ALB
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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:
It won’t happen. By waving the possibility that it might Johnson is seeking to strengthen the UK’s negotiating hand. The same goes for his announcement that he won’t extend the transition period beyond 31 December next year. Some commentators are saying that this latter could prove to be counterproductive as, assuming that the threat of no deal is a bluff, it puts pressure on the UK government to reach a quick deal and so strengthens the EU’s hand.
Fascinating stuff for nerds but unlikely to interest Leave voters who will regard leaving on 31 January as having got “Brexit done” as far as they’re concerned (and as far as it concerns them).
It is now clear that the UK will formally leave the EU on 31 January but the nature of the trade arrangements with the EU remain to be settled. The status quo — of being in the customs union and the single market — will apply until at least 31 December 2020.
Johnson wants a free trade agreement with no tariffs and no quotas but the EU won’t agree to this unless there is a high degree of regulatory convergence (on state aids, environmental standards, workers’ rights, etc) to avoid unfair competition from UK companies. They will insist on “a level playing field”. What exactly this will be is what is going to be negotiated over the coming year. It needn’t be fully regulatory alignment but could be mutual recognition of each other’s regulations.
We’ll see. But once the UK has formally left I think that will satisfy the vast majority of Leave voters. I can’t see them getting worked up — or being successfully stirred up — over the details of what is or what is not a level playing field for UK-EU trade. Trading arrangements was never the real reason why they voted Leave or for the Tory or Brexit parties last Thursday.
If this is right then Brexit will no longer be a popular issue let alone the main one. Good thing too.
I agree with Robbo here. The people likely to be more receptive to our arguments will be disillusioned Labour activists and voters who already agree that the interests of the few are not the same as the interests of the many and that the interests of the many can be pursued via the ballot box.
There will be stiff competition for their attention coming from Trotskyists saying that what is needed is a disciplined vanguard party to lead the workers and anarchists calling for so-called direct action in the streets to get reforms.
