alanjjohnstone
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
This press release on intellectual property and Marx was actually belated, drawn up not by the Media Committee nor the EC but requested from Cde Tristan Miller, who understands copyright laws more than the average member and submitted to the EC for approval. (i stand to be corrected on this).I think we may have struck lucky by not being caught up in a log-jam of earlier comments from every tom dick and harry group and our statement stood out as unique in its position (even if some will say it is a continuance of our legalistic Small Party of Good Boys image !!) Surely such statements should be featured on the front page of our website and the link given to it in the press statement which will indeed raise our profile online. Socialist Courier blog has had over 300 page views of the statement, over 60 from the Independent's link to it. SOYMB has had 120 hits on its Statement page and an unknown number who would have scrolled down to it. The Media and the Internet Committees should coordinate on this in future. Not too complicated i would imagine. The SOYMB often tries to provide the party view on currents events such as Gaza by re-doing past articles and performs reasonably well but i am biased. http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2014/07/gaza-suffers-again.htmlBut it is limited and suffers from not carrying the authority (or originality) of the Party as an official statement would do and which would be circulated through the comprehensive emailing list of the Media Committee (they have been very successful in collating an admirable collection of contacts) .We still got a lot to do but it is refreshing that we can witness benefits so quickly.
I have mellowed.If ALB, YMS and DJP say we can cherry-pick from the book to support our arguments and not suffer being tarnished by association with Piketty's or his advocates' reform proposals then so be it. I await the outcome and hope to witness the fruits.Even i have occasionally resorted to the current Pope Francis' cautionary sermons against particular expressions of capitalism to bolster our case. So why not use Piketty as supporting evidence. Wht not name-drop when the occasion is appropriate. If the Devil has the best tunes, i'm happy to hum along …as long as they are used effectively to show the present anti-social nature of any type of capitalist, regardless of any past progressive historical role they may have once had.
Stephanie Flanders take on the bookhttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/17/capital-twenty-first-century-thomas-piketty-review
Quote:Like Miliband, Piketty sees a clear difference between the wealth creators and the asset strippers – between the fat cat "rentier" capital that devours the future and the more socially useful capital of the entrepreneur. But his own broad definition of capital doesn't really help us draw that kind of distinction. It's all thrown in together, along with all of our houses, and everything else with a financial value that can be bought or sold. That's a pity because if there's one thing that policymakers around the world are looking for it's a way to channel a bit more money into productive investment – and a bit less into house prices and stocks and shares.Industrial barons gooooooood…lords of finance baaaaaaaaaaaad
Apart from letters from myself and another in th latest issue of WW, there is a couple on the contunuing Scottish Independence referendum debate that i think makes interesting reading since they overlap with our own position in their fundamentals (but of course not identical)http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1019/letters/
Quote:there are no instances of struggles for national liberation within the last 70 years that have advanced the struggle for socialism. On the contrary, they have retarded or actively destroyed it.Firt the book now we have The Spirit Level – The Moviehttp://thespiritleveldocumentary.com/Any ideas from anybody for making a short movie of Piketty's book that may help promote the party case?
In recent years we have had Trotskyist academics like Hillel Ticktin "improving" their own theory by re-emphasising the socialist ideal. I''d place a lot of caveats on that, however, but it does signal a change. Same with one of the platfoms of Left Unity, there was a large overlap in ideas with our own principles, something that we acknowledged. Its only with groups that possess practically identical vision of socialism with us that the parliament becomes an issue. Often it is from misconceptions of what they think we say and to be truthful different members of the party often give priority to different aspects of the case. Our pamphlet i think did a lot to reveal that we are much more open-minded than previously supposed. Our majority is not the 50% plus 1 but a politically effective majority …which need not be numerical majority. As pointed out …how could it be when the party began when women did not have the vote and about a third of men were also not eligible to vote. Sure the left bring a lot of their own historical baggage along but so do we since their views are a reaction to Lenin and Stalin and ours is to the SDF (although our burden is a lot lighter).They have this gulf between political action now for "bread and butter" aims…and the movement to achieve the ultimate goal I think in my experience the big stopper is our and their approach to reforms and immediate demands and palliative campaigns. I think we could improve our communication on it and make our message clearer. We do not object to particular reform campaigns, we do not stop our members from engaging politically in them, but as a party we do not do so for some very important and valid reasons and it is not because they make capitalism stronger as some of our critics accuse us of saying (even if some actually do, but that's not the point we oppose them) The Left themselves are a bit confused themselves on what is a valid reform campaign and what is a transition and unachievable demand.Many will now agree with us that reforms are not the stepping stones towards socialism as the Labour Party types tried to argue in the past but suggest that they have replaced the trade unions as the "schools for socialism" where workers learn to organise themselves in struggle (as if we need taught that these days.) Then they are the left who are more in tune with the charity/NGO type of reform demand. At times we can see that Oxfam and Children in Need growing more and more political than churchy with radical measures that go beyond the left at times. I think it was the late Pieter Lawrence who suggested we did not relate enough to those invaluable organisations. We sometimes think our case for socialism is so easy to comprehend and so obvious, we forget that it needs explained over and over again , the i dotted and the t crossed because for many who have been deluded into wrong paths and being told you are wrong is painful and sometimes like grief and bereavement it can be a long experience to recover out of and as said earlier some people/groups have a nostalgic longing for the past too or should i say false memory syndrome for it.Sorry for the ramble but i think most socialists still genuinely try to understand the process of social change and sometimes we have a feeling that our answers are not always 100% correct…perhaps only 99.9%
Also in The Independent
Quote:4. Lovely. Socialist Party statement condemns the "repugnant" idea of intellectual property; going on to defend Laurence & Wishart's copyright in an annotated collection of Marx's works.http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-daily-catchup-farewell-twobrains-welby-on-assisted-dying-and-intellectual-property-is-theft-9606126.htmlWhich provided a link to Socialist Courier blog publication of the statement with nearly 60 hits resulting from it.What's good about these mentions is that it carries extra info on the party.
One of the main proponents of banks create money out of thin air, Ellen Brown, appears to have recanted…or at leat in this article.
Quote:The fractional reserve banking scheme is a form of shell game, which depends on “liquidity” borrowed at very low interest from other banks or the money market.http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/16/did-the-other-shoe-just-drop/As a member of the Californian Green Party she has a menu of financial reforms rather than simply create credit at the stroke of a pen.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/07/scotland-independence-referendum-2014799520299309.htmlFor those not up-to-date, the nationalists are using the socialist slogan made popular by William Morris and the Sociaist League magazine " Common Weal" even claiming the Scottish derivation when i am sure it is much wider usage in the past. (That could be one debunking that our literary experts can expose)
Quote:"Whatever unfolds, the demand for "wealth shared in common" will remain the benchmark by which the Scottish government will be held to its promise of democracy by the people, for the people."Sadly this demand is translated into the usual mish-mash of what they take to be radical reformism. A four-day week and a citizens' income, to be paid for and supported by higher taxes on land, the rich and cutting defence spending and nuclear weapons. A national investment bank capitalised at 5bn British pounds.I'll take it as a piece of journalistic creativity when the article claims
Quote:No political party in Britain could gather 600 people together on a weekend in the silly season to "celebrate" a policy paper. Yet this kind of turnout is now the norm for the independence movement, who are holding meetings, rallies and festivals up and down the country on every day of the week.But there is a lot of propaganda opportunities that we should be taking. As others said about Occupy and LU it has created space for us to discuss politics with people who usually remain distanced.
Perhaps i am in a minority but i do have issues with political dynasties. We have Staw Jnr in waiting , Blair Jnr looking for a safe seat….Just what do the Milibands offer in real experience of workers lives? Immediately employed into the world of politics. Ed's only foray outside politics, if you could call it that, was as a researcher for the TV current affairs show "A week in politics"David's only "outside" career was as a political analyst for an NGO, then a simlar position for a think tank. David Miliband is one of six members of the Global Advisory Board of Macro Advisory Partners which advises multinational corporations, sovereign wealth funds, investors, and governments. In January 2012, David Miliband joined the Board of Directors of Mauritius based private equity group, Indus Basin Holdings. IBH operates Rice Partners in the Punjab region of Pakistan. It specialises in managing the end-to-end supply chain for major global users of rice. According to the Financial Times, "Mr Miliband’s jobs include advisory roles with VantagePoint Capital Partners, a Californian group; Oxford Analytica, a UK advisory company. As a speaker for hire he is available for 20,000 quid. – your typical Labour man, eh?Yeah, i have got a thing about those "professional" politicians who have never dirted their hands with any sort of real work and never had to count the pennies after each week or month to pay the bills. And i plead guilty if considering the educational privileges of those who are part of the ruling class to be inverted snobbery, so be it. Yeah , both Milibands can fuck off back to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, for all i care. Fuck the bastards. As for the original thread. i agree that we should not pass the sins of the father on to the sons…unless or until they deserve it on their own merit. Fuck William and Harry not when they were kids but what they have become now, the life they accepted and did not reject.
Quote:No forward slash is required in the inital bracketed 'quote' and at the end of the quoted text the forward slash precedes 'quote' within the brackets.i think they can be a useful way of exploring particular aspects of the socialist case yet inherently flawed. Of course, they are fantasies but so is the idea of socialism right now!Nobody wants to buy a pig in a poke and there are generalised and more tangible assumptions that can be made in advance to fit particular and specific situations which most people envisage. I think this example of a proposal is not very instructive nor illuminating and full of contradictions even if it does include some views that we can relate to. It is rather naive and does not quite understand that socialism is about doing away with the exchange economy.
I like the idea of 1 and 2. But perhaps go further with a special issue…Include the underconsumptionist faulty public spending theories too. As you say, why should some of those guys be fish that got away …Maybe call it "Inequality Beyond the Economists!" A meeting entitles "Have You Read Piketty?" …hmm???..Not going to get much of an audience, are we?"Why You Should Read Piketty" is more apt for yourself and a rhetorical "Why Should You Read Piketty?" for us doubters. A friendly debate with plenty of good humour…Your good self Versus LBirdI think we could easily update the online version. Perhaps a sort of errata slip coud be inserted into our remaining hard-copy stock.
It could turn out the bouregois glue is highly flammable, and we might be able to hurl molotov porpoises back at them…[/quote]Piketty has provided the actual historic data to say there is inequality built into capitalism – that we already knew (and those who deny it are still denying it) and that this disparity will widen in the future, something many already suspected, i would appreciate some outlines on specific ways that Piketty can be further used as a tool in our propaganda to abolish capitalism rather than reduce extreme inequality.Will we be publishing a pamphlet on the subject, a series of articles, public meetings? I have no problem with the promising situation that economic theory is once again being discussed in the more popular mediums. There has been various publicity events in the past couple of yers since the recession hit that has created the space for further discourse. Here's hoping Piketty has started debate in the pubs and clubs and i am proved wrong. But if it has, what is planned for our own contribution to ensure the correct conclusions are being drawn from Piketty? What is the content of those molotovs? Cod liver oil?
