[ALB]

Our US comrades are to it, according to this email:

Quote:

… an idea that has been accepted by the other WSPUS members active on our forum. It was reported in the US press that as a result of Bernie Sanders calling himself a socialist internet searches on the word "socialism" have surged. [The] idea is to take advantage of this by creating a new website using the domain name whatissocialism.org (or .net) specially designed to attract people who do these searches.

As an aside, I see Mason describes Sanders as "the first serious leftwing candidate in the history of the Democratic Party" but what about FD Roosevelt? Isn't Sanders advocating the same sort of "New Deal" policies? I know he's denouncing billionaires and calling for a political revolution but didn't FDR do much the same?

[ALB]

There does seem to be an anarchist at large in the i paper, as a comrade has just pointed out that its Quote of the Day for the previous issue (5 February) was:

Quote:

As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognise nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others. JOEL BAKAN

Bakan's book and film The Corporation are very good but the irony here is that the i paper is owned by a Russian oligarch  … by means of the legal construct of a corporation.

[ALB]

According to this, from an Iranian news agency, the Kurdish nationalists have been getting air support from the Syrian government and Russia for these advances against the so-called "moderate" Jihadists:http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13941119001478

[ALB]

Isn't refugees gathering at the border to get out how the Spanish Civil War ended as one side won?

[ALB]

In a book on Women and Socialism by a US Trotskyist (member of the ISO) which we've been sent for review, the author Sharon Smith reveals that others in Germany and elsewhere took the same attitude as us towards the Women's Movements that demanded votes for women on the same terms as men:

Quote:

For example, the early-twentieth-century German women's suffrage movement did not challenge the property requirements that denied working-class men the right to vote — knowing that such requirements would also deny voting rights to working-class women. Maintaining such property requirements could only strengthen the political weight ol the middle and upper classes, while the working class would remain politically voiceless.

And describing discussions within the Second International:

Quote:

The issue of whether to fight for "universal" or "partial" women's suffrage was a strong point of controversy. Some women's suffrage organizations demanded (and in some European countries, won) partial suffrage for women—with voting rights based upon property holding and the payment of taxes (that is, restricting voting rights to those women of financial means). But in many of these same societies, male suffrage was also partial, denying working-class men the right to vote. Thus, partial suffrage merely increased the voting power of the upper classes.

[ALB]

Actually, YMS, if I remember correctly he is on record in one of the previous multiple threads on this as saying that if society democratically votes in favour of one particular scientific theory that will become the orthodox view that will be expressed in all textbooks, etc. as such. Any rival view will have difficulty in being expressed. A vote will also be able to ban the expression of certain views.

[ALB]

SocialistPunk wrote:

ALB, you haven't wasted your time. People like TheSpanishInquisition will likely never be swayed whatever you or any other member of the SPGB/WSM say, but they are not important. The important people are those who may be reading what you say and have the seed of a new idea planted in their thoughts, that someday may germinate.

I know. It was just that I thought he was genuine and had spent some time looking on the internet for suitable basic articles which I wouldn't have done if he'd been honest and stated from the start that he was opposed to socialism as he misunderstood it (government ownership and control). Of course we should still discuss with people like him, for the reason you give.

[ALB]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

But, lets try another tack: imagine if, tomorrow, it was made illegal to be an employer (to use terminology from British law, to be the Master in a contract of service).  That would render almost all capital worthless at a stroke, and the only way in which labour could be secured would be through voluntary co-operation, using the worthless tools to hand.

Or that all companies and corporations (which are only legal entities created and maintained by the state) were dissolved or that all stocks and shares, bills and bonds, etc were declared null and void. They'd then just be pieces of paper that could be used to make lampshades.Then no one and no legal entity will be able to exert enforceable property rights over means of production. They would belong to nobody or everybody (the same thing).

[ALB]

Ah, the penny's dropped. You weren't the sincere seeker after truth about socialism that you appeared to be but a defender of capitalism. No doubt some sort of mad marketeer. I'm sorry I wasted my time.

[ALB]

Socialism/communism is not about taking away people's personal possessions. That's just a scare story put around by those whose property socialism will take away: those who own and control the means for producing goods and services (farms, mines, factories, etc).And they won't be bought out, but simply expropriated without compensation when a majority decide democratically to make the means of production the common property of all, so they can be used to provide for the needs of all instead of to make profits for a few.Nor has socialism anything to do with government ownership. It's about common ownership, which is the same as non-ownership. The means of production won't belong to anyone or any institution, not corporations, not rich individuals, not governments. They will simply be there to be used under democratic control to provide for people's needs in accordance with the principle "from each their ability, to each their needs".

[ALB]

Tim Kilgallon wrote:

to be fair, Walford did come up with one reasonably funny joke, which was – A Martian lands in Clapham High Street, knocks on the door of number 52 and says "take me to your leader"

Actually, wasn't the punchine rather "Take me to your non-leader" ?

[ALB]

Yes, but you fed him whiskey and prozac. I just slap him down once and then ignore him

[ALB]

Labriola wrote:

Or did Engels, when he wrote his Anti-Dühring, which is to this day, the most accomplished work of critical socialism and contains in a nutshell the whole philosophy required for the thinkers of socialism, dream of exhausting the possibilities of the knowable universe in his short and exquisite work, or of laying down forever the outlines of metaphysics, psychology, ethics, logic, and whatever may be the names of the other sections of the encyclopedia, which were chosen either for intrinsic reasons of objective division, or for reasons of expediency, comfort, vanity, by those who profess to be teachers?

Labriola wrote:

Engels' Anti-Dühring is that work which ought to get an international circulation before any other. I know of few books which are equal to it in compactness of thought, multiplicity of view-points, and effectiveness in bringing home its points. It may become mental medicine for young thinkers, who generally turn with vague and uncertain touch to books which are said to deal with socialism of some kind. This was what happened when this book appeared, as Bernstein wrote about three years ago in the Neue Zeit, in an article commemorating the event. This work of Engels remains the unexcelled book in the literature of socialism.

Labriola wrote:

When Engels, in his Anti-Dühring, used the term metaphysics in a deprecating manner, he intended precisely to refer to that way of thinking, conceiving, inferring, expounding which is the opposite of a genetic, and therefore dialectical, consideration of things. The metaphysical way of thinking has the following characteristics: In the first place, it regards as self-dependent things, as things independent of one another, those modes of thought, which are in reality modes only to the extent that they represent points of correlation and transition in a process; in the second place, it regards these modes of thought as existing before the fact, as pre-existing, as types, or prototypes, of the weak and shadowy reality of sense perceptions. From the first point of view, for instance, such thoughts as cause and effect, means and end, origin and reality, and so forth, appear merely as distinct terminals of different, and sometimes opposite, kinds. Some of them seem to be only causes, others only effects, and so forth. In the second case the world of experience seems to be disintegrating and falling to pieces before our eyes, separating into substance and attribute, thing in itself and phenomenon, possibility and obvious reality. The critique of Engels demands substantially and realistically that terminal thought should not be considered as a fixed entity, but as a function. For such terminal concepts are valuable only in so far as they help us to think now, while we are actively engaged in proceeding with new thought.

From here:https://www.marxists.org/archive/labriola/works/al03.htmand herehttps://www.marxists.org/archive/labriola/works/al04.htm

[ALB]

Labriola's criticism was aimed at the likes of Enrico Ferri who gave an openly Positivist interpretation of Marx and Engels, as in his Socialism and Modern Science:https://www.marxists.org/archive/ferri/1900/socialism-science/index.htmIronically, the Charles H. Kerr publishing house in Chicago, which specialised in publishing works by "Marxists", published translations of both Ferri (a member of the "Italian Socialist Party" at the time) and Labriola.Actually, Labriola and Engels seem to have been great mates. At any rate, there is no criticism of Engels in anything he wrote.

[ALB]

Most CND members were in favour of Voting Labour. INDEC were CNDers who didn't believe Labour would Ban the Bomb. How right they were (and probably still are, despite Corbyn).

[Author]

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