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Meel wrote:

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“Those who believe that communism or socialism is the most rational form of social organisation are aghast at the suggestion that they run against our selfish natures” (The Blank State, Allen Lane, 2002, p. 161)

This quote is taken out of context. This is not Pinker's opinion; he is putting this argument in the mouths of those in favour of socialism or communism.

I don't think this is either taken out of context or is Pinker describing some others' argument. Why, for instance, would those in favour of communism or socialism argue that the sort of society they wanted was against human nature? I think it is Pinker's opinion that our biological nature is "selfish", even if he thinks we can do something about it.As to Dawkins, here's what he wrote in the opening chapter of The Selfish Gene:

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Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.

Ironically, he has ended up with the same basic position as Christian theologians: that we are born sinful but can overcome this ! OK, he is not saying that socialism is impossible because of  humans' "biological nature", only that because of it there's only an outside chance of it succeeding. I think he's a supporter of the pre-Corbyn Labour Party or the LibDems or the old SDP, that sort of thing.In the original 1976 edition there was a note in which he condemned as "selfish" workers for going on strike against the then Labour government's "incomes policy". I've tried to find the exact quote on the internet but can't but will see if i can find a copy of this edition. In the meantime, maybe somebody else here can help. It is true that he later dropped this, another example of him backtracking. As is the inclusion in the 1989 edition of a new chapter entitled "Nice Guys Finish First", an attempt to argue himself out of this implication of his theory which he himself expressed as:

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The selfish gene view follows logically from the accepted assumptions of neo-Darwinism. It is easy to misunderstand but, once understood, it is hard to doubt its fundamental truth. Most of the organisms that have ever lived failed to become ancestors We that exist are, without exception, descended from that minority within every earlier generation that were successful in becoming ancestors. Since all we animals inherit our genes from ancestors rather than from non-ancestors, we tend to possess the qualities that make for success in becoming an ancestor rather than the qualities that make for failure. Successful qualities are such things as fleetness of foot, sharpness of eye, perfection of camouflage, and – there seems no getting away from it – ruthless selfishness. Nice guys don't become ancestors. Therefore living organisms don't inherit the qualities of nice guys (The Listener, 17 April 1986).

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For instance, Konrad Lorenz, Desmond Morris, Robert Ardrey, E.O. Wilson, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, sundry "sociobiologists" and "evolutionary psychologists" and all the others who encourage (and reflect)  the prejudice of the person in the street that socialism is against human nature. Wilson and Pinker state explicitly that this is the conclusion to which the theory they have put forward leadsHere's EO Wilson in 1978:

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"The perception of history as an inevitable class struggle proceeding to the emergence of a lightly governed egalitarian society with production in control of the workers is ( . . . ) based on an inaccurate interpretation of human nature" (On Human Nature, Penguin, 1995, p. 190).

And here's Steven Pinker:

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"One of the fondest beliefs of many intellectuals is that there are cultures out there where everyone shares freely. Marx and Engels thought that preliterate peoples represented a first stage in the evolution of civilization called primitive communism, whose maxim was 'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs'" (How the Mind Works, Penguin, 1998, p. 504).“Those who believe that communism or socialism is the most rational form of social organisation are aghast at the suggestion that they run against our selfish natures” (The Blank State, Allen Lane, 2002, p. 161)

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This year is the bicentenary of the first working telegraph by Francis Ronalds in his house in Hammersmith Mall. According to an article in the Chiswick Herald  (12 May, scroll down to page 33) this was the house where William Morris lived later and part of which is now the headquarters of the William Morris Society :

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A plaque on the house commemorates Ronalds’ achievement. It is seen near the top of the former stable, where the equipment at one end of the telegraph was once positioned. A famous later owner, William Morris, had agreed “reluctantly” that it could be put up – after explaining that he “doubted which has been the greatest curse to mankind – railways or telegraphs”.

So it would be fair to assume that Morris wouldn't have approved of mobile phone either but there is an electric barge in News from Nowhere. He sounds like an Old Grumbler.

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I would have thought that epigenetics, in showing that how some genes have their effect on the body is influenced by the environment, undermines the genetic determinists' case that we are the prisoners of our genes. This was obvious anyway but the scientists working in the field of epigenetics seem to be coming up with the way this works.

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Came across an old pamphlet from the time of the last Common Market referendum in 1975. At that time the TUC and half the Labour Party were for coming out though the Wilson Labour government was in favour of staying in (as was the Tory party).Here's Roy Hattersley, a junior minister,  for the REMAIN side dealing with the "loss of sovereignty" issue:

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Mr. Hattersley accepted that sovereignty would become a major issue once the new terms were known.  He questioned, however, whether the British Parliament really did have the power any longer to influence world events that vitally affected the British economy.  'No matter how many resolutions we pass or laws we enact, Britain's domestic interest rate (which affects every aspect of our life from the control of inflation to the cost of school building) will be more affected by decisions taken in Zurich, Bonn and New York – and now in Teheran, Jeddah and Caracas as well – than by anything done by the House of Commons'….'In or out of the EEC, our economy will be influenced , judgments made beyond these shores'.  The best protection was the economic power to withstand foreign pressures.  Close alignments, like membership of the EEC, clearly involved some pooling of sovereignty, Mr. Hattersley went on.  But if the Community gave each member State increased economic strength in return 'we become more free not less so'".  (Financial Times, 7-1-1975)

And Peter Shore, a Cabinet Minister allowed to put the case for LEAVE, dreaming of having his cake and eating it:

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Peter Shore recognises the need for Britain to continue trading on a large scale with the EEC, but argues that this could be done by concluding a trade agreement with the EEC such as Sweden is trying for. The trade agreement would offer access to the EEC and nothing more.

I don't whether the current debate is plus ça change or history repeating itself a second time as farce. 

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I don't know whether there's anything in this or not but at least it's a contribution to the debate:http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/poverty-is-genetically-damaging.html

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Actually it's quite a good adaptation.

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I see from the papers that it's the 40th anniversary of Dawkins's book The Selfish Gene and that they're bringing out a special anniversary edition of it.  It's a terrible book. Even its basic scientific hypothesis (that the unit of biological evolution is the individual gene) has been open to challenge (look at the convolutions its supporters have to go through to explain "altruism" and the survival of females after they can no longer have offspring), but worse is the title which suggests (and was probably meant to suggest by the publishers, if not by Dawkins himself)and which successfully cashed in on the popular and populist illusion  that humans are genetically selfish. Ok, Dawkins later recognised that he'd gone too far and he backtracked in the books he wrote after by introducing "extended phenotypes", grouped genes,  "memes", etc.Having said that, his The Blind Watchmaker  (also being repiblished) is a good popular science book explaining evolution. He's also done some other good work defending rationalism against religion and pseudi-science. Even so, The God Illusion (which is being republished too) suffers from being a purely rationalist criticism of religion that doesn't take into account the sociological reasons for its coming into being and continued existence.

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Isn't there going to be a t-shirt of it for members to wear when handing out our leaflet?  I think it might find an echo amongst an increasing number of people who must be beginning to get fed up with the lies and counter-lies of the two sides.

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Yes of course they have. We've actually got more articles than we probably need. It's going to be a special issue on socialism, real and imagined, in the US rather than just on the founding of the WSPUS 100 years ago.

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Meel wrote:

As you know by now, I am fascinated by human behaviour and have quite an interest in genetics.  You should also know that I am not a “genetic determinist”.  I have to state this more or less each time I make a contribution; such is the “blank slate” theory of human behaviour still in vogue within the SP, and the consequent assumption that anyone who mentions genes and behaviour in the same sentence, must be a “genetic determinist”.

Not true, the so-called "blank slate" theory is not in vogue in the Socialist Party. See for instance the review of Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denail of Human Natrure in the April 2003 Socialist Standard (here) and in particular this passage:

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We are not required to defend everything that Marx or the Cultural Anthropologists said or did. However, neither thought that the mind had no structure or that there was no such thing as human nature. Both Marx and the Cultural Anthropologists rejected Blank Slatism for one of the reasons Pinker advances for knocking down his straw man who believes in it: “That the mind can't be a blank slate, because blank slates don't do anything”. Precisely. The brain is not just a passive receptor of sense-impressions (experience) but plays an active role in organising these impressions so as to make sense of them (understand them). This capacity to organise sense-impressions is part of human biological nature. Clearly, before humans could develop culture – “accumulated local wisdom: ways of fashioning artifacts, selecting food, dividing up windfalls, and so on”, as Pinker defines it, which is learned and passed on by non-biological means – they had to have brains capable of learning and of using language and of thinking abstractly with symbols representing parts of the outside world. These brains had to have evolved and are just as much a part of “human nature” as walking upright and stereoscopic colour vision. So, there's no denial of human nature here.

As to not wanting to mention genes, we have published a whole pamphlet on the question, Are We Prisoners of Our Genes?, which can be found here.Dawkins's “extended phenotype” is him backtracking on some of the more extravagant claims he made in his original "selfish gene" book.

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Move over Bukharin, here's what FC Watts wrote on this theory in the January 1908 Socialist Standard (full article on Impossiblist1904's site here):

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When the rising bourgeoisie were directly concerned in the processes of production, when their personal directing activities were also involved, their political economy, from Sir William Petty to Ricardo, came to recognise labour to the full as the creator of value. As, however, with economic development the capitalists became less and less personally connected with the labour process, as they become increasingly mere absentees, coupon clippers, and ignorant of production, which came to be carried on entirely by hirelings, and as moreover by the culmination of classic economy by Marx the kernel of capitalist exploitation was laid bare, so it became necessary to find a theory of economics that did not lead with inevitable logic to Socialism. At the same time, by the capitalist becoming a consumer solely, so the consumer grew in importance in his eyes and the attributes of consumption in the form of “demand,” “ utility,” etc. — the reflex of the value process — became its foundation from the inverted viewpoint of the parasite. Thus a school grew into prominence which no longer recognised value as a result of the application of labour to useful ends, but held in effect that under the guise of “demand,” “esteem,” and “utility,” the value of a commodity was the creation, not of the producer, but of the consumer! To the workers, however, in daily contact with the material basis of life, such a theory must ever remain unreal and fantastic, and with them the fact of the worker as source of value must retain its fundamental importance until and unless a time comes when wealth is produced without labour, and when palaces, banquets and motor cars descend ready made from heaven.

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There's another one just out by him in this Indian publication:http://www.epw.in/journal/2016/20/special-articles/twentieth-century-socialism.htmlnOt read it fully yet but it seems to make the same point as in his previous recent articles:

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The 20th century brand of socialism, following the Bolshevik victory as the prototype of socialisms, has nothing to do with socialism as envisaged by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It can be considered only as one among different varieties of socialism such as guild socialism, anarchist socialism, market socialism, and so on. The Marxian socialism, as a portrait of an alternative society after capital, is based on the "associated mode of production." The fundamental characteristic which separates socialism envisaged by Marx from the prevailing socialism is that Marx's socialism, conceived as an association of free individuals, is a completely de-alienated society with no commodity, no money, no waged/salaried labour, no state, all of which are considered as instruments of exploitation and repression of a class society used to put down the immense majority of the humans. The 20th century socialism is quite aptly recognised as a system of party-state, two avatars. Characteristically, and in total opposition to it, in no discussion of the nature of the society after capital– that is, socialism–by Marx and Engels we find these two avatars. They disappear along with capital, the last class society.

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The penny has just dropped as to why the SWP is for Leave even though this will make conditions for migrant workers worse. It's that there are two types of migrant worker: those from the EU and those from outside the EU. Their target group is those from outside the EU (mainly Muslims from the Indian subcontinent) which the EU discriminates against but which an "independent" Britain could accommodate (UKIP makes the same point, at least on paper, but I don't suppose they really want non-EU immigrants either). Migrants from East Europe no doubt give the SWP, with its defence of the Bolshevik coup, short shrift. So there is some cynical logic to their position.

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I think we're talking at cross purposes. Of course Marx's approach is different from that of conventional academic economists. I wasn't talking about this but about their views on how prices are calculated and realised in practice.As to whether academic economists now have a theory of value separate from a theory of price, here's what the Penguin Dictationary of Economics says (or said in its 1987 edition):

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Late-nineteenth-century economists like A. MARSHALL subverted theories of value to theories of price, determined by demand and supply; with each determined by MARGINAL UTILITY or MARGINAL COST. Since then, the theories of price and value have not been separated except by followers of K. MARX.

They seem to have more interest in "utility" rather than "cost", maybe because if they looked into cost too much they would find that this can't be separated from labour expended.

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