ALB
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But he has bombed Syria. Like he said, America is back. I wonder if he will have baseball caps made with that on it.
I finished reading that during the first lockdown, though it is more about the next historical period. It’s heavy going with all the footnotes but good stuff. And you can see how Protestantism was a first step towards secularism (though it took nearly three centuries to get there) and so historically progressive compared to Catholicism.
Just evening up a top-heavy pro-Reformation bias in this country and in the schooling we all received
I wouldn’t be so sure of that. I expect many here will have gone to a Roman Catholic school and been taught by nuns and Christian Brothers and so would not have been taught about Bloody Mary, Guy Fawkes and Mary Queen of Scots being baddies. I imagine they will have been pictured as heroes. Perhaps, anyone here who had a Catholic education imposed on them can confirm this.
Being loath to judge someone just by their name, I thought I’d check first and Duffy is indeed a Roman Catholic, a former member of the Pontifical Historical Commission no less.
Sounds like an attempt to rewrite history from the point of view of the losers. The Roman Catholic Church only defends “religious freedom” when it’s in a minority.
grandstanding, egotistical, manipulative opportunist.
A bit like Alex Salmond then who will get more people than him to vote Tory !
Maybe the Tories are right that an independent Scotland would be a corrupt banana republic?
The remaining articles, from September, October and November 1928 have now been added, meaning that the whole year 1928 is now online.
New September ones
The transition period
Socialist Definitions—A Critic corrected
The socialist searchlight
The plain case for Socialism
Answers to correspondents
A look aroundHere: https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1920s/1928/no-289-september-1928/
New October ones
Questions on Socialism
Corrupt America and Pure England
The Secret of No Wages
Rationalisation or Socialism
The plain case for Socialism
Progress in Australia
What is the State?Here: https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1920s/1928/no-290-october-1928/
New November ones
The Labour machine in Conference
Do we want a censor?
“Modernism” v Materialism
The battleground of the class struggle
Socialist definitions: a rejoinder
The economics of the I.L.P.
A talk to wives & mothersHere: https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1920s/1928/no-291-november-1928/
Doesn’t addition of the word ‘independent’ make it a distinct name?
Yes and no.
It does for everyday purposes but not for UK electoral law where the issue is what name can be put on the ballot paper.
The UK Electoral Commission is pretty strict on party names and variants of them so as to avoid confusing voters. For instance, they refused to allow the Trotskyist “Socialist Party of England and Wakes” (SPEW) to register under that name as they held that would confuse voters with us. The SPEWers are however free to use that name on their election literature but on the ballot paper they appear under their registered name of “Socialist Alternative”. Just as the new ISPGB would be free to.
On the other hand, the Commission has just given us notice that they intend to strike off one of the registered variants of our name — The World Socialist Party (UK) — on the grounds that this doesn’t identify who we are to voters. We have appealed and are awaiting their final decision.
Incidentally, there is a suggestion that this new party might be a rightwing outfit rather than yet another “socialist” party. See the discussion here.
I think it is fair to say that by “material” in his materialism Marx meant “social conditions” and that, as these are created by human activity they can be changed by human action, at this stage of human social evolution democratically into socialism.
But this “material” is not the same as “matter” as the subject of human experience. As far as I know, the only place Marx discusses this is in detail is in this chapter of The Holy Family, another of his writings of the time (1845) in which he was settling his final accounts with German philosophy. People can make of it what they will.
https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch06_3_d.htm
Whatever it is that humans experience, it is not like social conditions, i.e., a product of human activity. Humans only describe it. They focus on a part of the world of experience (abstract it) and give it a name. This applies as much to tables and chairs as it does to “matter”. But this is not same as creating (bringing into existence) what is being described. That is there independently of human descriptions of it.
On this view, what scientists are doing is not “discovering” the world “as it really is” but describing it in various ways, ways that have changed over time, especially as technological advances have enabled humans to experience the world in new and different ways.
For the record, more par for the course about the Labour Party — support for nuclear weapons. No doubt Starmer would have no qualms about pressing the button if he was convinced that vital interests of the British capitalist class were at stake. In short, a psychopath. Or maybe he’s just saying it to win votes and not expecting his bluff to be called.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-politics-56198972
The present leadership of the Labour Party and most of their MPs are a despicable bunch of career politicians more eager to get their bums on the ministerial benches than anything else. After all, that’s why most of them “entered politics”.
Next month’s Socialist Standard has a review of The Deficit Myth by leading Muddled Money Theorist, Stephanie Kelton,
Yes, there was this article in the November Socialist Standard. There’s another in the March issue which should be in your doormat on Monday or Tuesday.
Two more pieces confirming that Marx was a materialist (without scare quotes). The debate about whether or not this is the case must surely be over. Perhaps it is.
Materialism is basically a rejection of theological explanations of experience rather than a commitment to a particular theory of the nature of “matter”. Materialists can have all sorts of theories about that or none. They can even be agnostic about it.
To weaken the power of the British state, rather than any belief that independence would bring some benefit to workers in Scotland (though of course in their propaganda for “the masses” they pretended that it would), was the reason given by many Trotskyist groups and other “anti-imperialists” for voting for separation in the 2014 referendum.
Funny how they should still align with Russia’s strategic interests even though its rulers have long since stopped claiming to be somehow “socialist” or even anti-capitalist. Nostalgia for the land of the Bolshevik coup perhaps, I suppose.
It looks as if April Fool’s Day has come early this year. According to this news item, the BBC is going to set targets for how many “working class” people it employs as workers.
Assuming this is not an April Fool, this should be an easy target for the BBC to meet since 100 percent of its employees will be, and always have been, members of the working class (though I suppose they could be the odd member of the capitalist class with nothing else to do but slum it by selling their mental and physical energies to an employer, in this case the BBC).
