ALB
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As we are not "liberals" we don't need to panic over this:http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/03/22/liberals-panic-john-bolton-appointment-national-security-advisor/
Why from 1956? Because the volumes are billed as an account of the "far Left" since 1956. I deliberately wrote that most such activists would have known "of" us not "about" us. You and me know from personal experience in the 60s and 70s that if you identified yourself as an SPGBer at meetings of these groups the people there would know who we were. As you say, they would have a distorted view of what we stood for, e,g the anarchists that we want to form a "socialist government" and the trots and "Communists" that we are anti-trade union (these misconceptions are still in circulation of course), but they still knew of our existence. We were part of the scene which any history of the period should reflect. The aim of the attempt to get a chapter in the volume was to rectify these misconceptions as well as, you would have thought, being of interest to the sort of people likely to be interested in a tome on the "far Left" such as far-Left trainspotters and ex-far-Leftists.
A clarification. I misunderstood and thought we were talking about Volume II. We do in fact have someone who is a "political scientist" in the academic sense of having a Ph.D in the subject. When, after Volume I was published, a second volume was announced he wrote to one of the authors offering to write something on the party (the volumes are collections of articles by individual authors on a particular subject). He received a reply indicating some interest. Then nothing. Then Volume II appeared (with some articles on some very obscure subjects, follow Imposs1904's link)). Sorry to interrupt your self-flagellation session, Alan, but this is not a question of us not being relevant. Everybody active on "the far Left" since 1956 will know of the SPGB. Nor is it us having delusions of grandeur. No history of "the far left" in that period is complete without something on us. It was a deliberate decision not to have an article on us. The offer was there but it was not accepted..
We are not mentioned not even in a footnote despite preliminary contact with one of the authors. The other must be a Trotskyist. They have ignored us, so we ignore them.
And to protest against capitalist China being allowed to provide a statue of the man whose views have nothing in common with theirs. When I lived in Luxemburg I used to take visiting comrades to Trier which is not far away. What struck me about the Marx museum (Marx Haus) was that there was no pro-Leninist propaganda there. This was because it was run by a foundation associated with the German Social Democratic Party, which enabled it to be more objective. Taking a gift from a country like China could endanger this. It should have been refused, just as permission should have been refused to the Russian government to erect that monstrosity on Marx's grave at Highgate Cemetry
I just checked and I see that the referendum mentioned in that 2002 article from the Socialist Standard was lost and that there's going to be another referendum in May:https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/08/irelands-government-approves-bill-paving-way-for-abortion-referendumThe sort of referendum in which Socialist Party members in the Republic (and there are some) have a free hand?
That's the way all coops eventually end up if they last any length of time. As the French Marxist Jules Guesde put it in 1910:
Quote:To pretend that you can go in for anything but capitalism in a capitalist society is really an unheard-of folly. General laws, born out of the form of property, impose themselves, and those people who want to build oases in the desert cannot escape those laws; the oasis will be swept by the simoom just as the desert is. And the oasis in this case is the co-operative, forced to bow before commercial or mercantile necessities. I know that you can remedy this evil partly by confederating your societies, and I congratulate you for entering upon and persevering in this road; but, once more, whatever you do upon co-operative ground, you cannot help being governed by all the laws which determine and regulate production and exchange in the society of profit of to-day.Dave B wrote:Interesting but symbolic communication is not the same as abstract thinking, i.e. thinking about something in the absence of its physical presence made possible by words as names/symbols for things and ideas. I don't think this experiment shows (or claimed to show) that dogs are capable of this. I only raised this (apart, that is, of course of Bentham's connection with the theory of animal rights) becaue I was reading Cat Sense by John Bradshaw which disusses the same issue in relation to cats and comes to the conclusion that they can't think abstractly like humans can. In fact, no other animal can, even if humans can communicate with them by means of (concrete) symbols and many of them can amongst themselves and to other animals.
Dave B wrote:Dogs have also beaten the chimps when it comes to vocabulary.They can also do the abstract thinking stuff.So they can be shown a picture of a red carrot and told to go and get it from the next room from a larger jumble of rubber toys etc.Is this really abstract thinking or is it conditioned behaviour? And if it is abstract thinking how is it different from getting a dog to smell some scent and setting it off to find it?
More added. Click on title to read.
Quote:Turgenev's Virgin Soil, July 1965 The maxims of Enoch Powell, August 1965 The Job of Governing, August 1966 The Failure of Reforms, February 1978 Debate with Liberal Party (Guildford), April 1978 The case against CND, June 1982 "The Struggle", December 1983 Is the Marxian theory of history still relevant?, February 1984 Socialism and the Left, January 1986 Labour's head-banging exercise, July 1989 Government or Democracy?, May 2001 A challenge to the unions, September 2002 The fall of Berlin, September 2002 The Last Conflict, December 2006Thanks for pointing this out. I know why this happened (the link changed between message #1 of 30 January and message #2 of 24 February where it works). It's now been corrected. To save time, here's a direct link:https://www.marxists.org/archive/lawrence/1what_socialism.htm
There's a fault in the link to the last item (a review of his novel about a possible way that socialism might come about). This one works:https://www.marxists.org/archive/lawrence/last_conflict.htm
Capitalist society is still based on the class monopoly over the means of wealth production with production for profit and all the attendant problems this causes for wage and salary workers in particular and for humanity in general. And socialism, or the common ownership of the means of production with production solely for use and directly to satisfy people's needs, remains the only way-out.The only change we would make in relation to that 1946 article is that the further development of the productive resources at the disposable of society since then has meant that the implementation of the principle "from each according to their abilities, to each according to the needs" is more practicable than ever.
Marx's view of Jeremy Bentham is here:https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/fi/vol02/no10/marx.htm
Quote:Had I the courage of my friend Heinrich Heine, I should call Mr. Jeremy a genius of bourgeois stupidity.
