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It sounds as if Nick Tapping has come a long way since he was virtually a troll on our old WSM yahoo forum. Somebody should send him an application form! A case of us influencing them rather than vice versa, which of course is as it should be.
KAZ has put his finger on another difference. They are “Utopian” moneyfreers who appeal to all people of good will while we are class-struggle moneyfreers. They are Robert Owen. We are Karl Marx. Still we do have the same objective and Owen wasn’t that bad.
I am afraid that what you suggest is precisely what Royal Mail does not permit. We tried inserts in a local free paper in Kent but got no response. Apparently “intellectuals” don’t read them. Can’t say I blame them.
The other odd thing is that our experience shows a better response from the South than from the North or Scotland. Make of that what you will.
There has always been a tension about who we target. Our theory (which says that socialism is an immediate possibility but can only come into being when a majority wants and understands it) means that we are targeting everybody, ie scattergun approach. In practice, however, our immediate aim to build up a larger and more effective socialist party, to campaign for socialism (I hasten to add, since this sounds a bit Trotskyoid, not to leader the workers) and, though I don’t think we’ve ever explicitly said so, to be around when outside events beyond our control spark off a mass movement seeking a way out of capitalism.
This latter means that we are targeting those who are politically interested and who have the time to be politically active. That is a very small percentage of the population which can’t be more than 5% if that. I wouldn’t call such people “intellectuals” just because they are prepared to read an 800-word article or leaflet. You don’t have to have a college degree to do that.
My view, for what it’s worth, is that we should be aiming at getting replies, so we can acquaint them more with our case via, in the first instance, a free 3-month trial sub to the Standard,
As to costs, you’re lucky as I happen to have them to hand as I’m in the middle of preparing a report from the election committee for the January EC Meeting.
Inserts in the i paper costs £18 per 1,000 + VAT (=£21.60). We had 160,000 inserted, at cost of £3,456. The printing cost £2,045, making a total cost of £5,501. These leaflets weren’t distributed specifically in the constituencies but over the whole of the south of England and Wales and parts of the Midlands. (They didn’t mention that we were contesting and could in fact have been distributed even if we hadn’t been.)
Printing the 55,000 leaflets for Folkestone cost £722 and the 45,000 for Cardiff cost £1,087 (their leaflet was more elaborate). Cardiff also spent £450 on a display ad in the local evening paper. On top was the election deposit of £500 for each constituency. So, the total cost of the campaigns in the constituencies was £3,259. (This suggests that running a campaign to get free postal distribution could cost as little as £1,200, but don’t expect many responses).
We also spent £210 on printing 15,000 leaflets for distribution by members and sympathisers outside the two constituencies.
The total cost of everything (excluding some travel and other minor costs) was £8,970.
Yes I remember now. Those were the two main points. Money free in one country and transitional measures. I think that in the meantime the MFP has deregistered as a political party which means they can’t contest elections under that name any more. Nick Tapping is still around as he puts in an occasional appearance in our Facebook page. He knows us of old.
“How are the reply rate going? Is the newspaper ad still the better response than the election leaflet?”
There is no comparison. Replies to the insert in the i paper (which was also about the election) are now approaching 100 while replies to the election communications remain stuck at 2 (1 from each constituency), useful replies, that is, as we had three hostile replies from Folkestone intended only to make us pay the return postage.
What this shows is that contesting elections to get replies to the free postal distribution is not a reason for contesting. This is not a reason for not contesting, nor even for not using the free postal distribution (since many more will read them than reply and it’s relatively cheap to have even 50,000 printed) as there are other reasons for this, e.g. local activity, national publicity, showing we are apolitically ctive.
The relative success of the newspaper insert confirms that you get a better response, in terms of replies, if you target a specific group (in this case, for us, the readers of a non-Tory serious newspaper) than if you have a scattergun approach aimed at everybody.
That dates from 1907 before Catholic Connolly became one himself as one of the founders in 1912 and leaders of the Irish Labour Party along the same lines as its British equivalent.
There’s a better poem than Connolly’s turgid stuff here called “The Labour Fakir”:
Oh, he preached it from the housetops,
And he whispered it by stealth,
He wrote whole miles of stuff against
The awful curse of wealth.
He shouted for the poor man,
And he called the rich man down,
He roasted every king and queen
Who dared to wear a crown.
He clamoured for rebellion,
And he said he’d lead a band
To exterminate the plutocrats,
Or drive them from the land.
He fumed, and roared, and ranted,
Till he made the rich man wince
But he got a Cabinet job and
Has never shouted since.It appeared in An Phoblacht, which supports Sinn Fein, themselves another bunch of Labour Fakirs, aspiring to be Cabinet ministers in Northern Ireland as well as in Eire.
Here’s Marx on capitalism’s role in preparing the material basis for socialism by imposing a transitory historical period of “production for production’s sake” (from section 3 of chapter 24 of Capital):
“Except as personified capital, the capitalist has no historical value, and no right to that historical existence, which, to use an expression of the witty Lichnowsky, “hasn’t got no date.” And so far only is the necessity for his own transitory existence implied in the transitory necessity for the capitalist mode of production. But, so far as he is personified capital, it is not values in use and the enjoyment of them, but exchange-value and its augmentation, that spur him into action. Fanatically bent on making value expand itself, he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake; he thus forces the development of the productive powers of society, and creates those material conditions, which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle.”
Fortunately capitalism has already done this and there is no more need for “production for production’s sake.” Unfortunately it continues, causing all sorts of unnecessary problems.
Socialists say that it’s been long overdue to stop this and for the humans race to enjoy the benefits of the sacrifices imposed on them by capitalism, by going over to a “higher form of society” where there can be “production for consumption’s sake,” which is only possible on the basis of the common ownership of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources.
For those who imagine that it is the word “Socialist” that is putting people off, here are the results of the Money Free Party in recent elections:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Poole_Borough_Council_election#Canford_Heath_West
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_West_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2010s
The Socialist Standard reviewed that book of Camus’s in 1973:
http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2010/02/camus-portrait-of-rebel.html?m=1
Marx was not advocating production for production’s sake. That was precisely his criticism of capitalism. However, he accepted that capitalism was a necessary stage through which society had to pass before socialism (and production for consumption’s sake, ie for use) could become possible and so therefore was a period of production for production’s sake.
In the passage Camus refers to, Marx is saying that Ricardo was right for his time (he died in 1823). Here is the whole passage in context (it’s from Theories of Surplus Value, Part II):
“Ricardo, rightly for his time, regards the capitalist mode of production as the most advantageous for production in general, as the most advantageous for the creation of wealth. He wants production for the sake of production and this with good reason. To assert, as sentimental opponents of Ricardo did, that production as such is not the object, is to forget that production for its own sake means nothing but the development of human productive forces, in other words the development of the richness of human nature as an end in itself.”
In saying that Marx said Ricardo was “absolutely right” Camus was going too far (to put it politely), since Marx clearly says “rightly for his time” , i.e not absolutely right for all time. But Camus was really criticising Stalinism not Marxism (unlike Sartre, and to his credit, he was not a fellow traveller of state-capitalist Russia).
So, Marx was not advocating “production for production’s sake” as such for all time (that would be to advocate capitalism for all time) but merely that Ricardo was right to have advocated this in 1817 as, at that time, the forces of production were not yet developed enough, i.e. capitalism had still to create the material basis for socialism by developing the productive forces to the point where production for consumption could be inaugurated.
Of course you could argue that Marx was wrong to have said that capitalism had to have developed before socialism became possible, but was he?
But, annoyingly, you keep begging the question by assuming that Marx wanted to conquer nature in your sense and so contributing to making socialism repugnant to some people. And you are ignoring the fact that humans have to change nature to meet their needs even to grow vegetables. Or are you a nutarian? If not, why not?
“Sounds like a reiteration of the conquest of nature syndrome!”
Not unless you think that “controlling” “Nature,” i.e natural forces, is the same as “conquering” it. Is harnessing the Sun’s rays to generate electricity “conquering Nature”? Is controlling wind power, tidal power, rivers and waterfalls? Is in fact growing food? Surely not but, if so, how are humans supposed to survive as a natural species? Are they just supposed to sit naked, hungry and without shelter “contemplating” nature as Camus seemed to be foolishly suggesting in your opening post where you quote him as saying:
“they [Christians and Marxists] considered [nature] not as an object for contemplation but for transformation.”
I don’t know if Marx did write of the “conquest” of Nature (though he might have done, in the sense if controlling its forces) but William Morris did, as here in Useful Work versus Useless Toil:
“Nature will not be finally conquered till our work becomes a part of the pleasure of our lives.”
But I don’t think he can be accused of wanting to declare war on nature.
Exchange of correspondence (or, rather, polemics) with a Henry Dight, a defender of Bolshevism and of their view that Marx wanted to smash the state not capture it, which shows that we were on to their distortions from the earliest days:
Added to the Jack Fitzgerald Internet Archive:
Those Misrepresentations of Marx Turn Up Again October 1920
Mr. Dight says this is the “The Kybosh” November 1920
Dight’s Dilemma May 1922
Who Should Wear the Caps and Bells? July 1922
