[ALB]

Interesting breaking news:

Quote:

A bipartisan subcommittee report issued Wednesday showed that parent companies of major U.S. banks have acquired massive trading positions in commodities even as businesses under their control sell uranium, operate coal mines and metal warehouses, stockpile aluminum and operate power plants.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/11/20/goldman-sachs-jpmorgan-morgan-stanley-senate-hearing/19293581/If banks can make money simply by creating money out of thin air and charging interest on it why do they bother to acquire physical commodities, not just to trade in them but in their production? Answer: because they can't and don't create money out of thin air.

[ALB]

I think the debate will be in Hansard. It will be interesting to see who the currency crank MPs are apart from Douglas Carswell (UKIP) and Austen Mitchell (Labour). Maybe there will even be some who do understand banking properly.

[ALB]

No it wasn't anything to do with the fact that we were socialists (or that the owner of Wetherspoons is a supporter of the UK getting out of the EU). It was a blanket ban on anybody with leaflets or placards or rosettes or badges. Later, after we had left for another pub, they did admit people even with placards. Either they had overcome their panic or the prospect of making more sales had made them change their mind. Incidentally, the other pub also asked some people (with Green Party placards, as it happened) to leave them outside. We kept our leaflets in our pockets but the "People Before Profit" candidate was also there, so we did have a political discussion there on whether this was possible under capitalism (we said "no", he said nothing). Not that it was likely to develop into a pub brawl. We also talked to another customer who said she had already voted by post for the Greens.I think the publicans of Rochester are more used to tourists than politicos.

[ALB]

SocialistPunk wrote:

Please show me where I discussed the case and used intemperate comments?

SocialistPunk wrote:

The issue now becomes how does the Party deal with someone like that in its ranks. If the footballer first mentioned on this thread were a Party member, how would the Party deal with the negative publicity such a person would bring? It's important to keep in mind the denial of any wrongdoing. Would members say let bygones be bygones, he's served his time, who cares if he denies the crime? Or seek to distance themselves from such an unsavoury and harmful character?

[ALB]

Looks as if the LU has been outmanoeuvred by the Trotskyists behind TUSC:http://www.independentsocialistnetwork.org/resolution-on-electoral-unity-with-tusc-as-agreed-at-lu-november-conference

[ALB]

SP has shot himself in the foot band and shown why we musn't go down the road he proposes. With his intemperate comments on the footballer whose case was at the start of this thread he has shown how some members would, probably inevitably,  allow prejudice to sway their decision.This is not and open and shut case (not many are):http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/oct/18/legal-watchdog-fast-tracks-ched-evans-rape-inquiryhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-30093565

[ALB]

See following

[ALB]

I think the manager was overwhelmed by the situation. Not far from the pub there was the confrontation going on between the Britain First fascists and those who wanted to stop them marching down the high street (past the Little Dorrit tea rooms, Pip sweetshops and Two Cities cafes). I don't suppose Rochester had seen anything like it before and the manager was afraid that if he let in anyone political fighting would break out in his pub. An over-reaction. We were just the innocent victims, even though his behaviour to us was overbearing.

[ALB]

So that's what you've been trying to say all along !Alfred Sohn-Rethel, (ex-CP) who he mentions, seems interesting and to be saying something similar (though abstract thought will have evolved long before Acient Greece). See:http://danieltutt.com/2012/11/15/sohn-rethels-necessary-false-consciousness-and-marxist-epistemology/http://www.internationalmarxisthumanist.org/articles/contra-sohnrethel-philosophical-roots-anticapitalismby-david-blackThis description of his view from the first above:

Quote:

Like Marx, he claims that all cognitive concepts are derivatives from the material being from which they arise, and because cognitive concepts are derived from this being, and not the being of external nature and the material world, it is the social being of the historical epochs in which these concepts arise and play their part that matter most in terms of analysis

and this from the second:

Quote:

Sohn-Rethel seems to think that he can avoid this dilemma through recourse to “materialism.” This is not to say that Sohn-Rethel subscribes to a vulgar dialectical materialist orthodoxy. He asserts that the reality Marx opposes to forms of consciousness is not “matter” but social existence; in order to derive consciousness historically from social being, we must presuppose “a process of abstraction which is part of this being.”

His Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology looks like another book to add to your reading list.

[ALB]

DJP wrote:

I think physically assaulting or threatening other members, or members of the public whilst representing the party should be taken seriously also.

OK. Fair enough.

[ALB]

Personally, I've always refused to do jury service, not just because it's part of the state, but also because I don't believe in judging and being responsible for punishing fellow workers. So, if I was called, I'd always vote for acquittal (except in the case of capitalists accused of fraud, in which case I'd always vote for guilty). The only of reason I can think for charging a member (apart from breaking the rules or expressing anti-socialist views) would be alleged strike-breaking or stealing from the party or a trade union, not for breaking some capitalist law.

[ALB]

What is in effect being proposed here is that someone should be retried before a jury of the whole party without the checks and balances (such as they are, e.g regarding evidence) of a proper trial. Or are we going to assume that they did do it even if they say they didn't (a guilty decision in a court of law doesn't mean somebody did it, only that a jury thought they probably did). We can't go down that road. It would be immensely disrupting and turn the party away from its main function of propagating the case for socialism. It could also lead to legal action against us.

[ALB]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

the short answer is that such a person would be charged, and their membership debated

Do we really want to go down this road and debate the morals of members and applicants? Look what happened in the SWP. I don't think so.And who wants to cast the first stone?

[ALB]

I suppose it depends on which 'atrocity stories' you choose to believe but the Islamic Statists don't bother to disguise theirs: they broadcast them to the world.

[ALB]

That reads like propaganda from the time when the Assad regime was not objectively an ally of Western capitalism.

[Author]

Posts