ALB
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They’ve gone and done it.
We can use this thread to document the anti-worker measures they going to be responsible for as part of a government of capitalism. Could be some useful stuff that we can use to expose the capitalist reformism of the Green Party here too.
“Beyond Politics” is one of XR’s three demands. See here where it is explained in more detail. It probably won’t be much different except that they might now be demanding citizens’ assemblies for more things that climate change.
They are not yet registered as a political party with the Electoral Commission but will have to if they want to be able to contest under that name.
Their strategy doesn’t seem to be very coherent. XR initially envisaged their demands being met by minority civil disobedience. Now they want to contest elections to local councils while at the same time transferring some of councils’ decision-making powers to Citizens assemblies.
And then they say: “The current political system is incapable of making the structural changes necessary” but then they want take part in it to the extent of standing in elections.
True, it can’t be used to successfully reform capitalism to work in the interest of the majority (not could citizens assemblies either), but why can’t a parliament elected by universal suffrage be used to abolish capitalism and usher in socialism when a majority want it and are organised outside Parliament to participate in this revolutionary change?
Or maybe the whole thing is just a stunt. Not a bad one actually, if only the purpose had been to publicise free access.
“Extinction Rebellion’s co-founder Roger Hallam is a driving force behind the party.”
Oh no, not that raving lunatic ! He doesn’t stand for free access but, besides predicting 7 billion deaths before the end of the century, is on record as advocating the rationing of basic foodstuffs as a way to try and avoid this.
It will be interesting to see if this new party will be amongst our opponents on the ballot paper when we contest the Barnet and Camden constituency in next May’s elections for the Greater London Assembly.
It may already be happening in Portugal;
Significantly it started in the poorer areas of Lisbon where people live closer together and have a higher than average percentage of people with poor health. According to today’s Times:
“Outbreaks in the poorest neighbourhoods and industrial suburbs of Lisbon as well as parties on the coast have alarmed authorities”.
If the authorities here are alarmed by the same thing happening here they are doing their best not to show it.
But let’s hope all this doesn’t spark off a second wave. It might not. As Brian sang on the cross, look on the bright side of life.
Meanwhile down the road from our Head Office:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-england-london-53176472
People seem to be fed up with being prevented from congregating outside in the hot weather. It looks as if one reason the government has relaxed conditions might have been because it knew it could no longer hold the line.
There are 43 articles from the Socialist Standard dealing with Aneurin Bevan, a leading leftwing reformist in his day, here.
It may be best to start with his obituary in the May 1960 Socialist Standard which sums up our criticism of his reformist politics.
Assuming by “Holland” you mean Stuart Holland, I am afraid there is only one reference to him, reflecting his relative obscurity, in this article, though I imagine he might be better known in academic circles.
No one is saying ( at least I don’t think so) that a religious person can’t want socialism. It is possible to be right for the wrong reasons. But that is not the question at issue. It is whether or not people with religious views should be admitted to the party.
The case for saying that they should not be is hinted at in the introduction to the ABC of Marxism elsewhere on this site when it says:
”Now, when socialists are so very few, a higher degree of understanding of the workings of capitalism and the course of history are required of socialists (at least of organised socialists). This need not be the case when the socialist movement takes off and begins to become a mass movement.”
People who hold religious views do not reach the degree of understanding required at this stage of the development of the socialist movement.
Or, put another way, we are a Marxist party as well as a socialist party and a Marxist and a religious view of the world are incompatible. If we admitted religious people we would risk regressing to become some sort of wishy- washy ethical group rather than a scientific socialist party.
Here is my question and his answer from his blog (see link given by YMS):
Are you saying that “abstract labour” and “value” will exist in a post-capitalist society but that they will no longer be misused by Capital?Thanks for your question. “Abstract labour” is capital’s concept of our causal powers. Like any successful concept it does refer to an objective property of the world, yet nonetheless it doesn’t fully capture its content (e.g., the scientific concept of heat does refer to something real and independent of us, yet nonetheless our concept of heat has evolved and subtly changed along with our theory and practice). So in a hypothetical post-capitalist society (presumably where capital no longer exists, and no longer controls us) then capital’s concept “abstract labour” will have ceased to exist. However, society, while it remains within the realm of necessity, will still need some mechanism to allocate labour-power, and therefore represent it and count it. So the political economy of a post-capitalist society will also need to reify the common causal powers of social labour; probably we’ll still need some kind of “average” and fungible concept of labour-power. Whether that would be a purely quantitative representation, or something more qualitative and complex, I do not know. My guess is that any new concept will bear a family resemblance to capital’s concept of “abstract labour” (I do not subscribe to Feyerabend’s incommensurability of paradigms). I hope this somewhat philosophical answer responds to your question.
Best wishes!
Ian.All religions have their particular way of intimidating people into abiding by their rules. Christianity and Mohamedenism threaten eternal damnation; those religions that believe in reincarnation threaten being reincarnated as some “lower” life form; the Jewish religion of the Old Testament threatened your descendants with being cursed down to the third or fourth generation.
They are all as bad as each other and none is worthy of respect. All of them are mistaken (there is no afterlife and there is no reincarnation), irrational and anti-human and have to be opposed.
Yes I too thought that that was an odd thing to say. Blaming conspiracy theories on the Age of Enlightenment and its mechanical view of all things doesn’t hold water.
The origin of the classic conspiracy theory that the world is controlled by a select group of humans who manipulated events was concocted by opponents of the Enlightenment to explain the overthrow in the French Revolution of the old order from which they had benefitted. It was no accident that the reactionary catholic defenders of the old order behind this theory saw this group as the Illuminati (a small and not very significant group of advanced thinkers that did exist for a while) as the word means the Enlightened in Latin. Far from them accepting a mechanical view of all things, they blamed this view for undermining the religious view that had justified the rule and privileges of the old landed ruling class, correctly in fact since it was part of the ideology of the rising bourgeoisie as in fact was the whole 18th century Enlightenment.
He also writes if we “stop eating species that are genetically similar to humans” this woud “reduce our vulnerability to zoonotic diseases.” (message #204345)
But I drew attention to that passage in his article myself ! My point was that it wasn’t just “the choice to domesticate animals as a source of food” that “has exposed us to additional zoonotic diseases” but domesticating animals for any purpose. If you want to introduce eating then you would have say that it was the “choice” to cultivate and store grain that exposed us to this too as it led to us coming into contact with rats, from whom humans contracted the deadliest of zoonotic diseases historically— smallpox and the plague.
But of course neither domesticating animals nor agriculture were “choices”. They developed as humans sought to survive better in the rest of nature just as all other animals seek to. In any event we couldn’t even consider doing away with the domestication of other animals for use as a source of power for transport and for ploughing fields to cultivate crops (not that anyone did, even Hinduism made cows sacred because cow dung was a useful source of fuel) until the full development of industrial capitalism which substituted other sources of power for these purposes.
Actually, zoonotic diseases are transmitted to humans by us being in contact with other, live animals, whatever the reason (e.g. transport, ploughing, carrying loads), rather than by eating them; in fact only rarely by eating them. After all, some of these diseases are transmitted via animals that we don’t normally eat such as mice and rats. This would suggest that one way to reduce our vulnerability to zoonotic diseases like the COVID-19 virus would be to keep our social distance from other animals as well as from ourselves.
Isn’t this similar to XR’s demand for a Citizens Assembly? In fact similar to what we have speculated could be tried in socialism with local councillors being chosen by lot.
It could work in socialism but I have doubts about it being an extension of democracy under capitalism with its vested interests. These are certain to try to pack juries by challenging jurors who might vote against them as they do in US courts now.
And do we really want to have to submit our proposal to dispossess the capitalist class by declaring all property rights and stocks and shares null and void to such a jury?
Best to stick to local councils and parliaments elected by universal suffrage as long as capitalism lasts.
