ALB
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Sympo wrote:"A bag of the same weight of small potatoes would have the same value as a bag of larger ones."Does this mean that a bag of 10 large potatoes has the same value as a bag of 10 small potatoes?
How could it since 10 small potatoes can't weigh the same as 10 large ones, can they?Incidentally, to complicate things, commodities do not generally exchange at their labour-time values but tend to sell at what Marx called their "price of production" which is the monetary cost of producing them + a markup for the average rate of profit.
Vivak Shori has sent a message via a third person that 'he is too busy working to reply'. Too busy, no doubt, thinking up some more bullshit.
ALB wrote:I challenged him to put his money where his mouth was and to bet that massive deflation (falling prices, yet higher unemployment, food and other shortages, debtors prisons, etc) would happen within the 2-5 years he predicted against my bet that it wouldn't. ….. I've since emailed the organisers offering to debate him … in 5 years time on "Why the economic system did not collapse".As the 5 years are now up and capitalism is still here I'm trying to contact him to arrange this debate.
14 April, 2017: Added to the Edgar Hardcastle Internet Archive:Words and Deeds, January 1923 Marxism today, September 1967 Marx's conception of socialism (part 1), July 1983 Marx's conception of socialism (part 2), August 1983The original transcriptions were done by Imposs1904 for his Socialist Standard Past & Present blog.
A bag of the same weight of small potatoes would have the same value as a bag of larger ones. That wasn't the distinction I was making. It was between a bag of selected potatoes and a bag of not selected ones.You are the one who said this was a silly thread.
Of course it takes time to sort out bigger potatoes from smaller ones. It's a question of time not weight.
If bigger potatoes are sold together they would be have more value than a bag of potatoes of all sizes due to the extra labour involved in picking them out …
alanjjohnstone wrote:Should the Party perhaps begin to focus more on them when it comes to contesting elections? If at this stage our aim is political education isn't a good place to begin is at the start…the lowest level?No, not a good idea. For a number of reasons. Rather the opposite: focus on elections to national parliaments which are real contests for power. True, at the moment we contest elections mainly to publicise the case for socialism but parish councils? They have very limited powers (bus shelters, footpaths, allotments, where to place litter bins). This isn't even reformism. Its sub-reformism. Nothing wrong with it but, since we socialists are so few, we should leave that work to others while we spend our time concentrating on spread the idea of socialism. There are plenty of non-socialists who can make good parish councillors (better than we could).Actually, the Party has contested parish council elections on a couple of occasions. Seaham Town Council has the legal status of a parish council and we stood a candidate for it in 2003 and 2007 but only because there were district council elections on the same day covering the same area. Here is the result for Deneside Ward in 2003. There were 5 candidates for the 6 councillors, 5 from the Labour Party and one from us. The result was: Labour 390, 386, 372, 367 and 333 (all elected) Socialist 216. But what on Earth would comrade Steve Colborn have done if he had been elected?I believe the Monster Raving Loony Party is pursuing the policy Alan is floating, with mixed success:http://www.midsussextimes.co.uk/news/crime/safe-dumped-in-bizarre-fly-tipping-incident-1-6800947http://www.worcesternews.co.uk/news/7633008._Loony__row_over_parish_vacancy/.
Letter published in today's Weekly Worker:
Quote:BrandingAs the Socialist Party candidate in Guildford West in this May’s Surrey county council elections, I note that Paul Demarty is urging workers there to vote for the Labour candidate and his pathetic slogan of “Say no to 4.99% council tax increases” (‘The Socialist Party’s decision to stand candidates in May is delusional’, April 6).The Militant Tendency, (standing as Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition), has a candidate in Staines for these elections, but he is standing on the ‘transitional demand’ of capitalism in a slump without austerity, whereas we are standing on the socialist ‘maximum programme’ of the common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production, with production solely for use and distribution according to needs. The Socialist Party is also standing candidates in Kent and in East Sussex.Adam BuickSocialist Party of Great BritainLocal Sussex paper lists candidates standing for East Sussex County Council:http://www.sussexexpress.co.uk/news/politics/lewes-county-council-election-candidates-revealed-1-7901930
A result of the last time they brought about "regime change":https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/10/libya-public-slave-auctions-un-migrationMaybe that's what they want in Syria too: no state just war lords as the price of depriving Russia of a naval base in the Mediterranean.
No, there used to be an organisation called the Syndicalist Workers Federation and there are still some classical Syndicalists about somewhere.Last year someone forwarded an email from Robert Turnbull about his forthcoming book on Ablett which gives more information on him:
Quote:Climbing Mount Sinai Noah Ablett 1883/1935 Climbing Mount Sinai is the first full length biographical study, of one of the best known and also controversial personalities to emerge from the South Wales coalfield in the era preceding WW1, an era of unparalleled industrial militancy in which the subject of my book played a leading role. The book tells the story of Noah Ablett from his early days as a boy preacher in the Rhondda coalfield, to his rise to prominence within the tight knit coalfield communities of South Wales, and his emergence as an uncompromising agitator, not only against the coal owners of South Wales, but also his own union, where his uncompromising brand of revolutionary class warfare, brought him into sharp conflict with the moderate consensus politics of William Abraham or Mabon, a liberal who had led the South Wales miners since 1875. The conflict with Mabon and what he represented, would lead to one of the most famous pamphlets in labour history, namely the Miners Next Step of 1912, which called for workers control of industry, in the wake of the bitter Cambrian Combine strike of 1910/11. Although very much a collaborative effort, the Miners Next Step is perhaps the most famous statement of Ablett's rejection of the parliamentary road to socialism as "No better than an ant heap on the way to becoming a dunghill" The book also concentrates on Ablett's time at Ruskin College Oxford, where he was instrumental in helping to form the Plebs League, to agitate for independent working class education, or IWCE, a movement which began with the famous Ruskin College strike of 1909, and eventually spread all over the country The study also reveals Ablett's previously unknown role in the Hands off Russia Movement in 1919 and 1920 in which he spoke alongside such leading figures as Tom Mann Using newspaper sources from the era and information from members of Ablett's family, including original essays, written during his time at Ruskin,the book also details his descent into chronic alcoholism, as the revolutionary tide of 1917 began to ebb, and his subsequent removal from the executive of both the South Wales Miners Federation and the Central College in 1926, a development which the author believes finally put paid to any lingering notions of Ablett regaining the stature that he once had. The book concludes with Ablett's tragic death from cancer in 1935, aged just 52, and contains a moving obituary written by Jim Griffith's later to be President of the Fed. I hope the book will appeal to labour historians and the general reader alike.We are trying to get a review copy. Maybe copies will be available at the talk if you can get one for us.
The more I think about it, and I'm not normally into conspiracy theories, the more I think that there is something odd about that chemical attack. It had no advantage for the Syrian government, which was just about to be rehabiltated, and every advantage for those states that want "regime change" there, i.e the installation of a pro-West regime. My betting would be that the Turkish intelligence services would have been more likely to have staged it than the Syrian government.
John Pozzi wrote:Stat money like US$ signify taxes on the product of labor to pay the interest to capitalist banks like the Fed.No it's not. The workers who produced "the product of labour" have already been deprived of a part of it which goes in the first instance to their immediate employers as surplus value. Out of this come all property incomes (rent, interest, profit) as well as taxes paid to the State. Interest is only a share of surplus value, already taken from the workers, so why should they worry if their exploiters have to share some of it with those who lent them money?Incidentally, I still don't see how State fiat money involves interest. But I see we've managed to coral the two of them on to this thread, set up to deal with currency crank arguments.
