ALB
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I don’t think anybody at Head Office knew or had been informed that you were the North East branch secretary, otherwise you would have been receiving calls for nominations, conference agenda items, etc.
There is one decision of the December EC that should be aware of (and were about to be informed of along with all NE branch members):
RESOLUTION: Browne/Kennedy- “The EC asks the CO to ask North East branch if they wish to disband and which branches they wish to join.” (Agreed)
It should be easy to give you (or any other members) access to EC Minutes. All you need to do is join the new Spintcom and consult the files section. I’m sure the moderator, Matt, could take you through in five minutes how to do this.
The current problem has arisen because the comrade who used to publish the EC Minutes here is no longer in a position to do so, resulting in a suspension of the service.
If this becomes a world pandemic (hope not) maybe we would enter the scenario in Pieter Lawrence’s novel The Last Conflict where the world is threatened by an asteroid hurtling towards it and the authorities everywhere are forced to forget about monetary constraints and set about mobilising resources directly to deal with it (to built underground shelters, if I remember). Not the ideal way for world socialism to come about, but it was just a novel.
Any member can ask to have the EC minutes sent to them by snail mail (in fact any non member can but they have to pay the postage). A couple of dozen do. Not sure though that it’s more rapid than email. Anyway that is not the problem. Once they are done they are sent to branch secretaries and those who have asked to receive them, either by email or by post. The files section of spintcom is essentially an archive where past minutes can be consulted.
It’s not us that are the oddballs but them. They anticipate a world civil war ie Bosnia and Syria on a world scale, and think socialism could be the outcome. Utter nutters.
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-asia-china-51245156
Yes, building that hospital will be a great feat and shows what can be done when there’s a will — and as soon as socialism is established there will be a will to eliminate world poverty and the diseases it leads to. We know too that the US Air Force can build an airfield in the same sort of time. So the technical means to eliminate world poverty and disease are already to hand.
All that is standing in the way is class ownership of the means of life and production for sale with a view to profit.
We have just had 3 requests from twitter users for the three-month free trial subscription, presumably as a result of the offer being mentioned there. One is from Britain, one from the US and one from Nigeria. Which shows that our tweets have an international following.
What do Greenpeace expect? The government negotiators and capitalist enterprises involved in such deals can’t help it. If fossil fuels are cheaper than renewables they’d be mugs not to do deals based on this as, if they didn’t, they would increase production costs and so undermine competitivity — and somebody else would come along and negotiate the cheaper fossil fuels deal. That’s the way it is under capitalism, especially on the international field where, unlike within capitalist states, there is no international body that can enforce measures in the longer term interests of capitalists and their system.
From today’s Times without comment:
“Britain will not diverge from European rules “just for the sake of it” after Brexit, Sajid Javid said yesterday, as he softened the government’s rhetoric on future EU trade talks.
In a move to reassure business, the chancellor said that while ministers were determined that Britain would not become a “rule taker” from Brussels, it did not mean the UK would necessarily diverge from European standards.
“We will be a sovereign and independent country,” he told a lunch for British executives at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. “But we’ll always protect the interests of British businesses throughout this process and we’ll maintain high standards — not because we are told to, but because we want to.””
Electricity has been seen as essential for a future communist society by all sorts of critics of capitalism. From Lenin’s “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country” to Kropotkin’s detailed interest in it in Fields, Factories and Workshops as providing the basis for production in a decentralised society. Both were right. But you can’t will the end without willing the means.
What’s wrong with electricity grids, national and international? They are a sign of how production is inter-related and part of the material basis for a worldwide socialist society. We will still need them in socialism. Small is not particularly beautiful. It is just small.
As you hint at, this is a measure of the waste of capitalism as a system not of how much each individual uses.
Taking total consumption and dividing it per head of population creates the illusion that ordinary people are to blame and that the way out is for us to cut down our personal consumption. But this wouldn’t make much difference. The other mistaken conclusion is that cutting down population would help. Ironically, by cutting down the figure by which total consumption is divided this would increase the figure for consumption per person!
Which all goes to show that consumption per head (they do it for individual countries too to show how the population there gets better off from year to year as capitalist production and waste goes up) is a misleading and pretty meaningless figure.
Yes we do have an arrangement with the WSPUS to offer contacts there the 3-month trial subscription and quite a few have taken it up. And we do get requests from Australia too. In principle it is open to people anywhere. However, we ignore all requests from Ukraine and Russia. Once bitten twice shy.
