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Sympo wrote:

At 1:55 I couldn't quite understand what was being said. It sounded like "the claws is of fudd" to

Clothes and food.

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Impos1904 has drawn attention to this blog item about the relationship between the Far Left and the Labour Party. It makes some good points about their tactics and illusions:https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2016/08/01/corbyn-labour-and-the-limits-of-the-british-far-left/I have to confess to liking Roy Hattersley's cruel description of the far left as being composed of

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Trotskyists, one-subject campaigners, Marxists who had never read Marx, Maoists, pathological dissidents

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Then it will have to be a unofficial one just as "Capitalism and Kids Stuff" has been. It's never been endorsed as an "official" party production either.

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So you didn't have a problem with the UK regional accent?

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Thanks, Matt, I see. "Poles" and "Lithuanians" are the same. The date seems to have been 1887 when he was a leader of the Ayshire miners. That's only five years before the founding of the ILP and his own elections as an MP.According to this site, his views were in line with those of the union's members, not that that makes them any more acceptable of course.http://www.scottishmining.co.uk/467.htmlSearching on the internet I see that far right groups have taken up these quotes, arguing that Hardie was right.This site  gets the date wrong, though theoretically possible as Hardie was born in 1856 and started working in the mines at the age of 10:

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A local newspaper on the 8th of November, 1867 quoted Keir Hardie (miners’ organizer and future Member of Parliament) in a speech to a miners’ meeting: “These men (Lithuanians) I am informed, are growing fat on four shillings a week. Their chief item of diet is said to be garlic fried in lamp oil.” Hardie also alleged that the Poles had brought “Black Death” and “immorality” to Scotland and stated that “decent men are not going to be turned adrift to make room for beastly, filthy foreigners without knowing the reason why.”

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

Perhaps the Daily Record might compare Hardie with Farage. Speaking of the Poles at Glengarnock, he said "their habits are very filthy, six or seven males occupying a one-roomed house, and having women to cook for them"(…)According to Hardie, the Lithuanians migrant workers in the mining industry had “filthy habits”, they lived off “garlic and oil”, and they were carriers of “the Black Death”.

In what year did Hardie make these remarks and by "Poles" and "Lithuanians" did he mean "Jews" fleeing from areas that were then part of Tsarist Russia?

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Thanks for the translation. Just what I was looking for. Is there a Lanzarote in Mexico as well as in the Canary Islands off Africa?

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Thanks but something from him even in Spanish about Cuba being state capitalist and why will do as well.

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mcolome1 wrote:

PS The grandson of Ernesto Che Guevara is an anarchist and he has said that his grandfather was just a supporter of state capitalism, and the dictatorship of a single party rule. He has never said that he was a socialist or communist

I didn't know that. Where can I find more?

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Here's the original reply to the famous "W.B of Upton Park" in the February 1910 Socialist Standard:

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W. B. (Upton Park) asks, what would be the action of a member of the S.P.G.B. elected to Parliament, and how would he maintain our principle of "no compromise" ?By compromise we understand "political trading," the "one-and-one principle" for example (see first page). The Socialist member of Parliament (while in the minority, of course), would advance the interests of the working class by caustic and enlightening criticism of capitalism in all its manifestations—political, industrial, educational, etc., etc. He would take every opportunity that offered to use this higher and well-heard platform as a means of spreading Socialist understanding.His presence, backed, as it must needs be, by a wide-awake electorate (suggestive of more to come and the threatened "end of all,") would in all probability evoke the initiation, by one or other of the capitalist parties, of measures that may conceivably contain some small advantage for the working-class. Now intellectual vitality requires the continual absorption, and digestion of new facts as they occur. So with Socialism and proletarian politics. The S.P.G.B. is always ready to consider new facts and phases when these present themselves, and therefore the question of whether Socialist representatives should support any such measures in Parliament, is one that we do not, in January 1910, pretend to answer. We can only say as to this, that as we progress and new situations arise, our membership, ever guided by the revolutionary principle of NO COMPROMISE, by our general understanding of Socialism and the requirements of the greatest interest of the working class, its emancipation, will DEMOCRATICALLY direct the action of its representatives. Each new situation, will have to be faced and Socialist action be decided upon the merits of the case. Meanwhile we may not claim rank with the Pope or Old Moore, and it should be understood that there is room for difference of opinion upon a matter that, at the present stage, is only of secondary importance. Our work to-day is to teach our fellow toilers their position and show them the indispensable steps they must take to win freedom.—(Ed. " S.S.")

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Sympo wrote:

Does the "correct" theory of truth have a name?

The first point to note is that the Socialist Party does not lay down a "correct" theory of "truth". As far as we're concerned to be a member, as long as someone accepts that there's an "external world" outside mind and that no god or gods have intervened, are intervening or will intervene in the course of human affairs that's ok.Having said that, for those more interested in the question, we refer to those writers in the "Marxist tradition" already mentioned (Joseph Dietzgen, Anton Panneloek, Paul Mattick) who argue that what scientists are doing is not so much "discovering" the ouside world "as it is" as describing its course in a way that it can be more or less accurately predicted and so used to serve human purposes. Perhaps the clearest exposition of this point of view is Anton Pannekoek's Lenin As Philospher here.In this sense, what is "true" would be what is "useful to human survival". That's my view but other members may have a different approach. I think it has something in common with this view of Marx's that  "truth" is demonstracted by practice.As he put it, in his Theses on Feuernach:

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The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.

Even so, some of us seem to enjoy discussing "scholastic" questions.

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ALB wrote:

Actually, Sympo, while this theory, "naive realism" if you like, is alright for everyday living, it's not really adequate.  Our minds don't simply reflect or photograph the world out there "as it really is".

L.Bird wrote:

The difference in the ideologies of Engels' (and your) 'materialism', and Marx's (and my) 'idealism-materialism', is that the former sees 'external reality' 'as it is', outside of social activity (labour),…

YMS, I don't know why you bother to engage with this serial, and possibly congenital and attention-seeking, liar.

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Yes, of course, there would be some phenomena which we now call Mars even if we didn't. I don't think Marx subscribed to the view that there was no "external reality" before the human mind evolved than he did to the "20 trillion flies can't be wrong" theory of truth. If he had, his critics would have had a field day.

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One for Brighton section of Kent & Sussex Branch here:https://m.facebook.com/events/660596360754487/?ti=cl

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Sympo wrote:

But something is true, or false, independently from what we think of the subject, right?

There is something out there that's independent of our minds, the "outside world" if you like, statements about which are either true or false according to a particular theory of truth. But, as statements are the product of minds, it can't be said "truth" or "falsity" are independent of minds.In other words, there is an external world outside the mind (or, more accurately, of which human minds are part). Only philosophical idealists (better idea-ists) hold that this is creation of mind (whether the mind of a "God" or of collective humanity or a single individual) but, in practice, they don't really believe this as they, like the rest of us, behave as if there was an independent, external world.

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