ALB
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I found a copy of the letter I sent to the local paper a couple of years ago:
Quote:I see someone has been fined for picking mushrooms in Richmond Park (Park fungus fine, December 12).This seems like a leftover from feudal times when the common people were banned from collecting wood and land usurped by the aristocracy. Or are the mushrooms reserved for the royal family and the Secretary of State?It seems I got the wrong end of the stick.
At least it's a thread about something going on in the real world not revolving around some obsession of someone or other.
As the article mentions but doesn't emphasise the problem is not so much individuals picking mushrooms to eat themselves but "commercial fungi foraging" by people picking them to sell to shops and restaurants. So, another example of the "tragedy of the commons under capitalism".Incidentally, the regulations for Richmond Park say you can't pick mushrooms (or flowers) without the permission of the Secretary of State, so I wrote asking for permission but, in a letter dated 1 April, was refused.
Sounds as if he might be covering the same ground as this other recent biographer of Marx:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2013/no-1309-september-2013/book-review-karl-marx-nineteenth-century-lifeProbably a better approach than a hagiography.
LBird wrote:Neither Gareth Stedman Jones nor Louis Proyect seem to understand Marx.GSJ can go ignored, because I don't think anyone here will be giving him any space whatsoever..We may have to as he's got a new book on Marx out next month:http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674971615Anyway, trying to get a review copy.
The editorial in today's Times suggests that joining the European Economic Area (like Norway) could be an "interim" solution:
Quote:The decision on June 23 was to leave the European Union, and EEA membership is a perfectly sensible way out.Joining this as an interim measure would buy more time and, later at any time, the UK could withdraw from that too. But no doubt the Times and the majority section of the British ruling class hope that EEA membership would turn out to be permanent.
Why don't yous try and comment on other things like in this one. I'm sure there'd be no problem.
lindanesocialist wrote:Bill, workers are living on the streets, starving, cold and if lucky if they are sleeping on a friend;s settee. I couldnt give a fuck about the clubs of big business. The party needs to prioritise and the EU is of no relevance to us'How about a special meeting on HUNGER and HOMELESSNESS andPersonally I dont give a fuck about brexitTim, I've been a trade union representative too and often the solution found was a pragmatic one. This is the case here as in practice nobody is being prevented from posting here, i.e. a way round the "ban" has been found which has been accepted by everyone.
alanjjohnstone wrote:Can't say there is much i dissent with in that.Personally I've never thought much of that well-known quote from Proudhon. It is individualist anarchism which any anarcho-capitalist would endorse. In fact do endorse. And it was Proudhon's objection to "communism" to which he was vehemently opposed all this life.I read (ploughed) all the way through that anthologyof his writings Iain Mckay gathered and I can let you know that you've missed nothing by not having read him. His stuff is just turgid and pompous with it. There's nothing of interest in what he wrote except perhaps his understanding that working for wages was an indignity. Only he didn't want to end it by going forward to the common ownership, democratic control and production directly for use of communism/socialism but backwards to an imagined society of independent (self-employed) producers, some organised in coops, producing for the market. He's not one of us and deserved the ridicule Marx gave him.
alanjjohnstone wrote:TWC, in your haste to defend Marx, you appear to read that when i quote Iain Mackay's opinion, you ascribe them to me.But I think the way you introduced MacKay's view did suggest that you endorsed it..
alanjjohnstone wrote:I believe Iain Mackay's book on Proudhon is critical of Marx's habit of distorting certain parts of Proudhon's writings.How else are people to interpret the words "critical of Marx's habit" which is accepting, as MacKay alleges, that Marx did have this habit?If you want to be nice to those anarchists who are near to us, there is no need to do so for those who aren't such as Proudhon who was an anti-socialist and his modern-day supporters who stand for a state-free market economy. I have never understood why anarchists want to see Proudhon as their founding father.
My (conspiracy) theory as to why the ruling class, echoed by their media, are so hostile to Corbyn is that he is against Britain having nuclear weapons and being part of NATO. They can't afford to have Her Majesty's Opposition and alternative government committed to this. Remember the last time this risked happening. They split the Labour Party so that it didn't have a chance of getting into power. They could well do it again.Of course, we know that the Labour Party has always been undemocratic (controlled by its parliamentary leaders not its membership) and that in government it won't be able to behave much differently from governments under capitalism everywhere. So the Labour leadership election is a bit of a side show for us though the anti-Corbyn campaign in the media is revealing in that it shows how they try to manipulate things in the interests of the ruling class.
Fortunately this time the allegations are readily available. Here:http://anarchism.pageabode.com/pjproudhon/appendix-proudhon-and-marx.htmlI've had a quick look and they seem more like disagreements than distortions.
alanjjohnstone wrote:A more detailed exposeI don't think "exposé" is the right word here as it begs the question that there was something underhand to "expose". If you wanted to be neutral rather than taking the critics' side, a better word would have been "claim" or something like that.
Not been able to find the original article to see exactly what they wrote. But here's what Eric Hobsbawn, who evidently has read it, says in his How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism:
Quote:The first serious attack on Marx's scholarship as we have seen came from two Cambridge dons in 1885 (Tanner and Carey) (…) It is the tone of denigration rather than the content of the Cambridge critics which is interesting: phrases like 'the mongrel algebraical expressions' of Capital or 'an almost criminal recklessness in the use of authorities which warrants us in regarding other parts of Marx's work with suspicion' indicate – at least in economic subjects – something more than scholarly disapproval. In fact, what made Tanner and Carey mad was not simply his treatment of the evidence – they shied away from 'the charge of deliberate falsification especially since falsification seems so unnecessary' (i.e., since the facts were black enough anyway) – but 'the unfairness of his whole attitude towards Capital'. Capitalists are kinder than Marx gives them credit for; he is unfair to them; we must be unfair to him. Such, broadly, appears to be the basis of the critics' attitude.So, according to him, the answer to your question is "No, Marx did not falsify what he found in the blue books". The two did not make the charge of "falsification" nor of "misquoteation" only of "misrepresentation" of role of capitalists. Not at all the same thing but just the sort of defence of capitalism you'd expect from Cambridge economists, then as now.Their article has recently become part of anti-Marx folklore but I doubt if most of those using it will have read it.
