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Trying to track down exactly what was Scargill's argument against cooperatives I've discovered that the remarks attributed to him were not about workers cooperatives but about "workers control". Further confirmation, I suppose, that you should never trust a Daily Torygraph journalist. He actually co-authored a pamphlet called The Myth of Workers Control which seems to have been an attack on the idea of having elected workers representatives on the board of companies. A flavour of his criticism can be found on page 6 of this document (an interview with "Marxism Today" in 1981):

Quote:

I reject the argument that you can have some kind of workers' control within capitalism. What you can have is class collaboration within capitalism. Those who follow this argument in essence seek to perpetuate the existing system. It is only by politicising our membership that we will ever bring about the irreversible shift towards a socialist system in society. Therefore I don't agree that we ought to be talking about workers on the boards, irrespective of whether it is in private or nationalised industry. Once we've put workers on the boards they become bureaucrats for a start. Secondly, there is a conflict of interests. Thirdly, workers themselves distrust those people sitting on the boards. And fourthly, those who actually sit on the boards of directors, or boards of management, begin to think with a completely different outlook from when they were workers' representatives.There must, in my view, be a quite clear distinct difference between those who own and control and those who represent workers. There is a class conflict, we do live in a class society. There are two classes in our society — those who own and control the means of production, distribution and exchange and those who work by hand and by brain. There is no middle class as is suggested by those academics and intellectuals who would like to stratify society. There are only two classes in the strict political sense.

This is a part of his argument that we can agree with, but it's not an argument against workers coops.

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It wouldn't work but it might be a way to stop rail strikes, with workers having to be their own bosses and discipline themselves to keep costs down.Tony Benn, when Harold Wilson's Minister of Industry in the 1970s, tried this, only to fail:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/7244680/Tony-Benns-failed-experiment-with-worker-co-operatives.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_Engineering#The_Meriden_Motorcycle_Co-operativeThe Torygraph article, besides mentioning Scargill's view, refers to the Tories trying to steal the idea:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/7244376/Tories-plan-workers-co-operatives-for-public-sector.htmlI don't think it came to anything, did it?

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Got a copy of his book. Will start reading it when I've finished Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (not everyone in the US is religious, fortunately).

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In that video of him speaking at the Oxford Union in 2013 he defines socialism as "from each according to their MEANS, to each according to their needs" rather than "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs". This is a very significant difference as his version implies the continued existence of money incomes which are to be redistributed from those with more to pay for services for those with less. Which brings out well the difference between Labour Party "socialism" (such as it is) and real socialism. Socialism is not about the redistribution of wealth but about the common ownership of it.

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

I find it strange that many who applauded Russell Brand for bringing the case for revolution into the popular political discourse are not applying the same logic to Sanders or Corbyn re-introducing "socialism" to the electoral campaigns. For sure, they share exactly Brand's faulty understanding of what is meant by socialism

There's probably something in this, just as the existence of the USSR kept the term "socialism" at the centre of political discussion — with our niche being to explain that it wasn't really socialist and which disappeared when the USSR collapsed.Some members of the Oxford Communist Corresponding Society are applying this logic to the Corbyn phenomenon. Unfortunately, they seem to have gone overboard in supporting the campaIgn to get him elected Labour leader rather than simply getting in on the act by using it to disccuss socialism. This is obviously going too far even if his election would change the terms of political discussion (moving the  "Overton window" Brian G mentioned to the left) but nothing else (it won't make capitalism any more reformable in the interest of the wage and salary working class).Ironically Corbyn hasn't been using the word "socialism" all that much. It's been more the media using it to try to put people off him, though the effect is the same: the word and the concept get discussed. Anyway, here he is 2013 talking about his idea of socialism:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZvAvNJL-gE

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Yes, I noticed he was backpeddling a bit but also that he favours enterprises being run by cooperatives rather than nationalised, state industries. An admission, I suppose, that nationalisation was a failure (from a working class point of view) and isn't popular but, as we know, workers coops would be even more at the mercy of market forces.

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Ah, Clause Four ! It's not what it seems and never was. Here's what it was when it was abolished twenty years ago now:

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To secure for the producers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry, and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible, upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry and service.

And here's what we thought of it:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1990s/1994/no-1083-november-1994/rise-and-fall-clause-four

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To talk of the common ownership of the means of exchange is a contradiction in terms. Where there is common ownership there can be no exchange since exchange can only take place between separate owners, i.e. where private ownership not common ownership exists. In a socialist society based on common ownership goods are simply distributed not exchanged, so there is no need for money, banks and the rest of the financial system.

In other words, insofar as it committed (on paper) the Labour Party to anything it was a nationalized economy, or state capitalisam, not socialism.

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Here's the review of his most well-known book The Great Terror in the February  1969 Socialist Standard:

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Robert Conquest is no friend of Russia and that fact alone will probably be enough for most supporters of the Russian regime to discredit his account of Stalin's purges. The one unfortunate fact, for the tireless Russophiles, is that Conquest's stuff is carefully documented, with even its trivia with testimony. And what is perhaps the most terrifying part of the book — "casualty figures" of the purges computed in part from Russian government population statistics.It is arguable, whether most of the book was needed. There is little to be gained from yet another account of the Kirov murder,the trial of Kamenev and Zinoviev, the pitiless system of arrest, interrogation, execution or slow, living death in the labour camps. Most of it has been done, somewhere or other, before.The casualty figures are another matter. There are of course no official details to go on; it must all be done by combining the evidence of participants — some of them NKVD officers — with official statistics and matching it all up with the Census of 1959. Conquest's conclusion, which is staggering but difficult to argue against, is that, as an under-estimation, twenty million were killed — by execution, in the “collectivisation drive", in the camps — under the Stalin state capitalist regime. The Nazis could hardly have improved on this. And for some of the time this wholesale murder was going on, we were told that the Russians were our gallant allies, contented under the solicitous care of Uncle Joe. Henry Wallace, who was then the American Vice-President, visited one of the worst camps in 1944. The place was specially tarted up and Wallace duly found it "idyllic".This sort of story should make even the most obstinate Tory pause for thought. What happens to a man who fights for power over capitalism? The answer cannot be avoided and the last forty years have given evidence galore. He does the job as the system demands and on those terms everything — murder, torture, everything — is justified.

In a review of a later book by Conquest Where Marx went Wrong in the February 1971 Socialist Standard, the reviewer ("H") writes in passing:

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It is not that Mr. Conquest does not know of us; he has on several occasions paid tribute to the Party's freedom from the dishonesty and cant that is the hall mark of the "Leftwing" parties.

I've not been able to find one of these, if only to refute the rabid "rightwing" Tory MEP Daniel Hannan who has written in his blog on Conquest's death:

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No one familiar with Conquest’s corpus could maintain, as student Lefties used to do, that proper communism had never really been tried, and that the USSR operated on the basis of some kind of state capitalism. Conquest ineluctably showed that, in the Comecon states, theory had found brutal practice.

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Which issue?Today's Times has a front page article "exposing" TUSC candidates and Left Unity members of signing up to vote for Corbyn. I don't think they understand TUSC, the main group behind which is SPEW which is opposed to Labour and sees it as a deadly rival for the leadership of the working class. I doubt if any of their members have signed up. It will be the non-party leftists and trade unionists they conned into standing as TUSC candidates and who think that TUSC really is what it appears to be, i.e Old Labour. Though I see Lewisham ex-Labour councillor Chris Flood is among those named and he's a SPEW member. Maybe if Corbyn wins the ex-Laborites in TUSC like him will begin to drift back to the Labour Party.. Another reason why SPEW won't be supporting him. Peter Taaffeand the rest of SPEW's trotkyist leadership must be worried sick at the prospect of a Corbyn win. As to LU, that's not a sirprise as if Cotbyn wins they can go back to the Labour Party. Surprising, though, that prominent LU members like Liz Davies and Tom Watson as well as some members of its national council thought they could get away with it.

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Young Master Smeet wrote:

Short of time, but Mason has published an interest supplementary essay:https://medium.com/@paulmasonnews/neoliberalism-system-first-ideology-changeable-2f0ade2aabcf

I think he's wrong and he puts up a pretty weak defence of using the term.. "Neoliberalism" is meaningless concept or insofar as it can be said to mean anything it's wrong. What it is criticising is not capitalism as such but a policy pursued by some governments, suggesting that if this policy is abandoned and a different one adopted capitalism would be ok. The alternative policy generally proposed is a return to the Keynesian policies previously in vogue or the sort of state intervention that Corbyn is trying to revive. Owen Jones does the same in his book on the Establishment where anybody who advocates "neoliberalism" is automatically a member of the Establishment even though are plenty of members of the ruling class who don't support it.Anyway, as a description of capitalism the word d is banned in the Socialist Standard (though I see it sometimes slips through on to our blog).

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You think that's bad but look what happens to atheists and secularists in Bangladesh:http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/12/third-atheist-blogger-killed-in-bangladesh-after-knife-attack

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Thanks. Looks as if we got a book review for next month's Socialist Standard if you don't have any objection.

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Actually, I knew the people he mentions in Oxford in the early 1960s. I'd add the following anecdote. I used to put the SPGB position to them that it was Marx's view that there'd be no money in a socialist society. They pooh-poohed the idea. After all, they were essentially leftwing Labourites (there's a letter from one of them to the Socialist Standard here ). They had invited Tony Cliff to address a meeting. I asked him whether or not Marx had said there'd be no money in socialism. He shocked them by replying that Marx had said this (he recognised where I was coming from of course).

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Interview with him in today's London Evening Standard where he sets out his reformist programme:http://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/full-interview-jeremy-corbyn-corybnmania-its-odd-im-a-normal-person-10439717.html

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"Positive Money", the oxymoronically-named campaign group, gets in on the act (also providing a photo, presumably of the non-entity who is the Labour Shadow Chancellor)http://positivemoney.org/2015/08/shadow-chancellor-look-case-strategic-qe/Note the comments by RJ (by " BoE reserves" he means what the commercial banks hold at the Bank of England; T is the Treasury):

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Of course QE for the people will not reduce the Govt deficit. As the article rightly points out, QE is an asset swap where BoE reserves are swapped for Govt bonds. It increases the amount of money (bank deposit) only when the bonds are purchased from a non bank.So in effect the Govt deficit spending is initially funding by T bonds. The BoE then buys these bonds back. The result of this is that spending is funded by reserves rather than bonds. But both bonds and reserves form part of the Govt deficit. And also debtHopefully Corbyn understands this point. Otherwise he could end up with a UK Green Positive Money explanation disaster.

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"it’s just that instead of putting this money into financial markets, it would be allocated to government, or other public institutions,"And this is very wrong. Hopefully My Corbyn has a better understanding. QE is an asset swap where the BoE buys back Govt bonds on the open market. The BoE DOES NOT allocate money to the Govt or anyone else. The Govt quite rightly is responsible for this action. The issue is just how to fund this deficit spendingOption 1 By T bonds issues (this always drains reserves / bank credit but only if a non banks buy the bonds)Option 2 By BoE reserves (this does not drain reserves or bank credit)In effect option 2 means the non Govt sector end up holding cash rather than T Bonds. Some claim (others disagree) that this additional money (bank credit) in the economy pushes up asset prices.

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