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robbo203 wrote:

I would not go along with this idea of some kind of mass cull, or weeding out, of non active members  at all, Alan. I think its a terrible idea to be perfectly honest. I think it would be utterly devastating in its pschological impact on the Party.  The loss of morale would be incalculable  and it would set in motion a vicious circle of decline.  (….)The fact that many members are not active does not mean they are not socialists and fully entitled to remain members,  The focus is completely wrong here. All organisations display a spectrum of membership participation – from the hyperactive to the inactive. Its just a fact of life and we shouldnt expect the SPGB to be any different. What we should be looking for instead is ways to increase the particapitation rate.  Instead of looking to prune away the "dead" leaves or, more literally , the dead branches, we should be looking to see how we could encourage the green shoots of growth among the currently inactive part of the membership.

Precisely. Couldn't have put it better myself or so politely.I'm afraid, Alan, you are becoming a caricature of yourself. The good news is that, although you are a moaning minnie, you are not a cassandra.

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Brian wrote:

The returns to the survey/questionnaire, as of 15th Dec 2017, totalled 87 (41 post and 46 email).

That's good, isn't it?

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jondwhite wrote:

At the last conference when employing staff was on the agenda, I was told the party employed a member full time presumably as an IT consultant which must date to the 1990s or 2000s. I was shocked to hear this.

It seems that all sorts of urban myths about Head Office are circulating up North!  The Party never employed anybody full time in the 1990s or 2000s. That would have required a Conference resolution and the money, neither of which existed. Even the Head Office Assistant only receives travel and subsistence expenses for being there part-time, for two-and-half days a week

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Bijou Drains wrote:

I don't get to HO as often as I would like. But the last time I called in apart from ADM, I tried to get hold of information such as a list of members and contacts in the NE region. I was told by the then Head Office Assistance that no central data base for any of that information existed (I think Brian might be able to elaborate on the difficulty in getting hold of info for the current survey).

Well, you were told wrong ! It is easy to get a print-out of members in the North East and also of contacts there by North East post codes (or anywhere else, for that matter). I can do this tomorrow when I'm at HO if you still want it. Won't take 10 minutes. We are not that incompetent !Head Office supplied the Survey Committee with the addresses, as printed labels, of all members and what email addresses we had and could get for members.But to come to the point at issue, I agree that employing or engaging a non-member to do essential admin work is a non-runner for the reasons mentioned by Robbo. On the other hand, employing/engaging a Party member to do the work of General Secretary/Treasurer/Central Organiser is a sensible way forward. Whatever impression some members may have got, there is a coherent strategy. Following a Party Poll on the matter, we are investing the money from legacies surplus to immediate requirements in an investment fund (to get 5% interest instead of 0.5% in a deposit account)  with a view to using the interest towards paying a full or half timer.The only problem that remains is finding a suitable member.

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Bitcoins do have a use-value (that of being a means of payment, a store of value, and for speculation). If bitcoin transactions are going down (but are they?) this would be a fall in their use rather than their use-value. That their price is going up reflects demand for them (for these uses, mainly speculation it seems).  They don't have a "value" in the Marxian sense since they are not products of labour. Having said that, it does take a lot of time and energy for computers to "mine" them.

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mmmmmmm… not so sure about this. Training people to express more competently a mistaken view of what "socialism is.

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We seem to have jumped the gun here as while some will have more deducted from their take-home pay others will have less, so more of a "redistribution of poverty" budget:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-42358522

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Real wages are going down at the moment, so any effect could take the form of wages not going down so much. In any event, we're (supposed to be) talking about the long — and in the long run a lot of individual workers get a salary increment. Difficult to disentangle the effects and counter-effects but trade union pressure is likely to be the most decisive.

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Actually, we get cheques in the post every day. And not just from old foggies who are not online but also from others who, for security reasons, don't do online banking. On the other hand we are getting an increasing number paying by Paypal (which, incidentally, is managed by a comrade somewhere in the middle of Yorkshire) and encouraging this. I agree we ourselves should be able to make online payments but there are difficulties which the outgoing Treasurer will be able to explain. You wouldn't believe the number of hoops that we, as legally an unincorporated association, had to jump through to open an investment account.By the amount of self-flagellation that goes on here you'd think we were catholic monks or shiite muslims.

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Actually the work of Treasurer is not much more than that of any club treasuer except that there are returns that have to be made to HMRC and the Electoral Commission by deadlines otherwise we get fined (and have been). It's just that it requires someone with a liking for, or rather not disliking, money figures. Difficult to find amongst socialists. We also need suitable software, but that's easily fixed.

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

Or a combined paid position, Brian….two birds with one stone

We agree on something, Alan. Yes, a combined General Secretary/Treasurer also doing the work of the Head Office Organiser and Enquiries Committee. Paid, but not necessarily employed. That was the idea behind the Investment Committee — to provide a regular income to pay someone rather than (of course) getting a better rate of interest on our legacies.

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There's nothing new in this idea. A candidate calling for this stood against us in Battersea in the general election:http://www.wandsworthguardian.co.uk/news/15301500.The_new_Macron__Independent_hopeful_for_Battersea_calls_for_new_centrist_party/He got 1234 votes (2.2%) and lost his deposit, though he did rather better than us. But who the fuck is Chris Deerin? Sounds like some jumped-up journalist convinced of his own self-omportance. Anyway, unlike Deerin, Coghlan is putting his money (wherever it comes from) where his mouth is:https://www.ft.com/content/ec334a98-af55-11e7-aab9-abaa44b1e130Interesting (or not) act in sideshow of conventional politics, I suppose, since we have to keep up with these things on the basis of know your enemy.

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What's interesting about that list is that there are over 30 different members on it. So the volunteers are there. It is just that no one wants to be treasurer or general secretary at the moment. 

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Thanks, Dave. I thought it must have come from Anti-Dühring

Engels wrote:

…. in time to come there will no longer be any professional porters or architects, and that the man who for half an hour gives instructions as an architect will also act as a porter for a period, until his activity as an architect is once again required. A fine sort of socialism that would be—perpetuating professional porters!

It is a better quote to illustrate the point that in socialism people will no longer be tied to doing the same work all day, month in month out, year in year out. A better quote in fact than the more frequent one about hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, etc  which is less realistic (and offends our vegetarian friends).

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I have only got round to reading the first section on the elimination of hierarchy which is based on a single quote from Marx taken completely out of context:

Quote:

Equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour insofar as they are human labour in general, this secret of the expression of value can be deciphered only when the idea of human equality has already acquired firmness of a popular prejudice.

This is taken from the last paragraph of section 3 on "The Equivalent Form of Value" of the opening chapter of Capital on "Commodities". Here is the whole paragraph:

Marx wrote:

There was, however, an important fact which prevented Aristotle from seeing that, to attribute value to commodities, is merely a mode of expressing all labour as equal human labour, and consequently as labour of equal quality. Greek society was founded upon slavery, and had, therefore, for its natural basis, the inequality of men and of their labour powers. The secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because, and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered, until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities, in which, consequently, the dominant relation between man and man, is that of owners of commodities. The brilliancy of Aristotle’s genius is shown by this alone, that he discovered, in the expression of the value of commodities, a relation of equality. The peculiar conditions of the society in which he lived, alone prevented him from discovering what, “in truth,” was at the bottom of this equality

It is clear that what Marx is saying here is that Aristotle could not have worked out the concept of "equal human labour" because he was living in a society based on humans not being equal (as some were chattel slaves); this had to await the coming of a society in which all humans were regarded and accepted as being equally owners of commodities (capitalism !). It had nothing to do with any "popular prejudice" about all humans being equal in the sense of having equal capacities which you then go on (and on) to criticise as ridiculous. Which it is. That humans have different capacities is well expressed in the longstanding socialist slogan of "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs".It's annoying that you didn't give the exact source of the quote (hopefully, not because you wanted to make it difficult for your readers to track it down and discover how you have distorted it).There's another quote, this time from Engels, that you don't give a precise source for:

Engels wrote:

… a person who gives instructions as an architect for half an hour, will also push a trolley for some time, until his activity as an architect is needed once again. Fine sort of socialism that perpetuates professional pushers of trolleys!

As it's a good quote that well expresses the socialist viewpoint can you supply the source?

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