use of awareness/consciousness/theory…without action to actually apply it practically.You already should have seen that this is a question we in the SPGB debate and discuss and many argue we still have not the answer and have proposed trying a different approach…but which is not too radical a change, granted…we do consider that we have a communication problem in conveying our vision and aspirations to fellow workers. Rod asks..have you had any more success….i think we know what your reply would be…Neither you or ourselves are shepherds looking for lost sheep to acquire a flock to lead…we all agree on the basic premise…workers themselves need to liberate themselves…How they will? That is the Holy Grail we seek because our future party function and our structure is determined by that question. Today all i can advise is a very impotent – "we just have to wait and see"…and keep on hoping we might be right and the vast majority workers are currently wrong. YMS puts it on this thread…at least what we do isn't going to constitute any great or lasting damage to the workers/socialist movement, if we are wrong. The legacy left by the Leninists cannot make that same claimThat is my political position, as i express it today…tomorrow is another day and my personal interests will have shifted and so will reflect my workers class interests differently or with a a different emphasis. Whats that Buddhist saying …we are never standing in the same river as it changes as it flows pass us…or some thing like that…
Ah, i see it a bit clearer now. My trouble is i take metaphors too literally.When workers select what dots (various material conditions) to join up, they determine the image which can be socialism…or just as easily fascism…then – reality- material conditions – without ideas (ideology) can be our enemy as well as our friend. We cannot rely on capitalism being its own grave-digger.But isn't this what at least i have argued and i think the Party does, too…class struggle on its own, unaccompanied by the objective, socialism, can and usually does lead workers down the wrong path, to wrong destinations. Our role is that since we claim to possess a map (and some call us elitist because of that) we, as party, place the sign-posts for what path our fellow workers should take. And again if what i am saying is close to what this really means again we have argued that fellow socialists who are not in the SPGB but who offer what they consider short-cuts…the SLP/IWW with their industrial unions…anarchist/left communists with their various explanations of putting action before ideas and expecting the action to produce the ideas (i maybe guilty of misrepresentation here)Which returns us back to the practicalities of politics and the need for education (or the fancy word consciousness) to reach correct conclusions …to seek out the appropriate dots to join up. Which again takes us back to the validity of knowledge…out of the myriad of dots presented…how many are needed to create the image (ALB's point that there is not too many required) and where they are situated has to be selected…and that is ideologically driven which has alwaays been your point from the Piketty thread. But again i just might be demonstrating that you can cast pearls of wisdom but some of us have mental blockages that either cannot absorb what you are saying …or adapt them to our already preconceived ideas – our existing ideology…I'm feel i'm getting out of my depth again. Surely there is a time and place to learn…we acquire our knowledge in phases, not all at once, but each morsel helps in the here and now to improve our actual conditions as wage slaves and is another step further onwards on our path to socialism…bits and pieces of theory are like mile-stones to show how far how practice has taken us…Damn, i'm getting lost by my own metaphors now….
Well it is very different and much more brief than wiki…said i would have to look up the meaninghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EpistemologyBut can i ask a very stupid question…because it is all kind of dotty to me….(don't tell me you weren't expecting that pun… )
Quote:Marx in effect came up with the idea of reality being a dot-to-dot book, but that the dots were unnumbered…Where did he know where to place the dots unless he already had some a priori (idealist) or a posteriori (materialist) view of what he wanted to depict on his page?They may be unnumbered but they are not random, are they? That's what printed newspaper pictures and computer pixel pictures are…just dots…, not numbered but positioned.Didn't Marx use the dots so we saw the image his way…?
Again for those interested in claims and counter claims, Libcom has this long thread on the development of PKKhttp://libcom.org/forums/middle-east/pkk-political-evolution-17082012
Quote:I’ve argued both that ‘workers need to understand epistemology’ (which ALB and alanjjohnstone seem to disagree with me)I don't even know what the word means. I'll have to look it up. I do argue that workers require knowledge in matters more than simply the expediency of socialism and presently in argument with someone who insists homeopathy can stop ebola …and if it comes to a vote, i think they might win and so their truth become the truth, their knowledge the true knowledge…but i won't stop saying they are wrong and by not using evidence-based science (much of it empirical studies) what they are advocating is dangerous and harmful to society…it is shameless primativism.
Quote:Let's hear your attempt to explain all this to workersI've said this in the past about this whole debate and all the related ones. I keep looking for suggestions of a practical nature…ie political ideas to implement …alas…it remains within the realms of the philosopher interpreting the world, rather than changing the world.Reminds me of Rosa Leitchenstein and her dialectics bugbear…interesting in small doses…but not important enough to make a career out of.
Quote:I believe the Japanese pure communists were distinctive in their actual views, they took on board ideas received from abroad, but they wouldn't have listened to them (or adapted them) if they didn't fit with their needs and their apprehensions of their cconditions.Fraid you'll have to educate me on the topic of Japanese pure communist movement with a link or two. I confess ignorance about them.
Quote:I'm afraid you have to wake up to the fact that millions of workers have read our propaganda, heard our message, and rejected it. Even if they have not specifically read our literature, they are aware of the critiques of the market, and usually reject them and accept market ideas.Millions? …i'm not a maths person but taking each months circulation of the Standard as 10,000 over a hundred years and we may reach a million but of course they are not all new readers, are they?..Add to this public meetings …say 75 yrs of them twice a week with an audience of 100…or even a 1000…still hard stretched to get millions hearing the message. Of course i do accept for all accounts we were punching above our weight.But even so to say most workers are aware of rational constructive critiques of the market is also pushing the mark.I agree our alternative vision is rejected but because of the dominance of other narratives…blame the migrants…blame Bill Gates…Part of the socialist task is to ensure that our version of reality and the truth is clearly heard and it isn't…we are out-shouted by a myriad of other influences on workers' thoughts, some hostile to socialism, some misrepresenting socialism, some offering different paths to socialism.
For those who are still interested in what may and may not be going on in Rojava, i found this article on Libcom and the accompanying comments a good read even though it too is short on details but still raises questions for the anarchists (the proposed parliamentary/council dual structure) and ourselves (when the Bookchin Institute of Social Ecology questions the genuine grassroots origins)http://libcom.org/blog/rojava-anarcho-syndicalist-perspective-18102014
