[ALB]

You've missed the point. The objection is not to you (or anyone else) criticising what we do stand for, but to you asking us to defend something you attribute to us but that we don't stand for (i.e.to defend something that doesn't exist). You can of course criticise that idea too but don't attribute it to us and don't expect us to defend it.

[ALB]

Good point, Robbo. It is a common mistake to imagine that socialism will substitute democratic, and therefore collective, decision-making for all decisions concerning the production and distribution of wealth. Obviously this will be he way that major decisions will be taken, but decisions as to what to take from the distribution centres can be left to the individual and an efficient system of stock control can ensure that these centres are always stocked with what people want based on what they have taken over a given period. In fact with this information being passed on from suppliers to their suppliers and ultimately to the producers, the production and distribution of consumer goods can be more or less self-regulating, a bit like the market system is supposed to be and to a large extent is, except that the suppliers and producers will be responding to what people have indicated they want by what they take rather than to what they buy out of their restricted income.

[ALB]

Prakash RP wrote:

' The answer to your question is no I don't. I don't think Alan K does either. ' ( ALB #59 )Should I take it to mean that you don't think that ' all my points are " logical mistakes " ' ( Alan's comment #44 ), that ' Marx's concept of money is wrong, and that economists that belong to the marginal-utility school are right ' ( Alan's comment #44 ) ? If you say ' yes ', I think I can also take it to mean that you approve of my claim to have presented humanity with the first and only proof of the thesis that money cannot measure the worth of a commodity, OK ?

Just because I don't think that all your points are logical mistakes doesn't mean that I therefore think none of your points are. For you to conclude that I do would indeed be a logical mistake of the simplest kind (some A are B, therefore all A are .I am afraid I don't think you should be awarded a Nobel Prize or that statutes should be erected in your honour all over the world for the great service you imagine you have done to humanity by repeating something that has been known for over 2000 years.

[ALB]

It is very near to Head Office which can in fact be seen on the first photo if you look carefully through the tree. Head Office is the next shop front down to the right after the Mexican restaurant. At the other end of the second photo you can see the shop where we buy milk and chocolate biscuits. There must be some other photos and videos out there in the media which show our front more clearly.This has happened before when a few years ago a black man was shot by the police in the bar on the other side of Head Office. Every time this incident was mentioned on TV it showed the bar with Head Office next to it.Who said Clapham High Street wasn't a good street to have our office in? It's going to stop the delivery of the reprint of our From Capitalism to Socialism pamphlet today, though.

[ALB]

The answer to your question is no I don't. I don't think Alan K does either. 

[ALB]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

Listen Marxist's Myth of the Proletariat seemed to want to address this. https://www.marxists.org/archive/bookchin/1969/listen-marxist.htm#h3

David Ramsay Steele, when he was a socialist, wrote a brilliant reply to this:http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/listen-anarchist.htmlIronically, later he was himself to become an anarchist, a leading anarcho-capitalist writer and polemicist in fact.

[ALB]

TheMightyYoghourt wrote:

There is scarcely a landscape in Britain that might be described as 'natural'. 

That's true but depends on what is meant by "natural". You seem to be using it in the sense of what it would be like in the absence of human intervention or indeed of humans. In which case most of Britain would be forest. The present landscape of Britain is the result of human intervention over more than 4000 years. As we put it in our pamphlet Ecology and Socialism:

Quote:

Although the biosphere is one big ecosystem, it is still possible to distinguish various sub-systems within it on the basis of the different climatic and physical conditions that exist in different parts of the world. For the land area of the globe, ecologists have distinguished a number of such "biomes" as they call them. These range from the tundra of the Arctic through the coniferous and deciduous forests and steppes to the savannah and tropical rain forests of the regions near the equator. To each of these physical and climatic conditions there corresponds a stable ecosystem which evolves to its "climax" through a series of successive stages. This stable climax will be the situation where the amount of food produced by the plant life is sufficient, after taking account of the plants' own respiration needs, to meet on a sustainable basis the food energy requirements of all the animal life-forms within the system. It will be in fact the situation which makes optimum use, in terms of sustaining all the life-forms within the system, of the Sun's light rays falling on the area. Under present climatic conditions, for most of Europe this stable climax, in the absence of human intervention, would be the deciduous forest which developed after the last Ice Age and which existed in Britain in untouched form till about 4500 years ago. If humans were to withdraw from the British Isles it is this forest that would tend to develop again within a few centuries.

But what would be the advantage in that?The aim should be to establish a stable global ecosystem which includes humans. In any event, even if/though it is humans (in the abstract) who have messed things up, we are the only species capable of putting things right. Again as we put it in the pamphlet:

Quote:

As the only consciously-acting life-form within the biosphere, humans ought to act as the biosphere's "brain", consciously regulating its functioning in the interest of present and future generations. But before humans can hope to play this role we must first integrate our own activities into a sustainable natural cycle on a planetary scale. This we can only do within the framework of a world socialist society in which the Earth and its natural and industrial resources have become the common heritage of all humanity.

[ALB]

Peter Joseph in his latest book also employs the concept of "classism", as a parallel to sexism and racism, as discrimination, in terms of what they consume and how they are regarded, against people from the (manual) working class or "lower class" as he sometimes calls them. He of course knows the way out (a free access society of plenty) but I wonder what those who think this can be rectified within the wages-profits-money system that is capitalism envisage as the way-out. It would have to be something like equal wages or an equal income for everyone, but that's not going to happen, for purely economic reasons, under capitalism. So the attempt is bound to fail, in the meantime stirring up sections of the broader, properly understood working class against each other. We need to oppose,in fact be hostile to, Id(iot)pol.

[ALB]

Thanks but I'm not all that much the wiser. If I've understood the acadamese correctly it is the theory that there are degrees of privilege and underprivilege amongst the majority class in society (those forced to try to sell their working ability for a wage or salary to live) in a hierarchy with white "middle class" males at the top and black handicapped "working class" lesbians at the bottom and the rest in between. And that the solution is to redistribute amongst them the artificial scarcity that capitalism imposes by bringing up those at the bottom at the expense of those at the top so that everybody ends up "socially equal". Hardly a formula for working class (in the proper sense) unity. Just the opposite in fact.  But what about socialism, where with the artificial scarcity gone, everyone can have access on the same basis to what they need in terms of food, education, health care, enjoyable work, etc in return for contributing what they are able to.

[ALB]

Here's an explanation from one of them as to why the anarcho-communists in the AF left (from Libcom forum thread on this):

Quote:

The AF's steady degeneration into identity politics and its public 'acceptance' of concepts such as privilege and intersectional theory was also never resolved. It should be clear that at no point was any formal decision made by the Anarchist Federation to endorse ideas such as intersectionality, privilege theory or to move to a more identity-based politics. However, official AF website and facebook posts have since been written as if the AF is indeed such an organisation. Those of us who criticised these ideas were told we needed to go away and write a proper critique of privilege theory. However, when we did this, we were met with open hostility, immediately attacked and denounced – it was also implied by some that we were borderline racist, misogynistic and homophobic. Meanwhile, a number of the pro-privilege/intersectionality people threatened 'mass' resignations if the critique was ever published on the website.So, we stepped back for fear this would lead to a split in the organisation. This was a serious error on our part because it basically meant giving free reign to people who had little conception of anarchist communism as it had always been understood in the ACF/AF. Now, a couple of years down the line, this increasing orientation towards identity based politics has pretty much shat all over what was once a fine revolutionary class struggle anarchist communist organisation.

I suppose the lesson of this is that, if you want to maintain yourself as a revolutionary organisation, you need to be careful as to who you admit into membership with voting righst, as we do despite being mocked by Andrew Neil and others for having an "entrance exam".Incidentally, does anybody know what "privilege and intersectional theory" isactly. I know they are to do with class-dividing, (mis)identity politics, so-called Idpol, but what exactly?

[ALB]

Here's a comment from a comrade on that quite good article on Bitcoin by, of all people, the section of Militant who stayed loyal to Ted Grant (and didn't try to usurp our name):

Quote:

Yes, that’s pretty good though they ruin it near the end where they try to tie it in to their usual stuff about overproduction, glutted markets, etc. It says a lack of profitable investment outlets means that capitalists are pumping their money into Bitcoin, but there are of course plenty of profitable investment outlets and the people putting their money into crypto-currencies in the main are IT geeks and semi-professional gamblers not real capitalists.

 

[ALB]

There have also been about 10 who, after receiving the three free issues, have taken out a paying 12 month subscription.

[ALB]

Fourteen more (via Imposs's blog).  Click on title to read:

Quote:

4 January, 2018: Added to the Edgar Hardcastle Internet Archive:The Real Russia: Its Present Position and Tendencies, February 1925 Catholicism and Socialism: Mr. Wheatley's Lie, April 1925 Socialism and the Economic "Experts", May 1930 Incentive Under Socialism, November 1940 The Devil is Convalescing, May 1943 The Purpose of Devaluation, December 1949 Trade Unions and the Cost of Living, February 1963 Cures for Strikes, April 1963 Throwing Stones in the Russian Glasshouse, July 1963 Can we trust the population experts?, February 1964 Russian Diamonds, July 1964 The General Strike 40 Years On, May 1966 Pipes of Peace?, April 1982 Failure of Keynesian policies, April 1983

[ALB]

Came across this Trotskyist take on this (it's the Militant lot that stayed with Ted Grant and are in the Labour Party) from last year. It makes some good points but on the whole is not that good. But at least they are not prepared to unite to try to get it:http://www.marxist.com/universal-basic-income-utopian-dream-or-libertarian-nightmare.htm

[ALB]

Your summary is generally fair but there are a couple of amendments:

you wrote:

We do not promote vegetarianism or veganism but we do acknowledge certain value in them, that for the well-being of ourselves and of our planet, we require to reduce our consumption of meat and curtail livestock farming.

I don't think "we" do acknowledge this (and certainly not for "veganism" which I don't think we've discussed). This makes the mixed meat/vegetable diet most people practise seem less "valuable". I'm not sure that even most vegetarians would want to actually say that as it makes them appear holier than thou and gets ordinary people's backs up (as it did here). Best to simply say something like:

Quote:

We do not promote vegetarianism or veganism or any other particular diet. Choice of diet is a private matter,

As to this

you wrote:

1.  meat-eating is not an efficient method of food production2. that there is very good evidence that it is not nutritious or healthy

There is no evidence whatsoever than eating meat is "not nutritious or healthy".As to (1), to be pedantic, meating-eating is not a method of food production.  Once this has been edited to "raising animals to eat is not …", this is not universally true either, as was mentioned many times in the discussion when it was pointed out that sheep and goats can more efficiently convert what grows on certain land into food better than agriculture could. Also, that chickens and pigs can eat stuff that humans can't, or don't, eat which would otherwise go to waste or to mice, rats and insects.Anyway, happy to close this thread. I agree we're going round in circles. In fact, since we too are animals I'm not sure whether Marxist Animalism was supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing. Do not discuss.

[Author]

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