ALB
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Dave B wrote:Re; that early Christians were ‘proto Marxists’, as Bart Erhman briefly ‘considered’ in one of his best selling books.
The earliest christians were clearly proto Jehovah's Witnesses who wanted to have nothing to do with then existing society and were waiting for the end of the world in their lifetime.
I thought you did have. What with managing our facebook and meetup pages I'll contact Andy and Howard with the suggestion. They've also made use of these contacts in Swansea and Easington.
gnome wrote:We in Kent and Sussex have also been inundated with emails via 38 degrees about TTIP. Our candidate in Folkestone & Hythe, Andy Thomas, responded to one such email […}Whilst our candidate in Brighton Pavilion, Howard Pilott, replied to another email with contrasting brevity:Quote:We in the SPGB propose scrapping capitalism, which should hopefully allay your fears.Did Andy literally reply to only one? For Oxford we have replied to every single one of the 300 or so (and counting) we received. I imagine a place like Brighton must have received a similar number. More hopefully.Once you've done the first you can use that reply for the rest. It's just a matter of cut and paste. Here we have a self-selected list of people who are already interested in international matters from a critical perspective. Which is why we've used their email addresses to make a database for at least one future mail-out. That takes a bit more work and time but is the modern equivalent of knocking on people's doors. After all, they say that e-campaigning is now the thing. We'll also be doing weekly literature stalls as well of course.
Our candidates in Swansea, Oxford, Islington and Easington have received what must be 400 emails via 39 Degrees about TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership). We've replied to as many as we can. Here's one respose we've had:
Quote:Goodness me! Love to attend that. In fact must be honest and say that it had never occurred to me that SPGB continued to exist!!! Some 60 years ago I counted myself one of your supporters, having got fed up listening to Tony Cliff and Gerry Healey spout on about Trotsky and permanent revolution. Can't remember now who came to the Malatesta Club to tell us about SPGB, but I was impressed.Today's Times reports this under the headline "Eat goat, say Hindu nationalists as beef is banned in Mumbai". Apparently they are owners who refuse to rent property to those who eat beef. That's a new one "No Irish. No Blacks. No Beefeaters".
I heard that episode too. He did strongly make the point we do that at work and in the family "communism" prevails. The trouble is he doesn't think society as a whole could operate on this basis.
Here's the excellent 25 minute talk about what the speaker says we should better call "cover-up" throrires:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/world-socialist-movement/audio-upload-what-conspiracy-theories-arent-telling-you
I meant someone from his own field of linguistics on the basis of their research and theorising in this field or, if you prtefer, theorising, research and theorising again
All I know was that one of them is on record as saying that he left UKIP because he felt its working class members like him were being treated as mere foot soldiers.
LBird wrote:More:regarding Chomskys theory, the article wrote:Speech is the natural, autonomous output of a dedicated computational mechanism – the ‘language organ’ – located in a special region of the individual human brain.'Individuals' and 'biology'.
It is this biological determinism that was why I was waiting for someone to refute him. A bit suspicious of Chris Knight though, as isn't he a bit of one too (ex-SWP, expelled I think, but in their argument I thought Chris Harman came off best)?
There's an audio tape of the two opening statements in last year's debate with UKIP here on this site:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2015/no-1326-february-2015/our-general-election-campaign If you want to see a rather amateur video of this (taken on her mobile) plus the UKIP candidate going on and on about the European Court of Human Rights at Strasburg (which is not part of the EU) it's on her youtube channel here: http://www.fanlook.net/view/Oyi1qYopafUIncidentally, two or three ex-members of UKIP have joined the Party in the past couple of years.
I don't know if this is what you mean by "recorded" but there's a more or less complete record of the Party's debates over the years here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Party_of_Great_Britain_debatesScroll down and you'll see we debated the British Union of Fascists in 1935, the Union of British Freedom in 1946, the Union Movement in 1955, the National Front in 1969, the Islamic Party of Britain in 1990, the Luton Cultural Islamic Society in 1995, and UKIP in 2009 and 2014.So we do practice what we preach. I think only the 2014 one with UKIP was recorded in the other sense. There also exists a press report of the 1969 debate with the NF, This was broken up by the Trotskyists, which explains why we've not debated with groups they designate as "fascist" since..
The UKIP candidate in Swansea West is one of the many skeletons in their cupboard:But he wasn't bad enough for UKIP to deselect him (not that they need to as he seems to be expressing their views if rather crudely):http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/no-further-action-against-welsh-8230540We've challenged him to a public debate. This is a better way to contest and expose his views than trying to physically stop him from expressing them as some locally are wanting.
I was going to make the same point as JohnD but he got there first. The purpose of a public debate is not to convince the opponent but the audience. That's why we say it's better to debate fascists, islamists, etc in public and expose their views rather to stop their views being expressed whether by law (as the Tories propose) or by mob violence (as the SWP do).I don't think either that there are such things as instant convincings. What we are talking about is the free circulation of ideas and, as JohnD points out, this as being the best condition for the spread of socialist ideas. I don't suppose we have convinced any "religious or racial extremists" themselves but we certainly have convinced people who were once influenced by them.
