alanjjohnstone
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Obituary should have, of course, read "obituary" as it was an observation not actual fact. My comment (first placed on SPOPEN previously) was originally in response to the March EC minutes where an Australian comrade acknowledged the SPA was no longer a functioning party, a rather belated recognition of its moribund state for some years now, imho. The source is the online website already cited, Reason in Revolt Debating why we have not been successful in our efforts to acquire more adherents may indeed require some ugly home truths (this also applies to the present condition of the WSM, too). You are it appears more privy to the going ons of the SPA when it was more alive. Perhaps you can say what sort of outlet there was for internal debate since i do not know if there was regular discussions and conferences being held because of as you say the membership was scattered. Perhaps the article is a contribution for what was intended as an internal debate and hence its publication. "Socialism is deterministic". Not sure if i agree with that statement. I always believed to change the capitalist system requires human agency, the material requirement already being in existence right now, its only consciousness lacking and that sadly has some subjective factors to overcome, such as nationalism, religion and other such stuff.There is a well-justified question to ask why capitalism's demise is taking so long to come about. I don't subscribe to the theory that it is the fault of our organisations failings. Larger powers and influences are at play in history.But i do accept that our membership could be greater, our presence more obvious, and we bear some responsibility for that condition. Early members were indeed optimistic in their views on the proximity of achieving socialism and the size of the WSM role within the process. Time however has changed the prominence of both these for many members.
Fracking for North Sea coal (now called gasification. Remove the word – remove the problems!) How can they resist such potential profits? Sunday Times article but as it is behind a paywall, so via Media Lenshttp://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1396258593.html
A switch of emphasis in this video , i think. Nations are no longer using the entral money to increase the money-supply for its operation but borrowing on the commercial bank market to fund its services. This is what is causing the increase of money creation. In French with subtitles https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=P8fDLyXXUxM
The Hitler analogies don't ever stop …first Crimea, then its all of Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, on to the three Balti states and finally into Finland! Putin wants it all!! Doesn't the Independent care about the credibility of its sources anymore. This is no longer the same newspaper i switched to in 2003 as being anti-war. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/vladimir-putin-wants-to-regain-finland-for-russia-adviser-says-9224273.html
Your additional material is appreciated, pgb. We should always try to be objective and honest about our failings and failuresI have pointed out on a discussion list, the SPA wrote its own obituary in 1948.‘Can we comfort ourselves with the knowledge that we have always pointed out that ‘Nationalisation’ merely means a change of masters? Can we pride ourselves on the fact that we have always insisted that a movement for Socialism must be built up on knowledge and self reliance, not on reformist activities and blind leadership? Can we take pride in the fact that we analysed the Russian Revolution from its very beginning as a bourgeois revolution, and pointed out that it must lead to state capitalism? Can we beat our chests and remind you that from the beginning seen that the Bolshevists (‘professional revolutionaries’ – control by an elite – no free discussion) coupled with the backwardness of Russia must lead to ruthless dictatorship? We cannot do any of these things, for just as consistently as we have been right, we have to the same degree unsuccessful. [their emphasis]We are in a position today where a hundred years after the ‘Manifesto’ there is not yet even the beginning of a real mass movement for Socialism as we conceive it. We continue to speak, and write. But the response as compared with the mass parties, is nil. We are beating our heads against a brickwall of illusions, myths and apathy in the hope that the wall will fall someday. Today, we can do nothing at all but continue with the same arguments which have proved singularly unsuccessful. Everything else – the idea of barricades, or infiltration, or lovely sounding manifestoes – is madness and self deception. If socialist propaganda during the last 50 years has had no success the first thing to do would be to find out why." the article goes on to list 6 possible reasons for their ineffectiveness. It ends pessimistically by stating if the SPA may be wrong , the mass parties and the labour movement in general have been on the wrong track too and so the consequence is more serious – " instead of breaking their chains, the workers will have rivetted them every firmer – by their own actions"http://www.reasoninrevolt.net.au/objects/pdf/d0483.pdf
More likely it is in the USA where there is a campaign going on to legalise those undocumented workers who the State deem to be illegal and who Obama wishes to also legitimise with n amnesty with plenty of caveats, of course, since he himself has deported more people than the last several Republican presidents as well as excluding those undocumented workers from his healthcare scheme.
Capitalism “distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment; they alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they deform the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital” Marx, Capital (my emphasis) He had one conversation where a man asked him who would clean the shoes under this new communist system, and Marx angrily snapped, “You should!” Nothing wrong with moral outrage at the system. So fuck capitalism and fuck the capitalist class. Fuck borders and frontiers. Fuck passports, visas and work permits. Fuck immigration laws. No striker is a criminal despite what the law may declare as illegal so fuck the bosses and fuck the employers. fuck the courts and fuck the judges.
Hmm?? Everything you say may be technically correct, TWC, but i'm beginning to think as Steve Colburn said on the other thread that you risk alienating your audience with your use of language and theoretical arguments. [who cares if its ilegal or illegal – the meaning is clear and it is demeaning to someone whose first language is probably not English and has also most likely been deprived of an education.]What's the use of being right if no-one can be bothered to listen?We do often demand legal reforms…democratic rights to assemble and protest, to have free speech, to write and publish what we wish, the legal right to organise in unions and to strike. Without these pre-requisites our capacity to struggle against capital or campaign for socialism is severely curtailed.Passports, visas, work permits, all relative recent inventions of capitalism, give the bosses greater powers over migrant workers than they have over native workers. Curbing mobility of workers is a means of social control. Borders trap workers. I would argue that the demand for no borders exposes the centrality of this control to capitalist social relations that are dependnt on exploitation and expropriation. The right of private property is to exclude others free access – to entry – while the anti nationalism of no borders re-shapes how we look upon the world that is not compatible with capitalism. We show that it "their" county, and not part of "our world". Part of our case is that borders territorialise us, make us subjects and economic assets to a specific capitalist class and set of employers.No Borders is our case against the nationalist view is that we are "rooted" to a particular part of the land, destined to be there, even.
i am led to believe that the World Socialist Party of India evolved independently of the SPGB before it found its affinity with ourselves, splitting from the mainstream Communist Party, naming its first magazine after Luxemburg's Rote Fahne . I maybe wrong and stand to be corrected in the details.The Socialist Party of Canada i also believe formed a few months after the SPGB founding from a merging of parties that pre-date the SPGB so it too can be described as an independent creation and not an import by SPGBers.
Due to Janet providing the link, our video Kids Stuff is headlining feature of the Countercurrents website home pagehttp://www.countercurrents.org/shannon270314.htm
Ken Loach promoting Left Unity and their conference tomorrow. Shame we didn't organise a lit stall and leaflets for it. Here's hoping Manchester branch have organised something. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/27/ken-loach-labour-failed-left-new-party
"I never managed, a single person throughout my working career, on socialist principle.." My reason is that nobody ever listened to what i told them Now it's still the same as a socialist …still no-one listens to what i say.
http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/blogs/searchlight-blog/liberty-it-isn%E2%80%99t I won't bother linking to the blog that called Liberty GB zionist and pro-homosexuality.
