alanjjohnstone
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"On leaderless parties I'd be interested in seeing how they operate in practice." Look no further than here. The history of the SPGB demonstrates that no matter how popular a member maybe as a speaker, how erudite he or she may be as a writer, theorist or Marxist scholar, the party has always remained controlled by its members and no clique has dominated it. The evidence is in the numerous party conferences and polls that have gone against these "leaders" ideas and proposals whenever a controversy arises. Perhaps that may be a weakness of the party…purposefully knocking members off their pedestals when they appear to have any party or public prominence. "the trick is to ensure that the leadership … are politically developed" This is one of the purposes of the knowledge test , so that once signed up as a member, a newcomer has the same input as any long-serving member. No probationary period, no hierarchy, just the same one vote on every question. We certainly cannot effectively field election candidates but we are capable of the token gesture. http://www.socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2013/10/vote-for-revolution.html
"I saw is a man genuinely angry and frustrated "He is an actor by profession so just how genuine an emotion did you actually see. I can't be sure, not knowing the man personally (also, an ex-drug addict and confessed sex-addict is particularly skilled at manipulation of emotions, i would also add)."articulate bloke"Depends on what you call articulate. I found his attempts at humour such as his remarks about Paxman's beard a distraction from the more impoerant things he had to say.I am not saying humour does not have a place in propaganda but some of his behaviour does give others cause to describe him as a clown. I disliked Ben Elton for his Maggie Thatcher routines since instead of treating her serious he and others reduce her to a joke figure. I have also found the other Brand -Jo- a much funnier person.My issue is that we should not dwell too much on a media personality. We should not try and base our activity on hanging to the coat-tails of Brand, hoping some of his fame will spill over to ourselves like some pop-star groupie. We have some more pressing immediate matters and that is how we manage to convey our ideas more effectively via means that we can access and control and apply ourselves.Celebrity endorsement is fickle. We would be associated with any future fall from grace by Brand. Have we forgot theTommy Sheridan Effect on the SSP?
The MediaLens website is devoted to exposing the BBC and the media's false liberalism. http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/10/launchpad-for-a-revolution/This article supports the argument that the Brand/Paxman interview was not as "revolutionary" as some wish it to be and may have an underlying ulterior purpose."…When someone with interesting things to say is granted a high-profile media platform, it is wise to listen to what is being said and ask why they have been given such a platform. Comedian and actor Russell Brand’s 10-minute interview by Jeremy Paxman on BBC’s Newsnight last week was given considerable advance publicity and generated enormous reaction on social media and in the press, just as those media gatekeepers who selected Brand to appear would have wished……He [Brand]effectively contributed to the illusion that the BBC is a level platform for reasoned, vigorous and wide-ranging debate on the most serious issues affecting people and planet. This matters because, as we have noted before, the most effective propaganda systems provide opportunities for some dissent while the overwhelming pattern of media coverage strongly supports state-corporate aims……It is understandable that there was much praise for Russell Brand’s Newsnight interview and New Statesman essay. To a large extent, this signifies the desperation of people to hear any challenge to the power-protecting propaganda that we are force-fed every day. But two crucial factors here are that Brand was selected to appear by media gatekeepers; and that media institutions, notably the BBC, escaped serious scrutiny. If Brand was a serious threat to the broadcaster’s projected image as a beacon of impartiality, he would not have been chosen. Noam Chomsky has a cautionary note on high-profile exposure in the corporate media: ‘If I started getting public media exposure’, he once said, ‘I’d think I were doing something wrong. Why should any system of power offer opportunities to people who are trying to undermine it? That would be crazy.’Given all that, how likely is it that the BBC would really provide a launchpad for a revolution?"
Both hold a religious belief in God so neither will be admitted to membership. Perhaps like Mosley his highness's politics shifted left-wards and then right-wards again , Adam. I'm pretty convinced he was a Nazi.
Have we got a short video of Danny to circulate on the web…or did another procrastination mean no…Perhaps we can re-edit the last one and post that. Should we also be proactive and issue an invite to the Brixton Blog people to the HO to meet the oldest existing socialist party in Britain and its candidate. Just takes a email to ask them and make the offer. But all the best and good luck, and again appreciation to all the volunteers that will be delivering the leaflets
"What he doesn't take into account is that the trustees of pensions and other funds are legally obliged to maximise profits and so are under more pressure to do this than capitalist firms, in fact to behave more capitalistically than them." Years and years ago i worked with an ex- USDAW (shopworkers) EC member, who was also on the pensions board as a trustee. He explained how it was practically legally impossible for the pension fund to devest from apartheid South African investments. They would be liable not just for civil action but criminal charges, IIRC As an aside he told me visiting the USDAW members at Halls sausage factory in Aberdeen was the union meeting he most feared…a bunch of men, steeled to the sight of blood and gore, carrying razor sharped knives. Charles can join the ranks of the philanhropists like the Buffets, the Soros and Gates of the world. Nice sentiments yet I doubt very much if he is willing to kick away the foundations of the capitalist system and let his palace and duchy fall. Class interests trumps all. There will be some however who would challenge a purely materialist explanation of the civil war in Syria, based on a drought and urban migration. Wasn't the original rising more a "educated, middle class" Arab Spring and rising food prices not a particulr great issue as a yesr or so earlier in Egypt…Smoke and mirrors, perhaps…..Hey , thats the cause…unfixable environmental destruction….not Saudi money and politics. But i may do a blog on our revolutionary prince (had a draft based on his Time interview but binned it) along with the new poverty critic pope, some day soon….The Prince and the Pauper Pope …that could be a title
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/29/italy-immigrants-treviso-honorary-citizens Treviso is changing, albeit slowly. Racism exists, he says, but so does a vibrant civil society that over the years has succeeded in welcoming immigrants despite the hostile tone of local politicians. "I understand that some people are scared but, slowly but surely, we are getting to know one another and people are realising that they don't have to be scared," he says. "You can see things are changing – slowly, but they are changing." Anna Caterina Cabino, the council member responsible for the honorary citizenship proposal, says: "The governing class managed to shore itself up for such a long time because it campaigned on fear, on xenophobia, on the defence of presumed local interests, on law and order, on the identification of an enemy … but this does not reflect social reality."
I see the Dutch co-operative bank Rabobank has been fined a billion for its Libor role, guilty of acting as any other banking institution.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24730242Background to Rabobank.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabobank I really do find it difficult to comprehend that those who support all those schemes to make banks co-ops or nationalise them or giving them a more democratic structure, cannot do a very simple historical check and see how past examples of it all evolve and develop until they are indistinguishable from so-called "conventional" banks. It is either their naivity but since many proponents are highly qualified academics it therefore must be their deviousness to promote a very different agenda.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24653643 "For the most part, people who hurt… they come from hurt. It is a cycle." Thomas says she tries to do something to break down racial stereotypes every day. No grand gestures. "The biggest thing you can do is just be kind to another human being. It can come down to eye contact, or a smile. It doesn't have to be a huge monumental act."
I note that a video by Positive Money is already on their blog. http://www.post-crasheconomics.com/blog/ One reason i think the money-cranks are so popular is that they turned out some very watchable videos – (hint, hint)
We are not alone!Apparently, Respect lacks any leader, just like ourselves…or so it seems on the surface http://www.theguardian.com/global/the-northerner/2013/oct/28/georgegalloway-respect-party About Galloway being named leader Respect explains "Every party is required by the E[lectoral] C[ommission] to have a 'leader', whether they like it or not."
Well done, Kohara. I did follow up with a blog submission. So far , no reply but a refusal doesn't offend. There appears to be an achievable opportunity opening up in the field of economics that we should try and get our foot in the door. The Guardian carries another story of how the orthodox academic economists are being questioned. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/28/mainstream-economics-denial-world-changed But once more, there is the risk that the revolutionary alternatives will be submerged by proponents of "radical" bourgeois economics as what took place with Occupy. Where there is a vacuum, others will fill it. We already have Marxist Economic Study Education Notes which could be updated with a few additions to it and then one of our university-centred members could get the data-base for e-mailing it to every economics lecturer and department in the country. This isn't spamming but reaching out to a targeted audience. It's about once more imposing our mark on an area of our expertise and making available our unique analyses. Any responses to such a email-out would then be saved and each new appropriate economics article in future Standards be sent to them, as a matter of course. A relatively easy task to maintain doing and again can be done by a internet-connected isolated, secluded, house-bound member in spare time once the data-base is available. If it works for economics then it can be expanded to include other university disciplines.
Where England and Wales have faith schools, Scotland has segregated schools. If i recollect my reading of history this arrangement was part of a deal made with John Wheatley and the Catholic Church/Irish Community. The Irish immigrants were not Labour Party supporters but voted Liberal for Ireland's home rule. Wheatley, a leading light in Glasgow's Catholic Socialist Society, to wean the Irish catholic vote away from the Liberals apparently promised a future Labour Government would introduce state-funded but Catholic church-controlled schools. Also to be noted that the worse extremes of religious bigotry is not Glasgow but Lanarkshire and West Lothian and Ayrshire. The roots was in the introduction of cheaper Irish workers for the mines and factories in those regions by the bosses and then the exercise of divide and rule. The estabishment of the paramilitary Orange Lodge who operated like the KKK ensured segregation was maintained. In Northern Ireland there has been a number of non-sectarian workers struggles and each one faced the wrath of the bosses determined to have the catholic/protestant division to continue. Let not the poor man hate the richNor rich on poor look downBut each join each true Orange OrderFor God and the Crown.2006- In a defiant show of opposition to sectarianism, striking trade unionists marched from Belfast’s Protestant heartland, the Shankill Road, to the Catholic Falls Road . Postal workers were immensely proud of this demonstration which was applauded by working-class members of both communities. Protestant workers walked off the job at in January 2002 when Catholic postman was murdered by pro-British Loyalists.
When i went to wiki to check on something on another thread, lo and behold, George Sorel had a few things to say about science….and i believe he has not yet been quoted. Sorel's attack on science is neither general nor peacemeal. Rather, as is clear from the quotations below, the 'science' he attacks is clearly of the idealized, mathematical reductionist or 'modernist' kind.Science is not reality[edit]He dismissed science as "a system of idealised entities: atoms, electric charges, mass, energy and the like – fictions compounded out of observed uniformities… deliberately adapted to mathematical treatment that enable men to identify some of the furniture of the universe, and to predict and… control parts of it." [1; 301] He regarded science more as "an achievement of the creative imagination, not an accurate reproduction of the structure of reality, not a map, still less a picture, of what there was. Outside of this set of formulas, of imaginary entities and mathematical relationships in terms of which the system was constructed, there was ‘natural’ nature – the real thing…" [1; 302] He regarded such a view as "an odious insult to human dignity, a mockery of the proper ends of men", [1; 300] and ultimately constructed by "fanatical pedants", [1; 303] out of "abstractions into which men escape to avoid facing the chaos of reality." [1; 302]Science is not nature[edit]As far as Sorel was concerned, "nature is not a perfect machine, nor an exquisite organism, nor a rational system." [1; 302] He rejected the view that "the methods of natural science can explain and explain away ideas and values…or explain human conduct in mechanistic or biological terms, as the…blinkered adherents of la petite science believe." [1; 310] He also maintained that the categories we impose upon the world, "alter what we call reality…they do not establish timeless truths as the positivists maintained", [1; 302] and to "confuse our own constructions with eternal laws or divine decrees is one of the most fatal delusions of men." [1; 303] It is "ideological patter… bureaucracy, la petite science… the Tree of Knowledge has killed the Tree of Life… human life [has been reduced] to rules that seem to be based on objective truths." [1; 303] Such to Sorel, is the appalling arrogance of science, a vast deceit of the imagination, a view that conspires to "stifle the sense of common humanity and destroy human dignity." [1; 304]Science is not a recipe[edit]Science, he maintained, "is not a ‘mill’ into which you can drop any problem facing you, and which yields solutions", [1; 311] that are automatically true and authentic. Yet, this is precisely how too many people seem to regard it.To Sorel, that is way "too much of a conceptual, ideological construction", [1; 312] smothering our perception of truth through the "stifling oppression of remorselessly tidy rational organisation." [1; 321] For Sorel, the inevitable "consequence of the modern scientific movement and the application of scientific categories and methods to the behaviour of men", [1; 323] is an outburst of interest in irrational forces, religions, social unrest, criminality and deviance – resulting directly from an overzealous and monistic obsession with scientific rationalism.And what science confers, "a moral grandeur, bureaucratic organisation of human lives in the light of…la petite science, positivist application of quasi-scientific rules to society – all this Sorel despised and hated", [1; 328] as so much self-delusion and nonsense that generates no good and nothing of lasting value.
