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Here's some of the things we've said about Castro and Cuba over the years:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1960s/1961/no-677-january-1961/cuban-background http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1960s/1961/no-680-april-1961/cuban-cockpit-and-castro http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1960s/1968/no-772-december-1968/abolition-wages-system-cuban-stylehttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1980s/1984/no-956-april-1984/cuba-under-castrohttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2003/no-1190-october-2003/cuba-no-workers-paradisehttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2008/no-1250-october-2008/cooking-books-1-cuba%E2%80%99s-wage-systemNaturally, there will be a major article on him in the January Socialist Standard.

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jondwhite wrote:

What if there is mass unionisation, can the workers organised stop wages falling as a proportion of profit?

It's not quite clear what you mean by "wages as a proportion of profits" since wages are not a proportion of profits. Do you mean the ratio of wages to profits? Or do you mean wages as a proportion of newly added value (wages + profits)? Whichever, it's not something that unions can lastingly influence in any significant wayEssentially, all unions can do is ensure that their members get the full value of the labour power that they sell to their employer. In times of boom (particularly in a particular industry) they can push wages a little above this level. In times of slump, on the other hand, the most they can do is to stop real wages falling as much as they otherwise would.Even if they could of course there would still be exploitation, and employers would speed up the introduction of labour-saving machinery to push the rate of exploitation (profits divided by wages, expressed as a percentage) up again.

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Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:

1) "Since capitalism is a worldwide class society and exchange economy, it is clear that the exploitation-less alternative to capitalism would have to be a classless world society without exchange." – well, sort of I agree.  This has exchange, but it's not exploitative. people still do favors for each other and put objects in the hands of others and that's what I mean by "exchange".

No he doesn't agree at all. Of course people will continue to do things for each other after capitalism has been ended but he wants to make things worse than they are under capitalism by applying the capitalist principle of equal exchange even to the favours people do for each other.PS I wish people would do what I've just done. Trim his posts when commenting (it's easy: you keep the [  quote] at the beginning and the [ /quote] at the end and delete the passages you're not commenting on). Otherwise his ramblings are up there twice and is a waste of space (but not of time if you don't bother to re-read them)

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Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:

I did enjoy reading it and spent about an hour on reading, reasoning and writing my reply.  Can I ask how much time you spent so I can estimate how much value you put into your reply in terms of time and offer a fair exchange of value with my time?

What he proposes is worse than capitalism since he wants to reduce all human interactions to an exchange of equal values. Not even capitalism has achieved that.

Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:

I have created an exchange system that lets you run an entire economy without ever exchanging $1.

Here's the classic definition of a money crank:

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a person who believe that all, or the vast majority of, social ills are caused by the current money system and thus can be solved by implementing an imaginary money system that they have designed can be safely considered a money crank.

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As was to be expected on the last weekend before polling day, everybody was there, including Goldsmith himself being interviwed (and heckled by someone calling him a racist because he played the anti-Muslim card in the London mayor election). This time the three of us were outnumbered by his supporters and by those of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign who had a stall opposite ours. Also present were Compass, a Labour leaning group, campaigning in effect for the LibDem candidate and again the Vote for Europe group doing the same more explicity (only this time the Union Jack was above the EU flag on their flagpole). Pastor Stockford, the Christian Alliance candidate, was there handing out a leadlet supporting a new airport in the Thames Estuary (God moves in a mysterious way).We handed out a few hundred leaflets and had a few conversations about socialism. We were interviewed by an author writing a book on "Brexit Britain" (see: http://www.brexitbritain.org.uk ). He wanted to know why we didn't support Jeremy Corbyn and John  McDonnell. We said that while their policies were different from the Labour Party's in recent years they were a throwback to Old Labour, which had also failed. In any event they didn't control the Labour Party (the Labour candidate here has a photo of Sadiq Khan not Corbyn on his manifesto). And of course that no government can control the way capitalism works, even less make it work in the interests of the wage and salary earning majority. We had to make the same point in a discussion with a Compass leafletter who challenged the claim on our leaflet that "the problem is not the Tories". We asked one of Palestine Solidarity people how they were going to vote. She said she was going to write "Support Palestine" across her ballot paper as none of the candidates did. Fair enough if that's what you think is most important. We said we'd be writing "World Socialism" on ours.We still have a couple of hundred or so left but we'll distribute these door-to-door, probably in the Kingston part of the constituency. That won't take long. And that'll be the end of our leaflet with Cameron on the front.

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Young Master Smeet wrote:

I'd argue freedom of information, expression and association come well above voting, and the right for minorities to try and become majorities (and for majorities to not enforce their will unless necessary): voting is just a means to assist the discursive process.  Sometimes we need to weight the strngth as well as quantity on a question: a minority that strongly holds it's opinion compared to a lightly held majority needs to be taken into account.  The conversation never ends.

Here's former Prime Minister Sir John Major's contribution to this debate (from yesterday's Times):

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I hear the argument that the 48 per cent of people who voted to stay should have no say in what happens. I find that very difficult to accept. The tyranny of the majority has never applied in a democracy and it should not apply in this particular democracy.

As concerns the principle of democratic decision-making he's got a point.

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On another forum discussing the by-election some train-spotting psephologist (not me) has worked out how many votes each of the candidates standing for the South West constituency in May's Greater London Assembly elections got in the wards in Richmond and Kingston that make up the Richmond Park constituency:Cons 24564 51.0%Lab  8395 17.4%LD   7462  15.5%Grn  5436 11.3%UKIP 2126  4.4%SPGB  180 0.4%It would be nice to think that there really were 180 socialists in the constituency but there will be some. Anyway, 2 or 3 of us will be out in the centre of Richmond wuith a literature stall tomorrow morning. We can't miss this chance of not putting our view across when there's more interest than usual in political issues.

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The book has arrived and it's a big disappointment. It shows the same degeneration from promoting the idea of a world without money to promoting small-scale local schemes to do without money within the present system (even if as a way of demonstrating the feasibility of living without money) as exhibited by the Zeitgeist Movement..It also introduces the distraction of veganism.

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Here's Lukacs the Leninist:

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If there is one commonplace which cannot be too strongly emphasized, it is that the communist party is the organizational expression of the revolutionary will of the proletariat. It is therefore by no means bound to embrace the whole of the proletariat from the very outset; as the conscious leader of the revolution, as the embodiment of the revolutionary idea, its task is rather to unite the most conscious sections, the vanguard, the really revolutionary and fully class-conscious workers. The revolution itself is brought about necessarily by the natural laws governing the economic forces. The duty and the mission of communist parties everywhere is to supply the revolutionary movement – which to a large extent arises independently of them – with a direction and a goal and to lead the elemental outbreaks sparked off by the collapse of the capitalist economic order on to the only viable path of salvation, on to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Pure Leninist Vanguardism — the conscious vanguard leading the merely discontented masses, a perfect echo of What Is To Be Done?  But I wouldn't be so illogical as to try to argue that because A shares Lukacs views on epistemology and because Lukacs was a Leninst, therefore A is a Leninist.

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It's more about the past ("history") than an analysis of the present. But this other book from India does analyse the present-day world economy:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Marxian-Economics-Globalization-Adam-Buick/dp/819025295XThere may be some copies at Head Office.

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mcolome1 wrote:

George LukacsAntonio Gramsci

Good point and not at all off topic. Two dyed-in-the-wool, die-hard supporters of the Vanguard Party (Lukacs was even worse than Lenin in arguing that the party could/should substitute for the class) and Russian State Capitalism quoted favourably while we dyed-in-the-wool, die-hard opponents of the Vanguard Party and State Capitalism are called Leninist.  The world turned upside down.

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Thanks Dave. That passage from Lenin deserves highlighting as it brings out the essence of Leninism and why we've nothing in common with it.:

Lenin wrote:

V. I. Lenin The Trade Unions, The Present Situation And Trotsky’s MistakesSpeech Delivered At A Joint Meeting Of Communist Delegates To The Eighth Congress Of Soviets, Communist Members Of The All-Russia Central Council Of Trade Unions And Communist Members Of The Moscow City Council Of Trade Unions December 30, 1920But the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised through an organisation embracing the whole of that class, because in all capitalist countries (and not only over here, in one of the most backward) the proletariat is still so divided, so degraded, and so corrupted in parts (by imperialism in some countries) that an organisation taking in the whole proletariat cannot directly exercise proletarian dictatorship.It can be exercised only by a vanguard that has absorbed the revolutionary energy of the class. The whole is like an arrangement of cogwheels. Such is the basic mechanism of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and of the essentials of transition from capitalism to communism.http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/lenin/works/1920/dec/30.htm

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mcolome1 wrote:

I can also say that Marx stand supporting certain bourgeois revolution and his wrong conception on the national question is also an excuse used by the Leninist to approve their own nationalism, can we say that Marx was a proto-Leninist ?

I remember giving a talk on just this at the 1998 SPGB Summer school:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/audio/did-lenin-really-distort-marxThe text is also in our pamphlet Marxism Revisted.I've just checked and the answer was:

Quote:

So, we can say, in answer to the question "Was Marx a Leninist?", that he did flirt with Leninist-type ideas for a while but then abandoned them and always thereafter opposed them in favour of a long and protracted process of working-class self-organisation which would eventually lead to them being ready to win political control and establish socialism.

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Here's what the Socialist Standard  had to say in 2003 about Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism:

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In any event, whatever criticisms may be made of Pannekoek's approach, to treat Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism as a serious contribution to the philosophy of science, as Richey does, is ridiculous. As anyone who has tried to read it knows, it is just a rant against some of Lenin's opponents within the Bolshevik Party in 1908 who he accuses, quite unjustly (but quite typically), of harbouring or condoning religious views just because they rejected his crude and untenable view that the mind merely reflects and photographs (as opposed to mentally reconstructs) the external world.

Book Reviews

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Yes, the working class can achieve some things without organising themselves as a party. This article from 1990 attributes those in Russia a role in bringing down the state capitalist regime there:

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It was inevitable that the oppressive forms of state capitalism in Russia and Eastern Europe would degenerate into chronic inefficiency. It is impossible to allocate such vast resources to repression, to engender corruption, cynicism, low morale and outright lack of enthusiasm and at the same time expect to be well ahead in the world league of rates of productivity and industrial growth. However, it would be wrong to say that the pressures for changes have originated at the top. Leaders like Gorbachev have reacted to a situation created by Russian workers through their many forms of passive resistance including their unwillingness to apply themselves conscientiously at work.

Editorial: The Lessons of East Europe

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