ALB
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More on this new party here. It seems it was set up by a disaffected Labourite (and rich businessman) when he was not selected to stand for Parliament against LibDem Simon Hughes in Southwarkhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_People's_Party_%28UK%29http://search.electoralcommission.org.uk/English/Registrations/PP2137
It looks like we will be opposed in Lambeth and Southwark by a candidate of the All People's Party:http://allpeoplesparty.co.uk/gla-election-2016-candidates/It's not too clear what they stand for (except capitalism) but their basic slogan "Fight for Equality at the Top" suggests that they are a caricature of "identity politics", i.e just want the top positions in capitalist society to be shared equally by their particular "identity group" (in this case, seemingly, people from West Africa). As if an even sharing of capitalist privileges amongst various groups would make any difference to most people, not even those in the groups concerned. It would just be a case of top jobs for some of them.
Yes, these developments are disturbing and show that history doesn't proceed steadily in a progressive direction but that setbacks and regressions are possible. It might have been expected that there would be a progression from backward-looking dynastic regimes to modernising secular dictatorships to capitalist secular political democracy. But this has not happened. Instead we've seen the rise/return of religious obscurantism in the Arab world. (But also in Turkey where the Erdogan regime is whittling away at Ataturk's progressive reforms).There will be a number of reasons for this, including the inability of the secular dictatorships to improve the material condition of the mass of the population despite their success in the field of education and fighting religious obscurantism. Another will be the accident of history that the world's biggest oil reserves should have happened to be within the territory of a Bedoiun tribe adhering to a particularly obscurantistand obnoxious version of Islam. Their riches have enabled them to propagate this throughout the whole muslim world and before whom the Western capitalist powers have bowed and scraped for geopolitical/strategic reasons as well as to get their oil supplies. But this accident of history might have a sting in the tail: the Saudi royal family's oil resources are situated in a part of their territory inhabited by Shia muslims who could, at some point perhaps with Iran's support, rise up and give the corrupt and hypocritical Saudi ruling family their come uppance and maybe a taste of their own medicine.
I see from today's Weekly Worker that the RSA, i.e Steve Freeman, has thought up a new possible compromise position on the referendum (scroll down here to "compelling case")
Quote:the Scottish working class should vote to remain in the European Union, whilst the English working class should abstain.Completely bonkers !
Just had a leaflet from the local Tories and here's how they get round this:
Quote:How we use your InformationThe data you provide will be retained by the Conservative Party in accordance with the provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998 and related legislation. By providing your data to us, you are consenting to the data holders making contact with you in the future by telephone, text or other means, even though you may be registered with the Telephone Preference Service. Your data will not be sold or given to anyone not connected to the Conservative Party. If you do not want the information you give to us to be used in this way, or for us to contact you, please indicate by ticking the relevant boxes: Post _ Email _ SMS _ Phone_Not saying we should do this, but is what you'd have to do to avoid any comebacks.
alanjjohnstone wrote:Recognising that RSA members are not united on the call for Remain, Leave, Abstain or Boycott, the RSA will take no official position on how to vote.There's something odd about this. If a group of three people is confronted with 4 options surely they must be able to agree to eliminate one? Or maybe YMS knows a voting system that can avoid this.Still, it's good to see that Leave is no longer the kneejerk position among the Left, as can also be seen in the letter column of the Weekly Worker (which is calling for Boycott, I think).
This item is interesting:
Quote:New Business: ELECTIONs to the Assam, West Bengal, Kerala and Puduchery state Assemblies have been declares and scheduled by the Election Commission of India to be held phase wise during upcoming April and May 2016. However, our Party lacks both necessary minimum organization and wherewithal to effectively contest the elections. The Election Commission has arranged EVMs (Electronic Voting Machines) instead of ballot papers for voting. The machines will have a special NOTA (None Of The Above) button with an EC symbol at the bottom of the list with symbols of contestants. This provision has been made to facilitate those who would decline to vote for any candidate.MSC: That we ask our members and supporters to go to the voting stations and cast their votes by pressing the NOTA button.Provision for people to vote "None of the Above" was not made in the various experiments in electronic voting that have taken place in Britain, mainly because the established, parliamentary parties have been against it. Electronic voting is ok in principle but not without a provision either to vote NOTA or to vote blank
I don't think we nor anybody else need take any notice of a ruling by tne Advertising Standards Authority. Its "rulings" are just pieces of paper without any force of law. But we still shouldn't do mass e-mails because this might infringe another regulation which does, as Tottenham MP David Lamy found to his cost (literally):http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-35772202This only applies to electronic communications. We can still send out hand-written mailshots without requiring prior permission from the recipients or infringing anything.
I know the financial and economic press are making a big thing about the fall/stagnation of UK "productivity" but I wonder whether what is being measured has the significance they attach to it. But at least it's a recognition that how effectively workers work is important for the operation of the capitalist economy as the more effectively they do the more the profits that can be squeezed out from them. And vice versa: if they are working less effectively then profits are threatened.Nation-wide productivity in the sense that is generally used (as in the table) is measured by dividing (an index of) of output (such as GNP) by (an index) of the number of hours worked by the whole workforce The trouble is that no distinction is made between productive and non-productive hours worked. Civil servants (and many others), for instance, do not produce anything, so it's not a measure of the productivity of productive workers, at least not a direct one, though changes in it will reflect to some extent changes in real productivity.There is another measure: output divided by the number of workers, which gives a differen result. And in the opening line of the article the autho rseems to be offering a third: "valuable stuff per person", but that's the same as output (or income) per head, not generally regarded as a measure of productivity as it includes people who don't work at all (the young, the retired, the unemployed, those unable to work) as well as those in employment.More on how productivity is calculated and how the two ways of calculating it have been moving in the UK can be found here:http://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/bulletins/labourproductivity/q32015In any event, I wouldn't have thought that the figures for national productivity would influence particular employers in negotiations over the wages of their employees. What would count there would be the productivity of their enterprise or of their whole industry (though of course if national productivity is stagnating they might use this as a pretext for saying no or offering less).
According to today's papers, in his interview on the Andrew Marr Show yesterday Duncan Smith let the cat out of the bag when he said:
Quote:We need to get the deficit down, but we need to make sure we widen the scope of where we look to get that deficit down and not just narrow it on working age benefits. Because otherwise it just looks like we see this as a pot of money, that it doesn't matter because they don't vote for us.That this was behind where the government chose the axe should fall, and why, has long been obvious to impartial observers.
Meel wrote:ALB said:#23 the Tories and the disabled“Genes do determine anatomical and physiological defects or abnormalities in some individuals which will influence (limit in some cases) what the individual affected can do as well as the attitude of society towards them. In fact it is significant that it is only genes determining such defects and abnormalities that have been identified.”#15 current thread“There does seem to be a genetic element in some mental illness (via the anatomy and physiology of the brain as part of the body), not nearly as much as some claim but still some, …..”I am assuming here that by “abnormalities” you also include mental “abnormalities” – so in fact you are saying (correct me if I am wrong) that genes have an effect on “abnormal” mental conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and I take it you would also include autism under this banner.Therefore you are saying that you think there is a genetic component to mental illness or mental abnormality – but not to mental “normality”. But think about the logic here: if there are genetic components to “abnormal” mental conditions, then as a corollary, there must be genetic components to “normal” mental conditions. This must be so, how could it be otherwise?I never said that the anatomy and physiology of the brain, as part of the body, was not genetically determined. Most humans are capable of extensive learning and absorbing culture. Some are. unfortunately, not and are described as having "learning difficulties". In most cases this will be due to some defect in the way their body works which is likely to be genetic.As to conditions such as those classified as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, they seem to be related to too little or too much of chemicals produced by the body such as serotonin, dopamine. I'm prepared to accept that a body producing too much or too little of them could be due to some genetic condition, i.e a bodily "defect" or "abnormality" (though this could also have environmental causes too, just as a brain trauma can affect a person's ability to learn).That's what I was trying to say when I wrote about there being a genetic element in some mental conditions. It's not so much the mental condition itself that would be genetic of course as the body's physical anatomy/physiology that gives rise to it or makes it more likely.
One argument put forward in favour of GM food is that this will allow more food to be produced so helping to reduce or eliminate world hunger. This will undoubtedly be the case in socialism where food will be grown to directly feed people. But it's not the case under capitalism where food is produced to be sold. There's a letter in the January/February issue of the Skeptical Enquirer from someone (who is not too keen on GM food) who inadvertently makes this point. He writes:
Quote:[T]he production of genetically modified foods is a business, not a work of charity. During most famines in modern times, people have not gone hungry and died because there wasn't enough food in the world; they died because either food wasn't available where those in need lived or because they did not have the money to pay for it. Why should foodstuffs be more available to people in this position if they are GM products than if they aren't?Good point. The benefits of GM crops will only be able to be fully realised in a socialist, production-for-use society.
This article on Laing by R. Baltrop from the August 1972 Socialist Standard is on our archives section here:https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1970s/1972/no-816-august-1972/mind-cul-de-sac-laingAs is this more recent one from last December's issue:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2015/no-1336-december-2015/mixed-media-mary-barnes
gnome wrote:Several people wanted to know our views on the EU referendum (we may do a leaflet for next time).The Election Committee has already prepared an EC Statement and a leaflet to go before the 2 April EC Meeting. Here's the text of the leaflet. Branches don't need EU authorisation to produce leaflets, so you needn't wait till after 2 April if you want to use it. Anyway, here's the basic text:
Quote:EU referendum: an irrelevant sideshowWe face months of debate over Britain staying in or leaving the European Union. It will dominate headlines and all political discussions, yet it is not the most pressing issue facing us by a long shot,In the UK thousands of early deaths each year are related to poor diet, fuel poverty and inequality. Wages have only just returned to the same value they had in 2008, before the Great Crash, and are growing slowly. 1.7 million people are unemployed (according to official statistics) and millions more are in insecure and stressful jobs.In reality, it doesn’t matter for the vast majority of us. Yet the politicians and journalists are full of discussions about whether or not Britain should be part of the EU.Those who own the productive wealth of society aren’t going to willingly let their capital lie idle. In or out of the EU, they will need workers and seek profits in pretty much the same way. They will always seek to make the most profit they can, and they will need the labour of those of us who work to make their profits for them.In order to do business, there will have to be arrangements with other governments, especially those that neighbour Britain. Pretty much all free trade agreements have an arbitration process, which will mean courts telling the British government what to do in order to comply with the treaties it signed.They’ll still need to ensure that goods and workers can get from A to B without massive queues, delays and bureaucracy. The only countries with truly controlled borders are the likes of Cuba and North Korea, whose example is hardly worth following.The owners of capital will still try to ensure that they get privileged access to the corridors of power, so that the rules and terms of trade are in their favour. Most of us will continue to have as little control over the laws of the land as before.Worldwide millions die due to lack of available medical services. Starvation exists in the midst of plenty of food. Man-made climate change is changing eco-systems across the world. Millions are displaced by war. These are Human problems, that we must confront on a worldwide scale.If we want practical control of our own lives, if we want to confront these problems, we have to organise on a worldwide basis, not a national basis. We need to join with the vast majority of the world who do not own a single square inch of it, in order to bring the wealth of the world under the democratic control of everyone, rather than taking sides in a factional dispute between memebers of the propertied class.Obviously a bit will be added at the end about going to the polling station and casting a write-in vote for world socialism.
