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"Participatory delegate democracy" is not the same as "direct democracy" (where everybody votes on everything). It's where everybody gets a chance to elect a delegate to pursue the mandate of the group (community, workplace, etc) of which they are a membe and where the person elected is answerable for their decisions to that group and who can be recalled by a vote at any time.This could have existed long before the invention of the internet. It doesn't rule out some issue requiring a yes or no answer being but to a referendum, but this is not appropriate in all cases since in most cases there are more than one possible answer and so best decided by a committee of elected delegates.

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Subhaditya wrote:

Anyway I was reading the article on Alexander Kollontai,  I am confused about Red Love, what does it mean… is there anywhere I can find more details about it.

I don't know if this is the same as she meant but here's an article from the Socialist Standard in 1910:https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1910s/1910/no-76-december-1910/case-free-love-some-capitalist-hypocrisies-exposed

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Still talking about bonobos, etc and still from a male perspective.

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Bit of a change from the usual caricature of a capitalist as a fat man with a top hat smoking a cigar.

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They were all there of course. Outside the Woolgate Centre in Witney. The Tories, Labour, LibDems, UKIP, Labour and the Greens, even the Elvis Bus Pass party (advocating "Better daytime television for those on Benefits"). Not present was the National Health Action Party which is also standing a candidate.We arrived late and had to set up next to the Tories. Which was unfortunate as we were handing out a blue-coloured leaflet with Cameron on the front. (I don't know who thought up this idea but it was counter-productive as more than one refused it as they thought it was a Tory leaflet). The Labourites packed up early and the Tories and Ukippers thought that we should take over their space as "the Socialist Party" had taken over the Labour Party. We smiled but didn't.The LibDems are making the biggest effort, no doubt because if they can't beat Labour under Corbyn for second place (their leaflets specifically denounced Corbyn) their credibility will remain damaged. Labour came second at the general election, with the LibDems 4th behind UKIP.. You'd have thought that Labour would also realise the importance for them of beating the LibDems, but they didn't seem to be making much effort. We were told that their candidate was an anti-Corbyn Blairite. Maybe this explains why we didn't see any of the young, enthusiastic new members Corbyn has attracted to the Labour Party. Anyway, enough of conventional, capitalist politics.Although our main effort was to distribute "The problem" leaflet before it became outdated, we still sold three pamphlets. One person immediately recognised us as "The Socialist Party of Great Britain". Another had received our leaflet through her letter box the day before, liked it and wanted to know more. Most of the conversations were about socialism, though there were a couple who had voted Brexist (in the minority here as the constituency was one of those that voted to stay in) and wanted to discuss this (they assumed that as socialists we would have favoured Brexit).It can't be denied that people are more interested in discussing politics when there's an election. We saw 8 or 9 posters in the window each for the Liberals, the Greens and Labour and one for the NHAP. Only one Tory one. Presumably as this is a safe Tory seat those who are not Tories want to show this. Can't blame them but this makes the title of our leaflet "The problem is not the Tories … It's capitalism" relevant. Naturally, they all got one put through their letter box.After the stall and door-to-door leafletting in Witney and Eynsham only 250 remain of the 2500 West London took. Others are due to be distributed by Midlands members in Chipping Norton and Woodstock. When it's over less than 1000 should be left at Head Office.

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We’re, after all, in it to win it – to not merely oppose but to create an entirely new world

This would be a welcome development. Hopefully, it's a sign that those who organise protest movements to "Stop This" or "Bring Back That" are beginning to realise that this is a treadmill that gets them nowhere. Some however have got a long way to go, for instance, the People's Assembly organised a demostration at the Tory Conference in Birmingham under the slogan "Tories Out".I think we have a few sympathisers in Sweden, don't we? Or maybe the organisers would accept a written statement.Maybe adapted from this article in the Socialist Standard?http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2013/no-1306-june-2013/socialism-only-alternative

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Just received a leaflet through my letter box from the local Green Party. The small print at the bottom says:

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If you have a "No Junk Mail" sticker on your letter box, you might wonder why a Green Party volunteer delivered this newsletter. We don't regard political communications as "Junk", but as an important part of the democratic process.

Good point. Ours too.

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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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