ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
The 3000 leaflets for distribution in the Herne Hill & Loughborough Junction local by-election in London arrived from the printers yesterday. Here is what it says.
Real change, not damage limitation
Fellow workers
They call it democracy but it’s nothing of the sort.
Labour didn’t even want this by-election. They’d rather stitch it up behind closed doors than face a real challenge. This isn’t about serving the people, it’s about protecting their grip on power. Councillors are parachuted in, selections are stage-managed, and decisions are made long before you ever see a ballot paper.
Meanwhile, rents rise, wages stagnate, benefits are cut, food banks multiply and estates are handed over to developers. Labour’s record in Lambeth is clear enough.
Now they ask for your vote again. So do the Greens, Lib Dems and others who promise change but only offer better management of a system built on exploitation. They won’t end your problems. They won’t challenge the class system. They won’t stop capitalism — they serve it.
No confidence in their system. No votes for our bosses’ parties. Until we end capitalism, nothing changes.
That’s why the Socialist Party is standing in this election. Not for tweaks or token reforms, but for real change. Common ownership, democratic control, production for need not profit.
If you want that, you can show it by voting for the Socialist candidate, Adam Buick.
Promoted and publish by Mark Hutton on behalf of Adam Buick, both at 52 Clapham High St, London SW4 7UN.
In the latest Weekly Worker, out today, they again accuse TAS of “Spgbism”.
TAS apparently argues that the proposed new “mass communist party” should have as its stated aim the winning of political power to expropriate the capitalist class and end working class exploitation, and should not have a programme of immediate demands but should simply say that it supports workers struggles to improve or protect from getting worse their conditions under capitalism.
In his article Jack Conrad says of this:
“… it seems, that the TAS comrades reject the idea of a minimum-maximum programme tout court. I say “seems” because at the moment it is more implied than explicitly stated. Nonetheless, comrade Wrack does provide us with this telling statement:
‘I see the programme … as being a programme for government – a government by the working class. It is a statement of intent, a series of policies that the working class will implement to change the way society is organised, to break the power of the ruling class, to end for ever the exploitation of the majority of the world’s population.’”.To which Conrad comments:
“If the programme is based on the ultimate destination, but fails to map out the route needed to get there, then what we have is an attempt to combine the SWP’s minimalism with the utopian impossibilism of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its ‘Our object and declaration of principles’.6”
The 6 is a footnote reference to our website where we set out and explain what our object and declaration what they mean. Conrad evidentially considers that “you are like the SPGB” will be a killer argument that will floor TAS and get them to change their position. Let’s hope that some readers of the WW follow the link that Conrad provides.
Conrad also writes:
“TAS … propose a Bakuninist leap from today’s capitalism to the communist future, where there is no state, no classes, no money, no markets.”
(Actually, Bakunin didn’t propose “no money, no markets”).
Earlier he had set out what the WW holds:
“ … the centrality of programme, the necessity of having a minimum (or immediate) section of that programme, of socialism being the transition period between capitalism and communism, or of socialism beginning as capitalism, but ruled over by the working class …”
This of course is pure Leninism which TAS seems to have moved beyond in accepting that socialism and communism are just two different words to refer to the same system of society “where there is no state, no classes, no money, no markets”.
The prospects of the two groups uniting seem slender if they can’t even agree on what socialism means. We shall see.
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1533/rediscovering-our-words/
Now the market for US government bonds is being affected. Selling bonds is the way governments mainly borrow money. The “yield” is the rate of interest on their nominal value. If it goes up it means that a government has to pay more for renewed and new loans
Of course the US government will never go bankrupt as its “collateral” is its power to raise money through taxation to repay its debts. But if yields keep going up it will have to use more in of its tax income to service its future debts.
One of its main creditors is China — yes, China lends money to American — and there is speculation that, as part of the economic war going on between to the two, China is selling some of its US bonds precisely to lower their price and so increase the yield on new loans (even this would harm China by reducing the value of the bonds it keeps).
Reformmuck tries to overtake Labour on the left:
https://www.grimsbytelegraph.co.uk/news/local-news/reform-uks-leader-nigel-farage-10091214.amp
This strategy might work to steal Labour votes.
According to this, the Trump administration is pursuing the same policy of restoring manufacturing as long advocated by the trade union movement and Labour Party leftwingers here.
The Green Oarty candidate in Herne Hill and Loughborough Junction has launched his campaign. He is promising cleaner air but has stopped short of promising more sunshine:
In this week’s Weekly Worker Mike Macnair accuses some of his critics of SPGBism:
“This was a friendly discussion in spite of the significance of the differences. However, I think – and this is merely my own opinion – that there is some danger of a ‘negative dialectic’ in which we in the CPGB understate the radicalism of our Draft programme, while, on the other hand, the TAS comrades drive themselves, in opposition to it, towards the position of the Socialist Party of Great Britain that all that can be done is to make propaganda for socialism until there is a clear majority for immediate general collectivisation. We need at least to try to avoid this dynamic.” (https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1532/minimum-demands-are-maximal/)
If you read TAS’s (Talking about Socialism) own account of the meeting you will see why Macnair made this criticism:
The WW are criticised for not saying that, on winning control of political power, the working class will immediately abolish capitalist ownership of the means of production and for drawing a misleading distinction between socialism and communism.
Let’s hope that the “Talking About Socialism” group do see where the logic of their criticism should lead them. I doubt that Jack Conrad and Mike Macnair will agree to drop their basically Leninist position.
Local online news site comments on the by-election in Lambeth:
We were outside Herne Hill overground station this morning distributing leaflets and back copies of the Socialist Standard to make our presence known.
This is going to be a hotly contested election between Labour and the Greens (who once had a councillor elected for the ward) and so should attract some local publicity.
The Labour people have already been out distributing leaflets.
“The question of Free Trade or Protection moves entirely within the bounds of the present system of capitalist production, and has, therefore, no direct interest for us socialists who want to do away with that system.” (Engels, 1888)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1888/free-trade/index.htm
This, from the sane period, is good too, especially the title:
Tariff Reform, Free Trade or No Trade? The fiscal fraud exposed
We’ve been opposing the idea that tariffs can somehow better the condition of the working class right from our start. Here’s a pamphlet from 1912 on “Socialism versus Tariff Reform” when the Tory party was advocating tariffs to protect British capitalist industry.
Interesting observation by columnist Janet Samuel in yesterday’s Times with reference to the last time Trump imposed tariffs, in 2018-19:
“Back then, the tariffs were not actually paid for by consumers. As far as one can tell from the data, they were paid in two ways: first, US importers accepted lower margins on goods bought from abroad, and second, the dollar rose in value, boosting US spending power almost by exactly as much as Trump had put on tariffs.”
Thus confirms a point made above that in the first instance tariffs are paid for by the business importing goods from outside and that this will hit their profits; which depending on the nature of the good and market conditions they may or may not be able to pass on to consumers. In this case, apparently they couldn’t.
Here’s the official list of candidates standing in Folkestone West and Folkestone East of Kent County Council.
The Homeland Party appears to be a fascistic party, according to Wikipedia;
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeland_Party_(United_Kingdom)
Here is the official list of candidates standing in the local by-election in Herne Hill and Loughborough Junction ward of Lambeth Council in London. As can be seen, here too we are up against the usual suspects and TUSC:
