ALB
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Your description of the affair doesn't correspond with that on wikipedia:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Dog_affairThe dates are wrong. The rioters were medical students protesting in favour of vivisection not workers protesting against it. Battersea council was not then chaired by a "black man", etc.If the wikipedia account is accurate then it might explain why the Socialist Standard doesn't seem to have mentioned it as might have been expected if workers regarded it as a major issue, especially since, as you point out, the party was particularly strong in Battersea at the time: it was a dispute between two sections of the bourgeoisie, medical students and feminists (Votes for Rich Women) who were also anti-vivisectionists.This is not to defend vivisection but to defend historical accuracy.On the other hand, the April 1905 Socialist Standard in an article "Socialists & Capitalist Hospitals" did complain about the treatment of working class girls and young women who went to hospitals being forced to strip to the waist in the presence of medical students for them to examine as part of their training.Lafargue's article (he was of course himself a medical doctor), dating from 1881, can be found here.https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1881/12/25.htmIt is unlikely to have been known to early party members — but no wonder the anti-vivisectionists don't like him !
I'm sure that such sharing schemes will flourish in socialism. As Zeitgeist (whatever happened to them?) pointed out in their activists' guide:
Quote:People claim “ownership” because it is a legal form of protection. In a system of abundance, without the need for money, the idea of ownership becomes irrelevant. In this new system no one owns anything. Instead, everyone has unrestricted access to everything. Ownership is a massive burden. No longer will a person need to live in one place. One could travel the world constantly. Anything needed is obtained, without restriction. There is no reason for abuse for there is nothing to gain. You can’t steal things that no one owns and you certainly couldn’t sell them. Household items are obtained through central distribution in the cities, while recreational items are available on call or near the location of their use. For example, if you go to a golf course you would select, on site, your clubs from the most effectively designed models available. You use them, and then you return them. If you decide to keep the clubs, go ahead – that is your burden… for why would a person want to transport, maintain and store golf clubs, when they can always have access to them and then return them onsite? Our homes today are full of junk that we hold onto because of the supposed value they maintain. This waste will no longer be needed. In this model, the city complex or, in fact, the entire world, is really your home. Instead of having extraneous items like recreational equipment and vehicles sitting about your physical house, collecting dust when they are not in use, they are stored centrally for everyone’s free access, with products being utilized actively, minimizing redundant waste. If you require an automobile for whatever reason, the car is made available for you. When you get to your destination, the satellite based driving system will automatically make the car available for others to use, as opposed to sitting in some parking lot wasting space and time. In society today, the need for property results in extreme product overlap and redundant waste. There is no reason for every person to “own” a car. Most only drive them for an hour a day. It is much more intelligent to create a universal shared system, for it dramatically reduces waste, redundancy and increases space and efficiency.Just read the same article in this weekend's i paper. I read it as saying that within capitalism such schemes will never be mainstream, but isn't this was what we say? It could have some relevance to the idea Robbo has revived on the SPGB Communications thread about encouraging such schemes as bits of pre-socialism within capitalism. Having said that, that doesn't mean we should reject or denounce them (after all, they are one way of trying to survive under capitalism), just criticise extravagant claims made about them.
alanjjohnstone wrote:Then let us see what Left Unity have discussed. http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1062/standing-in-londons-elections/Interesting discussion by them on the last election and the coming London elections next year. I see that they are aware of the People's Front of Judea question too.
Quote:Ken Loach decided to enter the discussion. Whereas he usually takes more of a back seat in LU, now the gloves came off. He thought the Hackney motion was “madness” and that it would lead people to invoke the Monty Python ‘People’s Front of Judea’ sketch – especially with LU’s name being what it is. We would be “laughed out of the room” if we adopted the Hackney motion, he said.The Hackney resolution was in fact carried. It's that of the first group described here:
Quote:In the discussion which followed it seemed that LU in London had split into three broad camps. There were those who supported LU standing on its own on a pro-migrant and pro-European basis. This group was made up of the leadership in the form of Kate Hudson and Andrew Burgin, as well as Socialist Resistance speakers like Terry Conway. The CP lent its support to this grouping. Then there were the ISN speakers, who promoted Tusc on the basis of “socialist unity”. Finally there was a quite backward grouping, around Simon Hardy and the Workers Power and ex-WP milieu, which also had on board the likes of Ruth Cashman of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and some ex-SWP speakers, who felt that elections were a waste of money and what LU should really be doing is “building the movement”.Maybe, at last, LU will stand on its own in elections, independent of TUSC, so we can see how much support they have (or have not) got. We'll see.Simon Hardy, by the way, stood against us in Vauxhall, one of the few who stood as LU not TUSC:
Quote:He jokingly started by giving his name and “188 votes for socialism” in reference to his campaign to become MP for Vauxhall.Compared to our 82. So, they're still in the same league as us, which "building the movement " instead of contesting elections won't disguise.
Howard Pilott wrote:Additionally unless there is a reference to Marx and preferably Engels too, somehow there’s a lack of credibility. Just ask yourself for a moment, why do references to some long dead German have such a status in our communications? To me it is almost as if we doubt our own integrity unless there is a link to our apostle and his holy scripts. My view is that most people could not give a monkey’s about what he said and in fact are turned off by the references; many of which quotations are turgidly expressed in the written voice of a bygone era.Howard's summary of the view of "some members" thoughts here is a bit unfair as it is based on listening to speakers at one meeting, at which the chair quoted Engels and the speaker Marx. Actually, whether or not it is a good or a bad thing, this is not done at all our meetings. Far from it. And it varies from speaker to speaker. It is certainly not compulsory.
Actually, the economy is expanding, slowly. You have a point, though, there may be a conflict of interest here between the government (which wants to reduce benefits, as those paid to the unemployed) and employers (who want a minumum pool of unemployed to stop wages rising too fast). A tough balancing act for the government, especially one that prides itself as being "business friendly", i.e as prepared to act in the interests of big business. I doubt if they really do want to get the unemployment rate down to the 2% or less it was in the 1950s and 1960s and the increased relative power this gave to the unions even this would cut the benefits billIt's a bit like the division amongst capitalists over tax credits as a subsidy to low-paying employers discussed on a couple of other threads here.
The whole campaign to "get people into work" is hypocrisy. They know that there will always be a pool of unemployed. Academic economists have invented a concept variously called the "natural" or "equibilbtium" rate of unemployment as "the level at which which wage inflation measures start to build" as the Economics Editor of the Times, Philip Aldrick, defined in in an article on Wednesday (10 June), i.e the rate needed to keep wages rising too much. Most economists fix it at 5% or more. The article quoted one economists as arguing that it might now be lower, at 4%.:
Quote:The Bank [of England] estimates the equilibrium rate to be 5.1 per cent — the average between 2001 and 2007. Mr Saunders suggests it could be less than 4 per cent today, the lowest for 40 years. In other words, at the economy's optimum cruising speed, 400,000 fewer people need be unemployed than before the crisis.Unemployment is currently 5.5 percent or 1,860,000 people. If their "equilibrium rate" of unemployment is 4% rather than 5% this would still mean 1,352,000 "need be unemployed". The government don't want these people to find jobs as it would strengthen workers' bargaining position over wages, but that doesn't stop them harrassing them with useless and petty form-filling, reporting to the so-called "job centre" just for the sake of it, calling them scroungers and now saying they are mentally defective.
alanjjohnstone wrote:For the time being i think this is the best place to discuss the London elections until the party makes a decision on its position to staanding.No, it's not ! There's already a long-running thread on Left Unity and Howard Pilott's paper has nothing to do with the London elections. If anything, there should be a separate thread here. Interesting link, very interesting in fact so I'll comment on it on the LU thread.
I wouldn't have thought so. It's already part of a document published in the files section of spintcom. An electronic copy already exists of course. But I think it would be more appropriate on the "World Socialist Movement" section than this one.
JordanB wrote:Why do you think it is that these vanguard parties go on to establish state capitalism rather than socialism ?Basically, because the economic, social and political situation in the countries where they got power meant that the development of capitalism ((as a society and economy based on minority ownership, wage labour and production for sale) in one form or another was the only way forward.It is true that, even in 1917, it would have been possible to have established socialism on a world scale. In fact, given that capitalism is already a worldwide system, so socialism can only be too. So socialism cannot be established in just one country alone as the Bolsheviks, the Vietcong, etc were trying to do (or at least saying they were trying to do).Groups like these having won power in one economically backward country had no alternative but to develop capitalism in one form or another. Because of their statist approach in their case this was likely to be state capitalism where the state would fulfil the role that had been fulfilled by private capitalists in other countries.Actually, it was Lenin himself who first said that state capitalism was the only way forward for Russia. Which is what happened for 70 years, but now they have reverted to the mixed state/private capitalism that exists in most other countries. Vietnam too, with Cuba under immense pressure to take the same road.
In an article today the Times Economics Editor, Philip Aldrick, quotes a Michael Saunders, Citi's UK economist, as saying:
Quote:"We now subsidise people to be in low-paid work rather than to be out of work," Mr Saunders says. The tax-free personal allowance, at £11,000 in 2017, has taken 3.7 million people out of income tax. Combined with tax credits for working households, which total £30 billion, every family on less than £18,000 — about two-thirds the average wage — gets a top-up from the state, he says.i.e. every employer paying workers less than £18,000 a year gets a subsidy from the state (just as every landlord with tenants getting housing benefit and every bus company transporting old age pensioners). So it's not just a redistribution of poverty amongst workers but a redistribution of profits amongst employers too.
JordanB wrote:Hungry stomachs are the backbone of every proletariat uprising & revolution, not bloated stomachs.I don't think that's right, from either a historical or theoretical point of view. Revolution and mere revolt are not the same. The socialist revolution has to be an action in which the wage and salary working class, as the vast majority in society, are democratically self-organised and moved by an understanding of what socialism involves, not by mere hunger (though some might well also be hungry).
Quote:I mean we can hardly be compared to the Russian peasantry back in 1917 or the Vitnamese peasantry etc.Quite. In these overwhelmingly peasant countries (ie without much of a working class) a peasant revolt was led by vanguard party which went on to establish state capitalism not socialism, the only possible outcome in the circumstances. There is nothing positive to learn from either for a revolution in advanced capitalist countries.
I suppose it depends on how you define "the poor". He seems to mean those who don't have an income enough to take them above some arbitrary "poverty line". In any event, his solution of "tax credits" is the same subsidy to low-paying employers that Gordon Brown introduced here. Whether other capitalists, those who will have to pay more taxes to subsidise their low-wage competitors, would welcome this is another matter.On a different level, it is not the rich who are to blame for inequality. It's capitalism and the rich are just its beneficiaries. You'd have thought, though, that they wouldn't think it wise to draw attention to this.
Meanwhile the US media are interested in his brother:http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/241425-bernie-sanders-brother-falls-in-british-electionsActually, some of the things he said at hustings in the election, eg about education today being essentially aimed at increasing a person's earning power, were quite good, but we had to point out that this could only be ended in socialism. Which can be said about a lot of the things the Greens advocate,. He used to be in the Labour Party, by the way.
Interesting and revealing article by John Milios who has been mentioned before on this thread. He has studied Marx's theories of crises and rejects underconsumptionism (that crises are caused by workers not having enoughor coming to have less purchasing power) and says so in the opening paragraphs and in footnote 2. But then he says something odd:
Quote:Austerity does lead, of course, to recession.Logically, in view of what he writes immediately before and after (about recession conditions eventually restoring profitability), he ought to have said the opposite and which is in fact the case : that a recession leads to austerity. I imagine that he puts it the other way round in order to be able to argue (along with the underconsumptionists!) that ending austerity is a way of ending the recession.Later on he criticises Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek Finance Minister (and someone else who has studied Marx but not so deeply), for accepting 70% of austerity and for telling a meeting on Greek bankers on 22 April:
Quote:The era in which a government of the Left was by definition contrary to the milieu of entrepreneurship has passed. if we get to a point when there is growth, we can start talking again about conflicting labour and capital interests. Today we are together.So, while Milios advocates clobbering the capitalist class, Yaroufakis is in effect saying that the way out of the recession is through capitalists investing for profit and if the price of getting them to do this is a reduction in working class living standards through 70% austerity, then so be it (and anyway they've got us over a barrel).Actually, given capitalism, Yaroufakis's policy is the more realistic. Milios's would just provoke an even bigger recession. What a cruel dilemma for the Syriza government: either cave in by accepting at least 70% austerity or go down fighting and make things worse for the working class that way instead. A dilemma that reinforces our view that socialism is literally the only way out that won't involve the working class suffering.
