ALB
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Just looked up the author and it's nothing to do with us. The present Chinese government might be embarrassed too. See here.
Stan Parker put together a collection of articles under that title produced on our photocopier but it wasn't 381 pages.
The Notice of Poll was published on Tuesday. Nominations have to be by midday next Friday (6 April). In the meantime members of the branches involved are collecting the signatures of 10 local electors required to stand. Those for Barnes have already been collected and are due to be handed in on Tuesday.
Mike Foster wrote:And we need banners for people to muster under!Exactly. As Clause 8 of our Declaration of Principles puts it:
Quote:The Socialist Party of Great Britain, therefore, enters the field of political action determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist, and calls upon the members of the working class of this country to muster under its banner to the end that a speedy termination may be wrought to the system which deprives them of the fruits of their labour, and that poverty may give place to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom.Sad that some members want to muck about with the wording of this fine, rousing historical statement. Of course everything and anything is up for discussion but, hopefully, they will get the same response as to their attempt last year to abandon the publication of the Socialist Standard.
acke wrote:I have see so many web pages of socialist and communist movements who advocate more or less the redistribution of the current wealth. Well – some years ago the total wealth of High Net Worth Individuals (those with investable assets of 30.000.000 or more) was mere 50 trillion$. If we distribute this walth to the 5 billions of the most impoverished men and women then we get one-time injection of 10.000$ per capita. This is small amount for one time injection and it does not solve the problem of poverty. 10.000 is secondary education or higher education or housing or cost of raising children – only one thing and not all of then.Good point but Socialists (as opposed to naive and/or confused reformists) have long ridiculed the idea that we want to divide up the wealth of the wealthy, as this passage from a pamphlet from 1876 shows :
Quote:Concerning the division of money, I must relate an anecdote invented to ridicule people who are represented to have such intentions. One day in 1848, as the story goes, Baron Rothschild took a walk on the Common of Frankfort-on-the-Main. Two labourers met him and accosted him thus: “Baron, you are a rich man; we want to divide with you.” Baron Rothschild, not the least puzzled, took out his purse good-humouredly and answered: “Certainly! We can do that business on the spot. The account is easily made. I own 40 millions of florins; there are 40 millions of Germans. Consequently each German has to receive one florin; here is your share;” and giving one florin to each of the labourers, who looked at their money quite confused, he walked off smiling. This teaches that the division of money is but an idle invention.What socialists want is the common ownership of the means of wealth production, so that they can be used to produce things and provide services to directly meet people's needs. Today, given the current level of technology, to produce enough to go over to the principle of "from each according to their ability, to each according to theirs needs".
It is unfair to describe Prakash as a rightwing defenders of capitalism. He's a communist/socialist in our sense as this article of his shows:http://prakashrp-1.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/on-definition-of-communism.htmlThe problem is that he wants recognition as the "Originator" of the idea, a throwback to the the pre-Marx days of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. It's infuriating arguing with him as he just keeps saying "I am the Great I Am".It must have been just as infuriating to have argued with them.
I think the point he is trying to mke is that if most people recognise that money does not measure useflness, i.e that the money price of a product is not a measure of its real worth to someone or to people in general, why don't they then conclude that the way to end this is to establish a communist society in which there woud be no money to distort things. The $64,000 dollar quesion of course.
I apologise profusely, but this correspondence must send now. I wish you the best of success in your endeavours.
We noticed the same thing about his speech at Occupy St Pauls in London in 2011 as those Trotskyists. See:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/occupy-movement?page=9#comment-288
Professor Aumann wrote:Prof. Aumann apologises profusely, but he must end this correspondence now. He wishes you the best of success in your endeavours.That's an understandable reply.
David Harvey's view have been discussed many times in this forum (just type his name into the search box). Some of his stuff his good, e.g his 2007 book The Limits to Capital and this from another of his books the Enigma of Capital:
Quote:Capitalism will never fall on its own. It will have to be pushed. The accumulation of capital will never cease. It will have to be stopped. The capitalist class will never willingly surrender its power. It will have to be dispossessed.But while he explains the macoeconomics of capitalism well enough he falls down when it comes to its microeconomics. The Critisticuffs group have made a similar criticism of Harvey not understanding Marx's theory of value:https://critisticuffs.org/texts/david-harvey/How could he, when as they point, he ends up advocating a form of money that cannot be accumulated, what he calls "oxidisable" money? As they quote him:
Quote:if you want to prevent class formation, if you want to prevent the individual appropriation of social value, then you would have to come up with a money form that is anti accumulation. Marx says that gold and silver are the money commodities because they are not oxidisable. […] They maintain their character. You can accumulate value, social power. And we see what happens in societies. But if you had a money form that dissolved, that is oxidisable, we would end up with a very different kind of society. You would have a money form that would aid circulation but that would not facilitate accumulation. (David Harvey on Platypus panel Radical Interpretations of the Present Crisis, 14 November 2012and
Quote:So we’ve got to change the monetary system – either tax away any surpluses people are beginning to get or come up with a monetary system which dissolves and cannot be stored, like air miles (http://www.redpepper.org.uk/david-harvey-interview-the-importance-of-postcapitalist-imagination).Here's a comment on this from the author of the article on blockchains in the December Socialist Standard:
Quote:Seems to me this is a bit similar to the Facebook 'crisis', where the platform has been exploited for unforeseen purposes, and that the solution is also the same: close the gaps to prevent it. If a block is only 80 bytes and therefore it can't store pictures directly but only links (leaving aside the legal grey area of whether a link to child porn is itself technically child porn), the solution is to prevent links being stored in a block, or prevent them being followed. Any decent programmer could write that code in less than five minutes, I should think. The idea that this hack suddenly renders all cryptocurrencies de facto illegal sounds like absurd hysteria aimed at grabbing headlines, or maybe shorting bitcoin stock or otherwise discrediting it, if that's not too conspiratorial, but – like Facebook – the situation does remind us that it's naive to expect capitalist companies to police themselves.robbo203 wrote:The above all sounds encouraging and positive. How can it be linked up with recent efforts looking into the Party's reorganisation. What is happening about the latter?Haven't you seen the agenda for Conference. Apart fom a couple of joke motions fom Lancaster, that's all thst's going to be discussed.
