ALB
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A couple of useful days in Oxford. Met the election manager at the Town Hall and got some electoral registers. Found 10 people (actually 11) to sign the nomination papers in Oxford East. With no contacts in Oxford West & Abingdon, two of us went from door-to-door and asking people in the street and got 7 signatures in less than two hours .We got invited in for a cup of tea by an elector with a Vote National Health Action Party poster in their window (turned out his daughter was a surgeon). Should be able to get the other 3 on 8 March in the village of Cumnor in gratitude for our candidate Mike taking part in the annual clean-up there (that wouldn't be vote-catching, only nomination-signature catching). Also got two more invitations to hustings, this time in Oxford East.
Met the person from "Socialist Resistance" ("house-trained trots", I like it). There is virtually no LU in Oxford but there is a branch of his group. He gave me a back copy of their magazine Socialist Resistance for Summer 2013, i.e after Ken Loach had made his appeal for a new Left party and before LU was founded. There's an article 'UKIP advances [in the May local elections of that year] shame the left' in which the author (Phil Hearse) writes:
Quote:The failure to construct a left electoral alternative to Labour shames the left, and in particular the leaderships of the SWP and Socialist Party, jointly culpable for the collapse of successive left unity initiatives. Certainly on the kind of unfavourable terrain that existed in yesterday's elections would not guarantee any kind of left electoral breakthrough. But the left should try to be a growing electoral alternative to austerity, xenophobia and racism. The present practice on much of the left is in fact a form of electoral abstentionism, although at a formal level organisations like the SWP and the SP reject it. Shrugging your shoulders and muttering about the primacy of mass struggle is (at best) a capitulation to syndicalism and spontaneism. The right wing must be fought in elections as well as in the mass struggle, obviously.I still don't understand why, from their own points of view, the leaders of LU have chosen not to participate in the coming general election. Whatever the reason (I think they mutter only about local, single-issue struggles), they've missed the boat and any chance of getting off the ground. They've given the Greens the chance to become "left electoral alternative to Labour". Maybe because that's where their sympathies lay anyway.
I see one idea is to give political parties £3 for every vote they get:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2058339/Cost-funding-political-parties-3-vote.htmlThat would mean we'd get the £500 deposit back if we got 167 votes (instead of 5% of the votes cast, as now).. Sounds alright (as we can normally do that): better the State giving us money rather than the other way round (even if the £500 entitles us to free postal distribution, a good bargain anyway).
stuartw2112 wrote:ALB: Simon Hardy's a nice decent guy, smart too. Perhaps on the election trail you can make friends.I can agree with you on that. I've read in some of his stuff. Probably shan't come across him myself as I'm the election agent for our candidates in Oxford. In fact I'm off in a while for a drink there with a member of the trot group "Socialist Resistance". I think they're in LU too, aren't they? No, it's not Alan Thornett.
It gets more complicated. The Green Party candidate who stood in Vauxhall in 2010, Joseph Healy, left and joined Left Unity. He now sits on their Disputes Committee. He has just (18 Feb) tweeted his support for Simon Hardy.
It so happens that one of the handful of Left Unity candidates in the coming general election will be standing in Vauxhall where we are too. So there'll be a head-to-deal clash withh them there. However, their candidate doesn't seem to be a normal LUer:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/world-socialist-movement/general-election-news-release?page=7#comment-20804
We have a new opponent in Vauxhall: Left Unity..Their candidate is Simon Hardy, ex-Workers Power, the Trotskyist group that stood against us there in 2010,http://leftunity.org/simon-hardy-left-unity-candidate-for-vauxhall/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=simon-hardy-left-unity-candidate-for-vauxhall He still seems to consider himself a bit of a Bolshevik-Leninist but one of those who try to argue that Lenin wasn't really a Leninist, i.e didn't really believe in a top-down, highly disciplined vanguard party to lead the discontented masses (when he clearly did):http://anticapitalists.org/2012/12/28/building-a-revolutionary-organisation-i/In any event, he still seems to be a member of the Dead Russians Society.
I've been reading the Morning Star this week (to see if they've published a letter we sent them) and have been surprised at their negative attitude towards Syriza. There's a letter protesting against this in today's issue. Apparently, the Morning Star, which is closely associated with the CPB, is echoing the views of the Greek Communist Party, the KKE, which is also hostile to Syriza. It wants Greece to withdraw from the EU (and so the euro). Which of course is what the CPB wants the UK to do too. But an "independent" state-capitalist siege economy wouldn't make things any better for workers in Greece. In fact it would probably make things even worse.Incidentally, in the elections the KKE also increased its vote and representation in parliament.
Very interesting and revealing, this speech dating from 2013 of the person who is now Greece's Minister of Finance. For those who won't read the whole article here's a couple of key passages:
Quote:Yet my aim here is to offer a window into my view of a repugnant European capitalism whose implosion, despite its many ills, should be avoided at all costs. It is a confession intended to convince radicals that we have a contradictory mission: to arrest the freefall of European capitalism in order to buy the time we need to formulate its alternative.Quote:If this means that it is we, the suitably erratic Marxists, who must try to save European capitalism from itself, so be it. Not out of love for European capitalism, for the eurozone, for Brussels, or for the European Central Bank, but just because we want to minimise the unnecessary human toll from this crisisIt's the same argument he put forward in his blog in April 2012 already quoted on this thread.At least he's honest about what he has since been given a chance to try to do.
Here (I hope) is Jim Callaghan's famous speech at the burial of the Keynesian idea that a government could spend its way out of a crisis:http://tiny.cc/mmh3tx I don't know if it has been translated into Greek so Alexis Tsipras can use it in a year or so's time.
You beat me to it ! Silvio Gesell's "stamp scrip" idea is mentioned in this article in the Socialist Standard:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2009/no-1254-february-2009/cooking-books-1-free-money-everyoneBasically, he proposed that money should devalue the longer it was held as cash and not spent. This, as a way of encouraging people to spend. It might work (it's not based on a fallacy about the nature of money). Some local currencies have adopted it (I don't know what my souvenir Stroud Pound must be worth now).Gesell has a sort of place in working-class history as he was Finance Minister in the ill-fated 1919 Munich Soviet .
I don't understand why you say Chomsky's view will irritate some here. It seems a reasonable description of what the Syriza election victory represents, i.e. a vote against austerity, but not for socialism or against capitalism. I suppose we could argue as to whether or not this is a "good thing". Maybe not, but it would have been a worse thing if they voted again for those who had been administering austerity to them.Chomsky's view is more or less the same as that of a Greek group whose article was published on the Marxist-Humanist website
Quote:The working class and the petty bourgeoisie vote for SYRIZA was a revenge vote against a right-wing government whose harsh austerity programs had disastrous effects on their lives and had pushed them to depression and suicidal tendencies. It was a vote against the politics of fear that had promoted not only the police repression of struggles but also numerous daily, small and depressing “civil wars” among the workers. It was a vote against the constant and monotonous propaganda of “there-is-no-alternative” dogmas.The vote is one thing. What the Syriza government will be able to do is another thing. After all there-is-no-alternative-under-capitalism. The Greek group are not very optimistic either:
Quote:The gradual adjustment of SYRIZA to realpolitik shows that, after pruning out most of its positions which are considered unacceptable from the standpoint of the dominant neoliberal capitalist strategy in the Eurozone, and by keeping and maybe enriching the most harmless ones such as those concerning the so-called social economy, it can transform itself into a “fresh” and rather competent manager of the capitalist state.Competant or not, a manager of the capitalist state is all it will be able to be.
I imagine the reporter was just innocently conveying a fact. After all, to be said to be Australian is not disparaging in most people's eyes. Quite the opposite, I would have thought.
moderator1 wrote:I have replied to this post on the 'Moderator suggestion' thread on the Website/Technical forum.Good. About time. Why don't you now lock this thread and transfer any further discussion to the technical section where it should be and have beeb.
It's rather obvious that she's Aussie-born as soon as she opens her mouth I wouldn't have thought many will think that to mention this is to be xenophobic.Anyway, it seems that the Green Party is winning hands down in the competition with Left Unity to win the left-of-Labour vote:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-31491221as well as RMT President Peter Pinkney standing for them.In fact, Left Unity doesn't even seem to be trying.
