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Here's this week's Weekly Worker letter page report:http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1133/letters/The debateson 'market socialism' continue with three letters from our side. They are replies to letters in the previous issue:http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1132/letters/
Party members votes will have been counted among those "void for uncertainty". This is the standard practice if anything is written on the ballot paper even if it is quite clear what the voter meant, eg "None of the Above". In my case, I wrote the word SOCIALISM in red in the box for each candidate (and one outside as there were 8 candidates but the word socialism has 9 letters). I suppose their logic is that it is uncertain which candidate you want to vote for. In some cases, eg where the x has been placed over two boxes, this will be the case. But in most cases it is quote clear that the voters intended to vote for none or the candidates or, the same thing, against them all.
The last few hundred of the "The problm is not the Tories … It's capitalism" leaflet have been distributed in the Kingston part of the constituency, in the same council ward that we contested in the 2006 local elections. Now, we can sit back and wait to see which capitalist candidate is elected — except that the Party members living in the constituency need to remember to go and cast a write-in vote for "WORLD SOCIALISM" on election day, this Thursday.
Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:Why don't you stick to critiquing ideas and avoid the personal attacks as much as possible? That's what I do.Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:the biggest trick capitalist ever pulled on you, Mcolmee1, was getting you to agree to their values. They've tricked you good and they created the term money crank to discredit economic theories like those of marx. You've taking up the job of capitalist in defending capitalism and call it socialism. Well, you're wrong and a traitor to the poeple and you don't even know it because you've been bought and paid for by the capitalist disinformation system.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.
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.
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)
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:
Quote: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.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.
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):
Quote: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.
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.
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.
