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Andy Burnham goes to war:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqlykpe4dk0yo
Can’t pretend this time that it’s about defending democracy or human rights which of course don’t exist under the Saudi oriental despotism.
Another 800 or distributed yesterday mainly on the Cowley Estate. Met three Green canvassers, armed with clipboard and doors to knock on.
Meanwhile the LibDems who are taking this election seriously have put out a leaflet which mentions their proposal to end the cost of living crisis:
“Lib Dems will rejoin the single market to solve the cost of living crisis”.
As if there wasn’t one in the EU countries too.
Our leaflet has brought a reaction from a member of the Lambeth & Southwark section of the Palestine Solidarity Movement, apparently a supporter of the Green Party (though we’ve heard the same argument from supporters of the Labour Party).
Anyway, here it is:
“Hi Guys
We appreciate your views, but on a practical level there is are many steps before perfection, and the Greens are leading us in the right direction. The country is in crisis and the most divided it has been for generations – let’s join together rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.
A volunteer for L&S PSC”London branch also have to cover another election, this time for Parliament. There’s a by-election in Holborn & St Pancras caused by Starmer deciding he has no future as an MP and resigning. The date is the same as for the local by-election in Lambeth: 8 October.
The main contenders are Labour and the Green leader Polanski. George Galloway of the Workers Party is also standing. Count Binface isn’t.
The constituency covers the area of Euston, Camden Town and Kentish Town and so is quite central. We are not contesting but branch members in north London will be distributing a limited number of leaflets urging a write-in vote for Socialism.
The fact that the media are concentrating on a supposed possibility of an artificial superintelligence destroying humanity rather than introducing socialism (the above article in the FT is the exception) shows the truth of the saying that “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”, at least for the media and pessimists and doomscrollers.
The irony is that less than ten years later Jules Guesde of the French Social Democratic Party (who was held in high regard in the early days of the SPGB) joined the French government when the First World War broke out. The German Social Democratic Party wasn’t invited to join the government but most of its members in the Reichstag voted for the war credits.
Some more publicity for our campaign, in a local online news site:
Myatt’s Fields by-election: seven candidates confirmed for 8th October
“Perhaps our contribution is simply to keep asking the fundamental question and passing it on”. Yes, Roberto, that is one way of looking what we are doing.
Our declaration of principles (which are actually quite general) summed up the experience of the working class up to the beginning of the 20th century. As humans don’t just learn from their personal experience but also from learning what previous generations had experienced, that means that workers don’t have to reinvent the wheel each generation.
Of course what socialists say has to be related to our fellow workers’ personal experience but things haven’t changed basically since then — workers still experience problems arising from their being excluded from owning and controlling the means of producing what they need to live or, to put it the other way round, of these being owned and controlled by a minority within society.
So, yes, we are involved in passing on the lessons learned from the past experience of previous generations of workers. Present generations would eventually learn this without a group of organised socialists passing this on, but the growth of the understanding of what needs to be done would be slower.
Roberto, you say,
“So perhaps our response to the growth of the Right should not be: “How do we get these workers back to the Left?”
It should be: “How do we get workers to stop looking to either side of capitalist politics and begin thinking in terms of their own class interests?”No “perhaps” about it ! That’s what our response should be.
800 or so leaflets distributed so far. This might be considered early but both the Greens and the Labour Party have already been out. We met one Labourite canvasser.
The area has been upgraded since we last time we contested a local election here, in 2013. Then large parts of it were a building site. Now it is this:
https://www.lambeth.gov.uk/better-fairer-lambeth/projects/myatts-field-north
The medium-rise blocks all have outside letter boxes which makes leafletting easier.
We now know who are opponents are: the usual suspects plus the Christian Peoples Alliance:
Reese is not very convincing as a writer on economics. He thinks that the absolute limit of capital accumulation has been reached and so capitalism is about to collapse. Scroll down to the review of his book The End of Capitalism here:
The stuff he writes in the Weakly Worket isn’t up to much either.
Here’s a passage from that article in the Financial Times of 29 August:
“Imagine then a super-AI armed with access to all the data we let our devices record for every transaction we enter into, and much more besides. Such an AI would surely bury Hayek.
Indeed, a big motivation for the socialist calculation debate was that market prices get a lot of things wrong. People don’t always know enough to choose the best goods; they get addicted, defrauded or bankrupted. Consumption and production have spillover effects on third parties — “externalities” — that pricing decisions do not capture; so we get pollution, resource depletion and climate damage. Price adjustments do not stabilise the macroeconomy; so we get business cycles, bubbles and busts. These shortcomings of the price mechanism were easy to grasp in the wake of the Great Depression. The same realisation may be gaining strength again, given the disenchantment with capitalism expressed by so many young people in particular.
Against this background, it beggars belief that once a super-AI was asked to advise on the allocation of resources, it would merely follow the outcome of the highest bids in free markets, rather than calculate the most efficient allocations it could find by itself. Why on earth would AI agents abdicate from central planning?”Of course it assumes that the means of production are no longer owned and controlled by a minority.
Three thousand copies of our manifesto have arrived. Here is what it says:
The Greens or Labour can’t reverse austerity!
The only hope is socialism
In May the Green Party promised to ‘reverse austerity’. It won them control of Lambeth council. It was an empty promise. No council has the power to do this, legally or economically. In office, the promise shrank to ‘campaigning to restore funding from central government’. Not the same. Austerity isn’t a political choice. It’s an economic necessity under capitalism. Councils and governments must limit spending to protect profits. The Greens’ campaign will fail.
Labour is no different. Labour ran Lambeth for years: protesting against cuts in opposition, making them in office. Labour’s answer tax the rich, spend more won’t work either. Corporate profits are the economy as far as capitalism is concerned. Tax them and investment and jobs dry up. Every Labour council ends up administering capitalism on capitalism’s terms. Whether Greens or Labour win the Myatts Field by election on 8 October, both will manage capitalism and capitalism means cuts.
The problem is the wages system itself. Workers are paid less than the value of what we produce; that difference is profit. Meanwhile food is destroyed while people go hungry, and houses stand empty while people sleep on the streets because production serves profit, not need. Unemployment, crisis, poverty and war are not accidents. They’re the inevitable product of a system where the means of living belong to a minority.
Socialism is something different: common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. No owners, no employers, no profit no wages, money or buying and selling. People contributing according to their ability, taking according to their needs, with production organised democratically to meet human needs in balance with the planet.
That can’t be handed down from above or voted in by one party. It needs a majority of workers understanding socialism and taking democratic control of production. That’s why the Socialist Party contests elections, not to manage capitalism, but to argue the socialist case.
Vote for the SOCIALIST PARTY candidate Anya Krycek on 8 October.
