ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Just noticed the attack on “delegate democracy” as Leninist in the editorial in today’s Times:
“The alternative notion that officials are mere delegates does have a philosophical lineage. It is to be found in Lenin’s The State and Revolution. This revolutionary blueprint was a guarantee that Russia would become a totalitarian state, for it had no concept of how to mediate between incommensurate values and competing interests [whatever that means].”
Two points here. First, it wasn’t Lenin who thought up this. Second, he might have preached it but he didn’t practice it.
Lenin did indeed write of “all officials, without exception, elected and subject to recall at any time” (his emphasis) but he was expanding on Marx’s description of the Paris Commune of 1871 in his The Civil War in France:
“The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms.”
Marx recommended that this is what the working class should bring about immediately on winning control of political power. The Communards weren’t socialists but radical democrats and what they did was already practised in Switzerland and in some of the states of the USA where the “right of recall” still exists in their constitutions. Indeed, this sort of thing is reflected in the US Constitution which lays down that the House of Representatives shall be re-elected every two years (the British MPs who have betrayed their mandate can sit for a further 3 years; in the US they’d be out in less than 2 years).
It’s a simple, basic radical democratic demand — which of course Lenin never implemented or had any intention of implementing. Power in Bolshevik Russia was in the hands of the unelected Bolshevik Party whose officials were not elected by universal suffrage nor subject to recall (at least not by the electorate though they were by the Party hierarchy as were non-party state officials). And of course one of the first things the Bolsheviks did was to abolish the Constituent Assembly that had been elected by universal suffrage. No attempt was made to organise the state in Russia along the lines of the Paris Commune.
So, whoever wrote the editorial in the Times is either ignorant or dishonest or both.
There is in fact a provision in UK law to recall an MP. Under the Recall of MPs Act 2015, if an MP has committed a series breach of parliamentary rules or is given a prison sentence of less than a year (more than a year then you are out automatically), a petition signed by 10% of the registered electorate and drawn up within six weeks can provoke a by-election. This has only been attempted once, in the case of the Reverend Inane Paisley’s son who had done something wrong (taken bribes, I think, without declaring them). It nearly succeeded but didn’t reach the 10% in the six weeks. Another attempt may be made to provoke such a by-election, in Peterborough, whose Labour MP is in prison for a few months for lying about a motoring offence.
There is nothing in our Rulebook about recall (but there doesn’t need to be specifically as a minimum number of branches can call a Party Poll to do this).
Re elections, our Rulebook says that a Socialist MP or councillors would be answerable to the EC or the local branch which could, presumably, deselect them. I am not sure this is perfect from a democratic point of view since, more logically, this ought to be in the hands of those who elected them, i.e. including non-members who had voted for socialism, but how? Nor is it clear how it could be enforced if the offending MP refused to resign, though my union at work used to insist that its candidates for the staff committee sign and undated letter of resignation. I don’t think that would work either. Leaving deselection as the only way.
I see the issue of “deselection” and a proposal that MPs who change parties should have to resign has come and is being criticised, but what’s wrong with this, at least with deselection? Under the names of “recall” and “revocation” isn’t this an essential part of the sort of democracy we advocate? In other words, if someone elected doesn’t carry out the mandate that their electors voted for, then the electors have the right to replace them with someone who will.
Is one of those signatories,. Selma James, the Marxist-Feminst, founder of Wages for Housework and ex-wife of CLR James? If so, she must be getting on a bit. Strange though that’s she’s ended up in the reformist Labour Party.
Who is this nutty Frenchman who wants to make it a crime to question a state’s right to exist? We and the anarchists do for a start for each and every state.And China challenges the right of Taiwan to exist. There might well be some nostalgic Unionists who challenge Eire’s right to exist. And Pakistan as a state based on religion is just as much also an aberration amongst capitalist stats. What’s the harm in people saying these things?
Those Tory women are a bit more impressive than the original band of Labour malcontents and misfits but still capitalist politicians of course.
As for Hatton, there’s nothing particularly antisemitic about what he said in 2012. Everybody was saying it at the time as Israel was then bombing the hell out of the poor sods in Gaza. Some idiots had lobbed some rockets into Israel and the Israeli army was applying its usual policy of a hundred eyes for one eye.
Now you’ve mentioned him, I thought I’d look up more on this Shuker character. It turns out he’s a raving Christian fundamentalist. From the Wikipedia entry on him:
Shuker became leader and pastor of the City Life Church in Luton until he stood for parliament (…) Shuker was opposed to the introduction of same-sex marriage. In 2012 he threatened to resign if Ed Miliband whipped Labour to support equal marriage. (…) In March 2012, Shuker was one of three MPs who signed a letter sent to the Advertising Standards Authority asking it to reverse its decision to stop the Christian group “Healing on the Streets of Bath” from making explicit claims that prayer can heal. The letter called for the ASA to provide indisputable scientific evidence that healing did not work.
Pity Ivan isn’t still doing his “Greasy Pole” column in the Socialist Standard. He could have a field day with this lot.
One of their pretexts for leaving Labour was anti-Semitism, but within a couple of days it was revealed that over 14% of the new group’s membership is colour-prejudiced:
So the moral high-ground against prejudice has crumbled beneath them. They can’t have much of a future after the next general election in 2022 when they will all be booted out — though they can draw their MP’s salary and other perks in the three years till then. After that, into retirement or a job in the City.
Who wants another capitalist political party anyway?
p.s. this is not a split. It’s a splinter.
Today’s papers have a photo of what was daubed on the front:
“Memorial to Bolshevik holocaust 1917 to 1953. 66,000,000 dead”
I still think the Bolsheviks should not have been allowed to move the Marx family grave and erected the monstrosity over it. I wonder how they got permission. One of Marx’s great-grandson’s, Robert-Jean Longuet (grandson of his daughter Jenny) was at times a bit of admirer of the USSR and may well have given the family’s permission.
This one might be sufficiently “internationalist” to do ? After all, the “No War Between Peoples” is one of the reasons the founding fathers of the EU gave for it and which went down well on the Continent.
Depending on how things develop before then this could be a big one, perhaps even bigger than the anti Iraq War one. Although the substantive issue is the trading arrangements of the UK capitalist class, it won’t be this that will be motivating those taking part. Most will be ordinary decent people protesting against the xenophobia and intolerance of the Brexiteers. So we should definitely be there. Unfortunately it clashes with a Party meeting on the same subject on the same afternoon, but there’s enough of us to be able to cover two things at the same time. I don’t think we need a special leaflet as they won’t be interested in our views on that. We already have a couple of leaflets that can fit the bill — the Identity leaflet and The Problem isn’t the Tories or Labour … it’s Capitalism (the LibDems who will be there in their tens of thousands as they were on the Iraq Wat one will love that !),
This week’s Weekly Worker has published s letter on this. For the record, here it is. Somebody will probably reply, so watch this space:
“Money theories
Michael Roberts brings out well the point that, while governments can create (whether indirectly via the central bank or directly via the printing press) as much money as they want, they cannot control the purchasing power of that money (‘Chartalism and Marxism’, February 8). If they issue more than the capitalist economy needs for its activities, then it will depreciate and, as he says, “the result will be rising prices and/or falling profitability that will eventually choke off production in the private sector”.
Good stuff. But then he goes and spoils it by talking about a “Marxist policy” for banks and money, which would seem to be a state investment bank which will be able to do what the ‘modern monetary theory’ people want – supply the money needed to expand production and ensure full employment. Maybe it can (for a while and in a developing capitalist country), but there’s nothing ‘Marxist’ about the finances of a state-capitalist economy.
How could there be? Marx was analysing capitalism, not advising what policies should be pursued under capitalism. In any event, his conception of socialism/communism (the same thing) involves the disappearance of commodity production and so of value, money and banks: ie, a ‘Marxist monetary policy’ is a contradiction in terms. From this perspective, Mike Macnair’s article in the same issue on a “working class trade policy” is also dodgy.
Adam Buick, Socialist Party of Great Britain”By coincidence (or perhaps not) there is a letter in this week’s Weekly Worker which illustrates the thinking of those who carried out this attack:
“With three million refugees and over two million dead in Venezuela, it must be apparent to even the most immoral and obtuse socialist or communist that the ‘socialist project’ inevitably means mass murder. Socialism and death go together like beans and toast: 100 million people killed in the Soviet Union, 50 million in China, 40 million in North Korea and untold millions more in Cuba, Vietnam and Laos.
Nobody likes to think that they might have been wrong, but it is important to face up to reality and admit that not only has the ‘socialist project’ failed in the most spectacular manner possible, but that the very idea of socialism is a killer. All assumptions that socialists make about race, gender, intelligence, equality and, most importantly, human nature are wrong and have conclusively been proved to be wrong.
Socialism now is simply a religion for people who are not quite stupid enough to believe in Islam – a very similar death cult to socialism and often associated with it. When one looks at people like Corbyn, Abbott and McDonnell, it is remarkable just how stupid they are. People who cannot put a coherent sentence together want to lead us into a socialist paradise!
I fully realise that the people who produce the Weekly Worker and the plethora of other publications may have good intentions, but, as they say, ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’. For people embedded in the concept of socialism it will be hard to come to grips with reality, but hopefully the more intelligent and ethical members will so do. If not, many more people are going to die in a totally immoral and useless cause.
Malcolm Scott
email”That reminds me I meant to ask this before. In that interview with Olga Guerin, Maduro said there were over a million Colombians living in Venezuela. Is that true? Anyway what is the difference between a Colombian and a Venezuelan beyond being born different sides of a completely artificial and accidental frontier?
