ALB
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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.This would be an interesting development if it actually happens:https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/03/civilians-organise-human-shield-protect-kurdish-afrin-180311163553611.htm
An interesting question from the point of view of the history of ideas (irrespective of whether or not they are sensible or practicable) is why the De Leonist SLP embraced the idea of labour-time vouchers while the SPGB didn't.We know why the SLP did as it was founded by German immigrants to the USA (refugees from the Anti-Socialist Law of 1878) who brought the idea within them where it was popular (and why Marx used the scheme for illustrative purposes). In fact, for them, it was the socialist method of distribution, not even a step on the way to free access. The European Social Democrats weren't committed to it so much if at all and certainly not as the end, and that's where we come from. Another possible influence on us could be William Morris and the Socialist League, a previous breakaway from the SDF.Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme, though available in German from 1891, wasn't translated into English until 1933 which, used by the rulers of Russia to try to justify the continuance of the wages system there, revived the idea. It also caused a problem for the SLP and eventually led them to accepting free access, without money or vouchers, as the goal with labour-time vouchers as a transitional measure.
Imposs1904 has put up an article from a 1920 Socialist Standard which shows that we rejected labour-time vouchers as long go as that:http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/how-shall-we-share-out-1920.html
