ALB
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I had always assumed that a fakir was someone who did the Indian rope trick or was a snake charmer etc ie some sort of conman or to be charitable a magician. I can’t imagine that those influenced by the SLP of America likened the Labour bleeders of their day to Sufi monks. I imagine that at the time fakirs were common in the US in circuses and the like. Does anybody know?
I think Marcos meant to post this on the thread vilifying Marx as “bourgeois” for not being a vegetarian and will be a reference to the forthcoming publication of more of his scientific notebooks (from which Kohei Saito has already drawn on to refute the lie that Marx wanted to subjugate nature). As these will be in German the question of copyright won’t arise. It only does and has in relation to translations.
There’s also this that was referred to the last time this criticism of Marx reared its ugly head here:
Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy
Here’s one example of us refuting the view that JO has repeated yet again:
What is needed is a World Cooperative Commonwealth not lots of small scale coops competing to sell their products on the market with a view to making a surplus aka profit in order to survive.
Mind you, the Party didn’t think much of him, denouncing him in 1915 as a “fakir” (a common word at the time instead of “faker”):
Yes, I thought they got it the wrong way round (according to Barltrop’s account in The Monument, pages 29-30). They make him sympathetic to “industrial unionism” whereas he was very much against it. Labelling James Connolly “Catholic Connolly” was good — and prophetic.
I suppose we will need to send them a correction. I see they have a comments section.
In the House of Commons yesterday Johnson promised a “Golden Age”. That easily trumps Labour’s End of Austerity and Free Broadband for Everybody. But imagine the stick Corbyn would have got if he’d promised that.
A Golden Age is a longish period of peace, prosperity and great achievements. Given the state of the world economy Johnson is being bold, especially as the UK is about to make access more difficult to one of its best markets. In any event of course governments can’t control how the capitalist economy works. His wild promise assumes that his government can engineer continuous economic growth as the basis for his Golden Age. But it can’t. He will fail as miserably as all Labour governments have in the past and as a Corbyn government would have done too.
This shouldn’t be here but in the World Socialism section, shouldn’t it, and of course something is being done about it.
Incidentally, the January Socialist Standard has already been printed and is at Head Office awaiting sending out after xmas.
Another anecdote. Steve Coleman went to Blackpool to speak at a fringe meeting at the Labour Party Conference organised by the party on the subject of “Abolish the Wages System”. On the train on the way back to London a delegate came up to him and said “I agree with you that we should abolish the Wages Councils” (that fixed the minimum wages eg of agricultural workers).
ps. They now have been.
That anecdote dates from before Sanders was well known and presumably reflects the fact that people do associate the end of private ownership of the means of production and production for use not profit with socialism , even if they don’t agree with it or that it’s possible ( and if they confuse the Government ownership with the end of private ownership).
A breakaway from the Socialist Labour Party of America decided to call itself the Economic Democracy League but, when they explained what they stood for, people said “ah, you mean socialism.”
Who said the capitalist class would do nothing about climate change:
