[ALB]

Vin wrote:

ALB wrote:

The big difference of course is how to get there. Nearly all these groups favour mass armed insurrection with a vanguard party somewhere in the background. And they can't agree amongst themselves on forming a single organisation.

Driven by a distrust in the electoral system

And in part also no doubt by nostalgia for the overthrow of the Provisional Government in Russia in November 1917.

[ALB]

Here's a flavour of that old pamphlet of Paul Breeze's (later an Independent councillor in Stoke):https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/these-are-undeniable-facts.html

[ALB]

The opposers of the motion are two well-known capitalist apologists:

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Dr Madsen Pirie : President of the neoliberal think tank the Adam Smith Institute. Madsen pioneered the UK government privatisation agenda in the 1980s. Rory Broomfield: Director of the Freedom Association and the Better Off Out campaign. Rory regularly appears as a talking head on news channels including the BBC, ITV, and Sky News.

We know these people and their views since we've debated against both the Adam Smith Institute and the Freedom Association. The other proposer is a member of Momentum and the Labour Party.

[ALB]

West London had a visit from a 4-member delegation from them at our meeting last night, Who exactly are they? Ex-trots or what? I read through issue 90 of "The Platypus Review" that they handed out. Difficult to read because of the lay-out — a broadsheet version of the ICC's "World Revolution". One of the writers was supporting the US Green Party.Anyway it made for an interesting discussion. They are thinking of organising one of their panels on "What is Socialism?" We said we be interested in having one of our members on it. Not sure we will get an invitation after we told them we didn't consider ourselves part of "the Left".

[ALB]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

A 'neutral' voice is made to say:

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UK economist Gerard Lyons said focusing on extreme wealth "does not always give the full picture" and attention should be paid to "making sure the economic cake is getting bigger".

That Lyons character is far from being neutral. He's a Free Trade Fanatic who wants all tariffs to be abolished. And of course a Barmy Brexiteer but then they're ruling the roost at the moment.

[ALB]

Isn't Capitalist Pig writing from the USA (I could be wrong on this), where there are no borders from one side of the Continent to the other? And isn't the USA famously " a nation of immigrants"?

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Wittgenstein, Shitgenstein. Can't understand a word of what he wrote. Worse than Hegel. Maybe the Emporer has no clothes.

[ALB]

The latest rat to leave the sinking ship is Tristram Hunt, author of a hostile biography of Frederick Engels. He is leaving parliament to take a higher paid job as head of the Victoria and Albert Museum. In doing so he shows two things.First, that many Labour MPs are just careerists. With Labour doomed to lose the next General Election there's no chance of any of them becoming a government Minister until at least 2025, i.e. for at least 8 years. Those who can change career — and as an academic  Hunt can — are doing so. The rest are going to have to stick it out. But even without a minister's salary the money's not that bad..Second, at least he practises what he preaches. Under the headline ‘We’re furiously pro-business, Labour MP tells private sector’, the Times (9 February 2015) reported him as saying:

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I’m enormously enthusiastic about businessmen and women making money, delivering shareholder return, about making profit.

And historians.

[ALB]

Yet more (click on title to read):The Communist Party of Australia, October 1921 The Communist Party. Communists in a hurry, December 1921 The Collapse of Capitalism, February 1923 The Communists and the Labour Party alliance, March 1922 The Evolution of W. Gallacher, February 1923 Mass action or intelligent organisation, March 1923 Jingo Communists, October 1923 The Communist Wreckers, March 1924 The latest criticism of Karl Marx, March 1925 Should the Workers Fight for Russia?, April 1928 Should Socialists vote for Labour candidates?, September 1928 Russia: Land of High Profits, September 1930 International Organisation (Socialist-Communist Party of France), November 1930 The Socialist Party versus the New Party, July 1931 Capitalism's crises. Well-known Communist discovers Marx, February 1932 One for the Currency Cranks, November 1932 The Situation in Italy. Is Fascism Cracking?, March 1934 Pawns in Abyssinia, August 1935 Review of 'The British Communist Party' by L.J. Macfarlane, June 1966 Review of 'Marxist Economics' by E. Mandel, April 1967 Capitalism in Eastern Europe, October 1969The ones from the 1920s on the early Communist Party are still relevant today as the same "tactics" are being advocated by modern-day Leninists and Trotskyists. The first one deals with a mistaken definition of "proletariat" which is still held by various Left Communist groups.Part of the concluding paragraph of the 1928 one on Russia is interesting and perhaps surprising:

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In conclusion, it may be as well to point out that this is in no sense a condemnation of the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. Our criticism was and, is that they claimed to be able to achieve the impossible. Certain definite tasks lay before them and have been achieved. They brought Russia out of the war, exposed the purely capitalist nature of the conflict to the workers in both camps, and hastened the building of capitalism in Russia at a time when there was no other party with sufficient experience or determination to tackle so great an administrative work. They cannot, however, by legislation solve the fundamental conflicts between contending classes in Russia. They cannot permanently make the working class content with the capitalist economic system, and it would be better that they should recognise before it is too late that if they remain in office the discontent of the workers will come to be directed against them.

[ALB]

There are quite a few left-communist groups, splits and breakaways that have the same understanding of what socialism is as us. Here's one at random, the CWO ,from "What We Stand For", taken from their paper Aurora which happened to be lying around at Head Office:

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We stand for a global society in which production is for need and not profit (and is therefore sustainable), where the state, national frontiers and money have been abolished, where power is exercised through class-wide organisations like workers' councils.

I agree the last phrase rather ruins it by suggesting that there could still be classes (even though it can't really mean this) in socialism.The big difference of course is how to get there. Nearly all these groups favour mass armed insurrection with a vanguard party somewhere in the background. And they can't agree amongst themselves on forming a single organisation.Still, putting across the same idea of socialism as us probably isn't doing any harm. It's get the idea into circulation.

[ALB]

The reason I asked was this passage:

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should start by saying that the sad ultra-left turn that IMT has taken in the last few years surely did accelerate my decision. Abandoning of the fundamental orientation to the Labour Party in Britain (signaled by the change in the paper’s masthead) which happened to come only months before the historic election of Jeremy Corbyn

I thought Grant's position was one of "deep entryism" into the Labour Party and that those of his supporters who weren't expelled never left it. When did they turn against the Labour Party? Or did they ever?

[ALB]

Which Trot sect is the IMT? The old Militant Tendency people that stuck with Ted Grant?

[ALB]

The key passages which show that he is on the same wavelength as us, i.e that this is a contribution to how a socialist society might organise the production and distribution of wealth are:

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I posit that when and if the broadly-defined working class comes to have dominant power in a large section, or all, of the world — regardless of the means by which we get there — we will need to end commodity-based production, commodity-based exchange, commodity-based belief systems and commodity-based culture as quickly as possible.

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Replacing “Exchange” with Distribution?How to avoid production for sale? Here I make a moderately concrete proposal for how we might organize production and distribution in a bottom-up way that avoids markets and the re-constitution of the value-production-based alienated society that markets may help to re-produce — at least unless we have eliminated all vestiges of the selling of labor power including systems of workplace cooperatives in which income or working conditions depend on selling the products.To be clear, the process I will describe here is not “exchange,” but rather distribution, because those getting the products do not pay, trade or in other ways reimburse those distributing them.Most fundamentally, distribution of products and services among production units and among people will have to be based upon socially-validated need. This means that if a community, person, or work place needs steel, rice, a laptop or special software, they have the right to ask for it from those who can provide it. It also means that those they ask will see themselves as having a duty to provide for this need if they realistically can do so, and if they do not see fulfilling these needs as harmful. (6)In short, we need to build in an expectation that if someone needs something, and we can provide it, we will — unless we think that this will create undue hardship for the producers (us) or for others who might have to wait for the product, or if we think the product or need is in itself harmful to fulfill. In such instances of disagreement, the requestor should be able to refer the issue to the council system for a democratically-based decision.

His position seems to be that if somebody wants something they go into a store or place an order for it and would normally get it free without having to pay anything. In exceptional cases and in exceptional circumstances (eg dangerous product, product not available, asking for too much) they might not be given what they ask for.  The same applies to productive units: normally, they would get what they asked for, free, from some other productive unit.Although he says in footnote 6 above:

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Note that this is not the same as Marx’s phrase “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” which can only come about later in the process of transforming the world. I am suggesting that this mode of distribution in accord with socially-validated and feasible need might begin to be implemented as soon as the working class assumes the direction of production and distribution.

surely what he is proposing is one way of implementing this. It is difficult to see how the implementation of Marx's phrase would differ in practice as, even with this, there would still be cases where people won't get all they ask for.  The difference would be one of degree, i.e. there'd be far less such cases.Friedman's scheme also provides a possible solution to the question of  how to deal with temporary shortages in the very early days of socialism or after a natural disaster which we have discussed here. It is certainly better than "labour-time vouchers" which he rejects even if rather gingerly, probably because it has been endorsed by some other members of his political group.PS Yes, we have drawn his attention to our pamphlet Socialism As A Practical Alternative.

[ALB]

Are we waging war on them?http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2014/no-1316-april-2014/relevance-marxian-economics-todayhttps://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/andrew-kliman-talk-to-spgb-video.htmlIncidentally, while I'm posting, I see Friedman talks about the "95%" rather than the "99%", which strikes me as more correct.

[ALB]

Thanks for that. One of the few attempts (apart from us) to describe how a non-market socialism might work. He doesn't think much of labour-time vouchers either.  I see it was originally published here and rejects the so-called "market socialism", the oxymoron put forward by other named critics of capitalism.

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A number of authors have attempted to produce such a vision, including Alperovitz (2013), Alpert (2000), Schweickart (in Ollman 1998) and Wolff (2012). All of them suggest one or another form of worker self-directed enterprises that compete with each other, and some form of socially-directed investment, as the core for a new society. Explicit or implicit in what they propose is that production continues to be on the basis of workers of various sorts being hired to produce tangible or intangible commodities in order to sell them.These authors argue that their model is fundamentally different from commodity capitalism and its needs to destroy the environment, create social injustice and create conditions that lead to global warfare. I am not going to attempt to argue against this claim of theirs here. (But see Friedman 2008; Hudis 2012; and Ollman 1998 for further discussion.) Instead, I want to offer a different view of what kind of new world we might aim for.

I think the author, Sam Friedman, is associated with the "Marxist-Humanists".

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