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robbo203 wrote:

Or will socialism be the ultimate expression of a post modernistic culture in which anything goes?

Of course not. I know you don't think this as you have argued here a moral case as well as a class case for socialism and that this is just a rhetorical question.But just in case someone gets the wrong impression, we don't agree with the post-modernists that cannibalism is just a matter of taste.

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You're right. It's a typical Tory heartland but there are a couple of Labour councillors, one from Chipping Norton which has a history of working class struggle:http://country-standard.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/other-chipping-norton-set-chippy.htmlAnd of course it was workers who made the blankets.

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Local elections took place in Brazil on Sunday. Voting is compulsory but here's what happened in Rio and Sao Paulo:

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In Rio de Janeiro, 25 percent of registered voters didn’t show up to cast their ballots. If we consider the 5 percent of “blank” and 13 percent of “invalid” votes, this means that 43 percent of Rio’s voters chose not to vote for mayor. In São Paulo, that rate was at almost 40 percent.

Spoilt voting lives, it seems. So, who says it's just an empty gesture. And prosecuting a quarter of the electorate for not voting is obviously out of the question.

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jondwhite wrote:

Two more reviews of Stedman Joneshttp://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2016/2456'Stalinicos'http://isj.org.uk/marx-deflated/

I thought the second one, by Alex Callincos, the SWP leader, was going to argue that Marx was a proto-Bolshevik but it doesn't. It even contains this refutation of the view that Marx thought that capitalism would collapse economically:

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Stedman Jones argues Marx abandoned his critique of political economy because “he had not been able to sustain his original depiction of capital as an organism whose continuous and unstoppable spiral of growth from inconspicuous beginnings in antiquity to global supremacy would soon encounter world-wide collapse”.15 But nowhere in Marx’s writings of the critical period 1857-67 does he claim that capitalism is heading towards economic breakdown. His initial six-book plan of the Critique of Political Economy culminated in a volume on “World Market and Crises”—crises are not the same as collapse. Marx actually wrote: “Permanent crises do not exist”.16 His fullest discussion, in Capital, Volume III (dismissed in a sentence by Stedman Jones), portrays a spiral movement in which the tendency of the rate of profit to fall interacts with financial busts and economic slumps thanks to which capital is destroyed and exploitation increased sufficiently to allow the engine of accumulation to resume. Marx’s discussion of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall concludes in the original manuscript with the sentence, cut by Engels: “Hence crises”. The “vicious circle” of boom and bust will continue as long as capitalism exists.17

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

But a spoiled ballot would effectively made it easier for the 50% turn-out threshold to be met as they were counted in the turn-out.

I don't think that's right. The threshold is 50% of valid votes not 50% of turnout. Otherwise your two tailed dog party would have been stupid to call for voters to spoil their ballot paper. At over 220,000 or 4%, the number of spoilt votes is quite impressive.

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Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:

We aren't arguing that bonobos can act like humans.  We're arguing that humans can act like bonobos.

That's exactly my point ! But humans are not the "third chimpanzee" but a quite different species with quite different behavioural patterns and possibilities. Our behaviour may exhibit similarities between those of chimps but that's just a co-incidence.

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Osama Jafar wrote:

found that your waitng for Marx to rise from his historical grave to tell you what do.

An unusual reason for not wanting to join, but don't applicants read our declaration of principles before they sign the application form (the word "class" appears in every one of the 8 principles)? (Actually, I think they don't have to as the Membership Applications Committee asks those who apply through this site to answer the questionnaire first and only asks them to sign the application form if they have shown that they understand and agree with our case).

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That was Marx the practical revolutionary in the course of the (abortive) German revolution of 1848. Like many others in the middle of the 19th century, he then had his concept of revolution shaped by the French Revolution opf 1789-93. So he would have had in mind the terror against the aristocrats who were planning with the help of outside powers to restore the former regime in France.After the failure of the revolutionary wave of 1848-9 Marx and Engels came to abandon this concept of revolution. In the 1860s Marx got involved instead in encouraging the industrial class struggle through the International Working Men's Association in the belief that this would eventually become political and aim at winning political power even through the ballot box.In his 1895 Introduction to Marx's The Class Struggles in France, a collection of articles Marx had written in 1848-50 about the revolutionary events in France at that time, wrote that he and Marx had been wrong about both the prospects and the nature of revolution they had then held.Here's a few extracts:

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But we, too, have been shown to have been wrong by history, which has revealed our point of view of that time to have been an illusion. It has done even more: it has not merely destroyed our error of that time; it had also completely transformed the conditions under which the proletariat has to fight. The mode of struggle of 1848 is today obsolete from every point of view, and this is a point which deserves closer examination on the present occasion.All revolutions up to the present day have resulted in the displacement of one definite class rule by another; all ruling classes up till now have been only minorities as against the ruled mass of the people. A ruling minority was thus overthrown; another minority seized the helm of state and remodeled the state apparatus in accordance with its own interests. This was on every occasion the minority group, able and called to rule by the degree of economic development, and just for that reason, and only for that reason, it happened that the ruled majority either participated in the revolution on the side of the former or else passively acquiesced in it. But if we disregard the concrete content of each occasion, the common form of all these revolutions was that they were minority revolutions. Even where the majority took part, it did so—whether wittingly or not—only in the service of a minority; but because of this, or simply because of the passive, unresisting attitude of the majority, this minority acquired the appearance of being the representative of the whole people.

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History has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong. It has made it clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that time was not, by a long way, ripe for the removal of capitalist production …

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With this successful utilization of universal suffrage, an entirely new mode of proletarian struggle came into force, and this quickly developed further. It was found that the state institutions, in which the rule of the bourgeoisie is organized, offer still further opportunities for the working class to fight these very state institutions. They took part in elections to individual diets, to municipal councils and to industrial courts; they contested every post against the bourgeoisie in the occupation of which a sufficient part of the proletariat had its say. And so it happened that the bourgeoisie and the government came to be much more afraid of the legal than of the illegal action of the workers' party, of the results of elections than of those of rebellion.For here, too, the conditions of the struggle had essentially changed. Rebellion in the old style, the street fight with barricades, which up to 1848 gave everywhere the final decision, was to a considerable extent obsolete.

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The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organization, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for [with body and soul]. The history of the last fifty years has taught us that. But in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long, persistent work is required, and it is just this work which we are now pursuing, and with a success which drives the enemy to despair.

The whole introduction is worth reading as representing Marx and Engels's considered view of revolution at the end of their political life.Having said that, we are not Marx-worshippers. If in 1848 Marx favoured revolutionary terror against opponents of the minority-led revolution he then envisaged, so what?

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robbo203 wrote:

Im not entirely convinced that the distinction between primate and human behaviour is  quite as cut and dried as it may seem.  Frans de Waal's work is quite seminal in this regard – books such as Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes (2007) and Chimpanzee Cultures (1994)

The trouble with arguing from the cooperative behaviour of other animals to try to show that humans can be too (as Kropotkin pioneered in Mutual Aid) is that those who argue that socialism won't work because humans are innately aggressive, etc can also apply the same argument to back up their case.Of course other animals do behave cooperatively and that's part of their "nature" (and we can use that to counter those who claim that all nature is red in tooth and claw). But human behaviour is very different because nearly all of it is learned from the human-made environment. Human behaviour is flexible and adaptable in a way that no other animal's is. We are unique and the behaviour pattern of other animals is irrelevant when it comes to what we are capable of.

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I agree it is possible to have a moneyless class society with a state (a number have existed in the past) but not that it is possible to have a moneyless capitalist society (a cashless one perhaps, but that's not the same).Capitalism is a buying and selling society in which the human ability to work is bought and sold and results in the capitalist firms that employ them appropriating a surplus from their work, a surplus which takes a monetary form and most of which is re-invested as more capital. A society which exploited the producers but where the surplus extracted from them did not take this form would still be an exploitative class society but not capitalism

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Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:

Because Sociologist who study primates tell us humans have the abiity to behave in ways primates behave.

Of course we have and a lot more other ways too. But the point is that they can't behave in the ways we can and do.

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I hadn't realised this before but the write-in vote tactic is allowed in the US and has been successdully applied in an election to the US Senate as recently as 201). See here.So, in advocating it we are not advocating something completely outlandish. It's a legitimate election tactic under certain circumstances. Of course in Britain it would be counted only as a spoilt ballot paper. Nevertheless.

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Osama Jafar wrote:

What happened in Russia is party state capitalism, but what SPGB propose is workers state capitalism the highest & Rudest Stages of capitalism which we are already in.Thanks for you all, i have no further addition.

You can't make an outrageous suggestion like that and then refuse to discuss it or try to back it up. Needless to say, we don't stand for any kind of state capitalism which is just the management of the wages system and capital accumulation by state officials.  I thought you accepted that we stood for a

Osama Jafar wrote:

* could be over night find yourself in moneyless, stateless majority led society?

How can there be state capitalism without a state and capitalism without money?

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Osama Jafar wrote:

The HOW to get has a broad arsenal of options; for example, like marx i support wining political control even with a minority; but even that need real socialist by character at least, & that what i ment not just seting communs though that communs was a valuabe experience.

Winning political control "with a minority" won't lead to socialism either (it wasn't Marx's view and it's not ours).If we credit them with really wanting socialism, this was the view of Lenin and the Bolsheviks and people like Castro and Che Guevera: a minority who want socialism seize power and then use it to try to educate the rest of the population into becoming socialists. It didn't work out like that as in the meantime the minority in control of political power has to ensure that production keeps going and, without the conditions for socialism, this can only be on the basis of capitalism — extracting a surplus from the working population who are paid wages. In the end in Russia (perhaps not so much in Cuba) the minority emerges as a new privileged, ruling class. No, the only way to socialism is through the democratic political action of a majority of socialist-minded workers.As to communes, we don't have any objection to people going and living on one if they want. It's one way to survive under capitalism. But you don't have to live on one to be a socialist (and living on one doesn't make you socialist).

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Why are we talking about the behaviour of chimps, baboons, etc when what distinguishes humans from these and other animals is that our behaviour, including sexual behaviour, is not just governed by biology but is overwhelmingly culturally-determined? We have a wide range of possible behaviours. They don't.

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