ALB
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The issue concerned was March 1988 and the article "Hate and its Causes" (subtitles: "Horror in Ulster" and "Sinn Fein policies"). The comment, appended at the end of the article, said:
Quote:The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those held by Calvert's Press.The sequence of events was then:April 1988: letter from a member under the heading "Were we censored?"May 1988: letter from "Some members of Calvert's Press" under the heading "Calvert's reply" which began:
Quote:The article "Hate and Its Cause" (Socialist Standard March 1988) contains inaccuracies and unsubstantiateed generalisations concerning the republican movement in Northern Ireland.and went on, over two columns, to defend Sinn Fein and the IRA against the criticisms in the article.June 1988: long letter under the heading "IRA again" from the author, Richard Montague (of Belfast), dealing with the Calvert members' objections in detail.September 1988: last issue of the Socialist Standard printed by Calverts.
Calverts are not to be trusted. We shouldn't give them the time of day. They used to print the Socialist Standard until one of their typesetters took it upon themself to add a dissenting comment to a criticism of the IRA in one of the articles. In other words, to express support for the IRA's anti-working-class bombing campaign (remember Birmingham, Wigan, etc?) that was going on at the time. It was the last issue they pinted for us as we immediately changed printers.
Quote:If you haven’t started a new language by the age of 10, you have no chance of achieving fluency and that even basic learning abilities fade by 17 or 18.I read that too but I don't believe it as it's belied by the facts. Millions and millions of the world's opulation are bilingual but I suppose the get-out clause is that they haven't achieved "fluency" in the second language. But what is fluency? The bar here seems to have been set very high, as the ability to understand, speak, write, read and think in the second language to the same standard as your first. Maybe only a few achieve that but that's not necessary as long as you can understand and read it and make yourself understood in it in speech.
They're all at it:http://theconversation.com/is-it-time-for-israel-to-reveal-the-truth-about-its-chemical-weapons-95604When it comes to states defending vital capitalist interests it's all hypocrisy and lies.
I wonder if either of them actually used the words attributed to them here, not even Hitler. Their views are bad enough without having to exaggerate. Actually, as I am sure John Oswald will be quick to point out, all people are animals, although he would probably add that most animals are better than people.
As the paper of what's left of the PCF (French Communist Party) I doubt if they'd accepted anything expressing our views, e.g. that Lenin distorted Marx as this from the site of the Socialist Paryt of Canada/Parti socialiste du Canada:http://www.worldsocialism.org/canada/frlenineoumarx.htm
Actually,I think he came from the CPB, joined us for a while, and then returned to his first love. He is still a subcriber to the Socialist Standard.
I think you will find that some members in this position won't regard themselves as Jews because this is a religion and as Socialists they reject religion. It would be like me staying I was a Plymouth Brethren just because two of my grandparents were. This was the position taken up by members of the Wspus even though they sometimes exchanged insults in Yiddish at their conferences.
alanjjohnstone wrote:what i have learned of the Jewish Bund and Yiddish, certainly opened my eyes to a whole new aspect of Jewish history that is rarely revealedSteve Coleman once explained that there are two Jewish traditions, one based on Hebrew (a revived religious language) and Yiddish (a European language, written in Hebrew letters), with the first tending to be religious and the second tending to be secular. Naturally, all the Jewish people who have joined the Party over the years have been from the Yiddish tradition. Mind you, this didn't stop Steve being berated once in Hyde Park for being a Cohen (apparently a priesly caste in Judaism) who couldn't speak Hebrew.
There's a sympathtiser whose father was a Party members who told me that when Israel was established in 1948 his father was beaten up by some of his Jewish fellow-workers in the East End of London for, as a socialist, refusing to endorse this. The Zionists are nasty nationalists but then they are not the only nationalists to behave in this way.
That's a brilliant article from the New York Times so here's a direct link to it:https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/opinion/george-soros-israel-hungary.html
Quote:Mr. Soros’s humanitarianism and universalism represent an expression of post-Holocaust Jewish identity that is anathema to the hard-line nationalism of Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition, which adheres to the classic Zionist mission that sought to end anti-Semitism and diaspora existence by gathering all Jews in the historic land of Israel. As in this case with Hungary, Mr. Netanyahu is increasingly aligning Israel with illiberal, autocratic states like Russia, Turkey and Egypt. The ultimate cynicism of such alliances is visible in Mr. Netanyahu’s willingness to tolerate the anti-Semitism of the global right-wing nationalist camp if it will bolster the Greater Israel movement.So, the longstanding anti-Zionist tendency amongst Jews is still alive (and in Israel too). Anti-Zionism is indeed not anti-semitism.In the meantime, incidentally, Soros's instiute has been driven out of Hungary and has had to move to Berlin.Forgot to add that Hungary was one of the states represented at the ceremony to celebrate the moving of the US Embassy to Jerusalem.
In one debate on Syria the US ambassador to the UN asked her Russian counterpart how he could sleep at night for supporting the "monster Assad" who killed children and criticised him for using his veto to stop UN endorsement of a US-led bombing of Syria. But when it comes to Gaza what happens? No denunciaton of the "monster Netanyahu" for shooting unarmed civilians including children or calling the Israeli government a mere "regime". No, the US exercises its veto to prevent a mild statement calling for an investigation of what happened:www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-5732039/Kuwait-wants-draft-Gaza-resolution-US-defends-Israel.htmlAlso, note that she put all the blame for what happened on Hamas for "cynically" organising the protests.But there was no criticism of the Jihadis of Douma for "cynically" organising the actual bombing of civilians in Damascus.Hopefully, people may be beginning to see that none of the "Great Powers" are really interested in what happens to civilians but only in protecting and furthering their economic and strategic interests, as always under capitalism.
Just remembered, when we reviewed his book on Debt in the August 2012 Socialist Standard Graeber sent in a reply that was published in the October issue. It makes the same point as in his answer to the final question in the interview (scroll down, it's the second letter):http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2012/no-1298-october-2012/letters
Quote:What I was mainly trying to address in the section on capitalism is a question that to my knowledge no Marxist analysis has really been able to resolve: why, if capitalism is a system based on factories and free wage labor, did most of the financial institutions that we associate with it – stocks, bonds, futures trading, semi-private central banking systems, and so on – actually arise in the 17th century, long before either factories or (any significant amount of) free wage labor made an appearance. The whole idea of "merchant capitalism" which is supposed to characterize the period from roughly 1500 to 1750 (or even 1800 in most of Europe) has always been a puzzle. If capitalism is a system based on wage labor, then it wasn't capitalism at all. But if so most bourgeois revolutions happened before capitalism had even appeared! If merchant capitalism is capitalism, then capitalism does not have to be based on wage labor, and certainly not free wage labor, at all. Claiming that merchant capitalism was capitalism because European elites were somehow trying to create a system that didn't exist and there is no evidence they were even capable of imagining, seems absurd. The obvious answer is that capitalism is not in fact necessarily based on free wage labor contracts.To which we replied:
Quote:We can’t see how anyone can deny that central to Marx’s analysis of capitalism (“the capitalist mode of production”) is the capital/wage-labour relationship, whether or not they agree with this. But this is not the only feature of capitalism; it is also a market economy where goods are produced to be sold. In fact, capitalism can be defined as a system where all the elements of production, including in particular the human ability to work (labour power), are bought and sold, which only becomes general once the direct producers have been separated from the means of production, whether land or machines. This didn’t come about suddenly in one go; it developed over time. Historically, the world market – as an inter-national market – first came into being in the 16th century and then market relations spread internally within countries producing for it as there were put change the more they got involved in it. Those in control of political power in these countries faced a choice: either to try to resist the changes or to encourage them. The “European elites” were divided over the issue. Those in favour of change wanted to remove all the barriers to property ownership and production for the market inherited from feudalism. They were, or represented, the up-and-coming bourgeoisie. In the end, they got their way, especially after they won control of political power in the English Revolution in the 17th century and the American and French Revolutions in the 18th century. Whether or not they envisaged a system of production based on wage-labour eventually emerging, they were consciously aiming at the spread of market relations and of the concept of the individual free to enter into market relations with other individuals.
