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Have you heard the one about the economist who predicted five of the last two crises?

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Vin wrote:

I think tax credits is what concerns most workers or the need to use food banks.

Most workers? Most workers are not on tax credits or have to go to food banks. I don't know what the exact figure is but it won't be much above 10%. Our appeal must be to a much broader section of the working class and on a wider basis than the fact that some members of the working class are on or below the "poverty line". What  about those who are not?

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Important election today in Turkey. If the ruling Islamist party loses and power passes to the secular opposition party, in coalition with the Kurdish nationalists, then there would be a complete change of Turkey's policy towards Syria. The main opposition party, the Republican People's Party (CHP), comes from the same secular nationalist stable as the Baath party in Syria and is in fact sympathetic to the government there. 

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Here's the text of the leaflet that is being prepared for distribution at the demonstration in London on Sunday 29 November:

Quote:

Too Little Too LateThat’s the most that will ever be done under capitalism about the problems that global warming will bring.The way the capitalist system works rules out the effective action at world level that is needed to begin tackling the problem. It even encourages economic activities that contribute to it.Capitalism is based on production being controlled by profit-seeking enterprises which, supported by governments, compete on the market to buy resources and sell products. This competitive pursuit of profits is the essence of capitalism. It’s what capitalism is all about and what prevents any effective action to deal with climate change.Nobody can deny that global warming is taking place. Nor that, if it continues unchecked, it would have disastrous consequences – such as rising sea-levels and increased desertification – through its effects on the climates of the different parts of the world. There can only be argument over what is causing it. Most scientists in the field take the view that it has mainly been caused by the increase in the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere largely as a result of the burning of the fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas.If this is the case, then one part of any solution has to be cut back on burning these fuels. But this is not happening. In fact, on a world scale, their use is increasing. This is because this is currently the cheapest way of generating the energy to drive industry – and the logic of capitalism compels the profit-seeking enterprises that control production to use the cheapest methods. If they don’t, their competitors will.What is the solution? First, the competitive struggle for profits as the basis for production must be ended. This requires that the Earth’s natural and industrial resources become the common heritage of all humanity. On this basis, and on this basis alone, can an effective programme to deal with the problem be drawn up and implemented, because production would then be geared to serving human interests and no longer to make a profit for competing enterprises.There will be those who say that we haven’t the time to wait for the coming into being of this, in their view, unlikely or long-distant solution, and that we must therefore do something now. In this age of apathy and cynicism when any large-scale change is dismissed, this may seem a plausible argument but it begs the question. It assumes that a solution can be implemented within capitalism. But if it can’t (as Socialists maintain), then concentrating on something now rather than on changing the basis of society and production will be a waste of valuable time while the situation gets worse.

 

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Gramsci is supposed to said that he held to "Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will". The Party seems to be the opposite: optimism of the intellect, pessimism of the will ….

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Another thread for Private Fraser, Cassandra, Jeremiah and Moaning Minnie but:this might prevent a few suicides:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/world-socialist-movement/are-physical-meetings-best-form-democratic-control-2015?page=5#comment-26497

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Meanwhile the other side of the battle line:http://syriadirect.org/news/every-child-left-behind-in-the-islamic-state%E2%80%99s-new-elementary-schools/I think I'd rather learn Kurdish.

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The Times is reporting today that according to booksellers books like The Establishment by Owen Jones, Chomsky on Anarchism and The Labour Party: a Marxist History by Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein "have been flying off the shelves since Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader":http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/industries/retailing/article4596928.eceSome sort of confirmation that the heightened interest in "left" politics sparked off by Corbyn's campaign and election opens an opportunity for us too to put our views across.

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What this article reports would seem to suggest that they have not abandoned their Maoist ideology entirely:http://syriadirect.org/news/new-pyd-curriculum-in-northern-syria-reveals-ideological-linguistic-fault-lines/

Quote:

Cheerful images of Ocalan, juxtaposed with the Rojava flag and speaking with a young child, fill some of the pages of textbooks used as part of the new curricula, in pictures given to Syria Direct. Opposition to the new curricula is not only partisan, however. Educators have also pointed to the content of the new texts as an attempt to embed a “totalitarian ideology” into school lessons by “sanctifying the leader and militarizing the schools,” Jian Zakaria, the secretary of the West Kurdistan Teachers’ Union said.

Interesting also that the Syrian government has been continuing to pay for education (and health and other services too) in the areas controlled by the Kurdish Nationalists of the PYD/PKK.

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Just realised that this passage in the LibDem's blog where he describes the attitude of the Labour Party towards State payments to wage workers:

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Many Labour MPs actually opposed the first state pensions in the 1909 Peoples’ Budget because they thought they would get in the way of demands for wage increases. The Labour governments of 1924 and 1929-31 dismissed talk of such comprehensive extensions of the state as unaffordable, focussing instead on appeasing further trade union claims for wage rises until the Great Depression made that impossible.

is more or less the same as that we put forward in our other 1943 pamphlet Family Allowances:A Socialist Analysis:

Quote:

We would therefore ask the workers to examine the proposal for Family Allowances in the light of the foregoing remarks, bearing in mind that at best such a scheme can provide a slight and probably small improvement for a small section. Our advice to the workers is that they should not be fobbed off on the industrial field with small and doubtful gains for a comparatively small number, but that they should seize whatever opportunities may present themselves for winning improved conditions for all.

I suppose we could say something similar about Tax Credits. Better than relying on members of the House of Frauds.

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Samuel Courtauld, I think:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Courtauld_%28art_collector%29Seems to have been a bit of a philanthropist. He's mentioned in our 1943 pamphlet Beveridge Re-Organises Poverty:

Quote:

And Mr. Samuel Courtauld, millionaire chairman of the great rayon firm, speaking at the Manchester Rotary Club on February 18th declared himself:“strongly in favour of the principles and almost all the proposals of the Beveridge Report…. I have not the faintest doubt that if we can survive the first severe business contraction which arises after the war, social security of this nature will be about the most profitable long-term investment the country could make. It will not undermine the moral of the nation’s workers: it will ultimately lead to a higher efficiency among them and a lowering of production costs.” (Manchester Guardian, February 19th, 1943) (Italics ours.)

This is the pamphlet which quotes Tory MP Douglas Hogg (later Lord Hailsham, whose son of the same name is famous for his duck island) as saying:

Quote:

if you don not give the people social reform, they are going to give you social revolution.

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It's not really surprising that a minority government has been allowed to be formed in Portugal, but the reasons given by the President are scandalous from a democratic point of view. He sounds like a complete fool for spelling out what might indeed be the reason when he could have thought up some other more democratically acceptable one. I doubt if he or the new government will last long. It will be interesting to see how long it can survive with a majority of MPs against it.

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From that Guardian article:

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Where AWL admits it has stood candidates against Labour in the past through the Socialist Alliance, it said it only did this in seats that Labour was never going to lose.

This is true of TUSC and Left Unity and was their deliberate policy because, in the end, they prefer a Labour government (sometimes genuinely, sometimes because they [mis]calculate "after Labour, us").I don't think it is the policy of either the SWP or ex-Militant to support the Momentum group within the Labour Party. According to this recent interview with Peter Taaffe, SPEW is still dreaming a Labour Party Mark 2, a new trade-union backed "workers party":

Quote:

If the right continues to resist the will of the members for socialist ideas, then they must be taken on. The Corbyn campaign has within it, in reality, elements of a new party in the process of formation.

Looks as if they are banking on Corbyn failing to change the Labour Party, so opening the way for them. They don't seem to have changed strategy.

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Speaking of the Roman Empire, here's a quote from Marx about it (from chapter 25 of Volume i of Capital):

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But just as little as better clothing, food, and treatment, and a larger peculium, do away with the exploitation of the slave, so little do they set aside that of the wage-worker.

(Definition of peculium here). I realise that having more money is not the issue here but rather the perception of (wage) slaves  in this position. Admittedly, they don't see themselves as exploited (even though they are).

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jondwhite wrote:

The name James Morbin sounds like Jeremy Corbyn.

It didn't do him any good. Here's the result of yesterday's local by-election in Oxford:http://www.oxford.gov.uk/PageRender/decN/newsarticle.htm?newsarticle_itemid=57720Morbin got 9 votes for TUSC (1.4%). Labour romped home, increasing its share of the vote from 70% to 78%.There can't be much significance in this as the turnout was only 15% except perhaps that it's another example of UKIP coming second in an ultra-safe Labour seat/ward so that bubble hasn't burst. I don't think many Labour voters, at least at local level, care who their party's Leader is or what its national policies are.

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