ALB
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MBellemare wrote:Not an anarchist…lol! Just pick up "The structural-anarchism manifesto" at Amazon.UK.
Yes, but what sort of anarchist? Are you a "communist anarchist" who wants to see the means of production owned and operated in common, with the abolition of production for sale, money, banks, credit, etc? Or are you one of those anarchists who envisage the abolition of the state but the continuation of a market economy in some form?
There was a light-hearted programme on BBC Radio 4 this morning about Lucian, including a mention of his satire on the christians of his day and a claim that this was an earlier version of The Live of Brian:http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0910n6sHe was a good bloke who should be better known.
Each capitalist firm making the same rate of profit is also of course an "equilibrium" position, tending to be brought about as capital flows in search of higher profits flows out of one industry and into another, but it's one which is never reached as things are changing all the time. Nevertheless it's the tendency.
The meeting did take please yesterday evening, though it took us 20 minutes to get past security. 15 people there including 5 members. Discussion more about Russian Revolution than socialist revolution, with them challenging the view that it should be judged by its results and not by what it said it was doing. Ironically, they think Russia under Stalin was a system of State slavery, i.e something worse than capitalism. Ironic because that makes its outcome even worse. We said it was still capitalism because it was based on wage-labour and that the result of the anti-feudal Russian Revolution of which the Bolshevik coup was a point had been to spread the wages system and production for profit in Russia, and that in event the Russian Revolution, as a minority-led revolution that led to minority class rule, was not a model to follow. The discussion on our (and Marx's later) position was: what was more likely and sensible — using the ballot box or civil war? A no-brainer of course. Not that they practice what they preach, i.e weapon training was not part of their University and they're all in the Labour Party.Three of us stayed on afterwards for a drink in their canteen. Discussion on Chris Knight's theory of the origin of our species. Apparently they accept it. Personally I think (and said) that Chris Harman won the argument with Knight, despite being an SWPer.
Not the AV committee in particular but more than one committee. Same applies to Socialist Standard Committee , Publications Committee, Election Committee. Best to have just one committee in charge of actually putting stuff on. That was my point.
Vin, please lay off the Internet Committee. Like yourself, they are volunteers doing work for the Party in their free time, key work actually, such as maintaining and running this site which is taking the place of the Standard as our flagship. Continually sniping at them doesn't help. The same applies to those running our Facebook page.In any event, what you are suggesting would open the door to chaos. It makes sense to have one committee in charge of the whole site, not individual committees or individual members adding stuff that might not necessarily fit into the whole. The same principle applies to the computers at Head Office: only one person can upload new programmes. That's the efficient way of doing things.
In practice the price of a commodity oscillates due to short term changes in supply and demand not around its value but around its price of production I.e its cost of production plus the average rate of profit. It corresponds to what Adam Smith called it's "natural price", its longer run equilibrium price
I don't think that he was in fact in any Trot organisation only that he toyed with Trotskyist ideas after reading Deutscher biography of him. Personally, I can't understand why anyone should be impressed with Trotsky's life. It was a complete political failure.
I see Peter Joseph seems to be suggesting that the change (to a world without money) will come through the spread of an "apolitical subculture".
Funny you should mention Marx because there is a connexion. When Marx moved in "Young Hegelian" circles in the early 1840s before he became a revolutionary socialist and was just a radical democrat and atheist one of his associates, indeed influences, was Bruno Bauer. As Marx moved to becoming a socialist they fell out and Marx wrote a couple of polemics against him, The Holy Family and The Jewish Question. Bauer went on to develop the view that Jesus was not a historical figure but a myth. According to this, he was the first to do so:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Bauer#Argument_against_the_existence_of_JesusAccording to Maximilien Rubel and Margaret Manale in Marx With Myth:
Quote:During the winter 1855-56 Marx had several visits with his estranged friend Bruno Bauer, who was spending some time in England. Marx described Bauer as a light-hearted old gentleman, a confirmed bachelor as always, and hazarded the guess that Bauer wanted to introduce 'scientific theology', now dead in Germany, in England.I suppose that shows Marx's lack of interest in Bauer's theories but at least shows he was aware of them.
It is absurd to claim that Lucian confirms the historical existence of Jesus. All he confirms is that christians existed (which nobody denies) and believed that Jesus had existed (a belief nobody denies either). If Lucian had been more acquainted with what the christians believed Jesus had done (wine into water, curing the blind, raising the dead, walking on water) he would have had the same fun, as a sceptic of such claims and religions, in taking the mickey out of them as he did in "The Death of Peregrinus" and "Alexander The Oracle Monger". He knew the type.My nexrt witness is Paul of Tarsus who certainly existed and was in fact the real founder of christianity as a doctrine. As someone who spoke Greek he would have been well acquainted with saviour religions and turned the dissident Jewish sect that christianity started as into one. He lived at the same time as Jesus was supposed to have and was in Jerusalem at the same time that Jesus was supposed to be active as a miracle-worker. Yet he never mentions him as a real person, only as someone who appeared to him in a vision. See:http://www.news24.com/MyNews24/Is-Jesus-Christ-a-myth-Part-3-20150622Why did he not mention Jesus as a person? Here's someone who could be a key witness but he says nothing. Talk about the absence of evidence !
