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Young Master Smeet wrote:

 the euqllay unspeakable gangster Assad will regain Syria.

I don't agree that he is "equally unspeakable", a ganster no doubt but at least he's living in the 21st century not the 8th or 9th. I'd much rather live under his regime than under that of those Islamist barbarians. I'm sure any woman would agree.

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I never said it wasn't chosen democratically (if we hadn't accepted the recommendation of the adhoc committee the affair would have dragged on and on, wasting more party time), only that in my opinion it is terrible. In other words, I don't agree with LBird that the majority is always right.

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Found it. It is this from 1995:

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That this Conference regards Clause 4 of our Declaration of Principles as committing socialists to opposition  to all prejudices, based on gender, race or sexual orientation. (1995).

Incidentally, there has never been any bar on homosexuals joining the party even when this was illegal. In fact at least one prominent member was during that period. Also an abortionist when that was illegal too. 

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No, it wouldn't be logical. It's a one-off just for the fascia of Head Office. What would be logical would be to adopt a completely different logo for general use. We've already got perfectly adequate headed notepaper and compliment slips.In any event, the Head Office fascia is terrible. You can't even see clearly what's in black behind "Party" in white. Is it a 9 or an S? All you can read clearly is GB as if we're proud of that. Terrible. Best confine it to a minor high street in south London so it won't be seen by too many people. Actually, Gnome, I think it would be technically possible to get rid of SPGB: isn't it done on a separate sheet?  Pity those who wanted it in didn't think of doing this by putting our website there instead: http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgbAnyway, this is a subject that bores me, so I'm not going to launch a campaign against it. Just complain whenever somebody says they like it and get on with real socialist activity and discussion.

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Brian wrote:

Conference passed a resolution on 'sexual preference'

What resolution are you talking about? I can't find it.

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gnome wrote:

Nick Long, who is standing as the "People before Profit" candidate, was repeatedly told that capitalism can't work that way but all to no avail.  People instead of profit should have been his clarion call.

But it hasn't been. Here's his election video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5gmG89D64kNo mention of getting rid of capitalism (which he presumably wants) or anything like that but just about restoring reforms that used to once exist under capitalism. Missed opportunity.Talking about missed opportunities, we could/should be doing amateur videos like this. Maybe we could get our candidates in the coming general election to do one each, tailored for the constituency where they are standing?

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Apparently the Podemos ("We Can") party is now the party in Spain with the most (opinion polled) support:http://www.newsweek.com/radical-spanish-party-podemos-lead-polls-first-time-281699Don't lnow what it means except that people there seemed to be as pissed off with conventional politics as people here, except that here it's taking the form of UKIP.

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Another relevant news story:http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/nov/10/russia-today-ofcom-sanctions-impartiality-ukraine-coverageAs if the BBC, etc hadn't been biased in favour of the other side.

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What was revealing was not so much the show of support for the UKIP candidate (by all accounts they are going to win) but the nature of the supporters. Reckless is what Class War would call a (ex) Tory toff.  His election manifesto is like any Tory one:

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Mark Reckless is 43 and married to Catriona. They have two children, Jamie and Toby, and they live in Rochester. Before he became MP for Rochester and Strood, Mark worked as an economist, as a lawyer and in business.

Pictures of him, his wife and kids suggest he lives in a big house with a big garden.Most of those campaigning for him (and they'd come from all over the country) didn't look as if their wife was called Catriona or their children Jamie or Toby or that they lived in a big house with a garden. In fact they looked more like  Labour supporters are supposed to look (though they had probably been working-class Tories). Older men (no skinheads)This is strange as UKIP's constitution declares it to be a "libertarian" party, "libertarian" in the US sense that is, i.e in favour of  laissez-faire capitalism, and is financed by rich businessmen who see an economic interest in Britain not being in the UK. But, in a political democracy, capitalist parties have to seek and get working-class votes and to do so make wild promises to disguise what they really stand for.No doubt one of the appeals of UKIP to the campaigners we met is summed up in this from one of their leaflets entitled "It's time we swept away the failed political class" showing Farage sweeping away Miliband, Cameron and Clegg, and saying:

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For 20 years, idemtikit governments have ridden roughod over the wishes and interests of the people of Britain. Many people have given up voting because all the choices appeared the same and no matter who they voted for, it made very little difference. (…)We're governed by a clueless class of professional politicians who are out of touch and out of ideas. It's time we swept them all OUT OF THERE.

The tragedy is seeing everyday working people out campaigning for just one such professional politician.We also met the Monster Raving Loony Party candidate "Hairy Norm" who was also making a bid for the protest vote, but even he was saying "Don't let Europe Rule Britannia" and  "keep imperial measures" and "keep the pound" (though, to his credit, he didn't say anything about immigrants). He's also the local "log merchant" and his election leaflet was "sponsored by Ashword Firewood Supplies". He probably wants to keep selling his logs by the hundredweight rather than the kilo or tonne as the changeover would be too complicated. But who else knows what a hundredweight is?

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Refreshing yes. And of course we have the same position on GM crops and fracking, i.e that if they can be made safe (as they can technologically) then there is no objectioni n principle  to using them in a socialist society but it is up to the members of that society to decide for themselves democratically whether or not to use them. We are no more anti-GM or anti-fracking in principle than we are anti-nuclear.Incidentally, rather surprisingly from someone who I think is closely associated with the Marxists Internet Archive, he attributes Engels's Principles of Communism to Marx.

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I see what you mean. For a moment I thought you were talking about the Unitarian christians (the last step before atheism) but couldn't understand that they had suddenly gone crazy.It seems as if Left Unity is trying to live up to Cameron's description of UKIP as "fruitcakes and loonies" .More on this here:http://shirazsocialist.wordpress.com/2014/11/12/beyond-belief-left-unity-to-debate-pro-isis-motion/But then the SWP too was always soft on Islamism. I can remember when IS meant the "International Socialism" Group from which the SWP emerged. Perhaps the fact that now "IS" means "Islamic State" is poetic justice or something.

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SocialistPunk wrote:

such a huge flaw in the plan.

That's where you are wrong, on other threads as well. Socialism is not some "plan" that the Socialist Party is going to implement. I know we are often accused of that, but that's utopian system-building. Socialism is a system of society that the working class is going to establish by prosecuting the class struggle to a victorious conclusion. We today don't have to have the answers to everything. We haven't got them and it would be stupid and arrogant of us to think we could have. All we can say with certainty is that the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources would provide a framework within which all the problems humanity faces can be dealt with, certainly a better framework than the present one of minority ownership and control. The rest can only be speculation, interesting and instructive perhaps but not a "plan". Having said that, when the socialist movement is much larger and nearer to winning then, yes, I'm sure, groups of workers will be drawing up plans on what to do when capitalism is ended, but we are nowhere there yet.

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DJP wrote:

ALB wrote:

Is he saying that German materialism is a form of his "naturalistic realism" or that "German idealism" is?

Can't quite work it out either but after watching the questions and answers in that video (the last 15 minutes) wouldn't be suprised if he is talking about Idealism..

If that's the case it's not clear what he's trying to get at here. Even less when he entitles a talk or article:

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"Realistic monism: why physicalism entails panpsychism"

Sounds a bit like our friend here who says that "idealism" and "materialism" can we combined. But there are two levels involved here.1. What is knowledge (epistemology)?2.  The contents of knowledge (theories about the world)?Re 1. Dietzgen and Pannekoek argue that knowledge is a description of the ever-changing passing world of phenomena. I agree with Bottomore and Rubel here that the theory of knowledge (epistemology) was not something Marx took an interest in. Even less in ontology, the theory of the nature of reality, which for Dietzgen and Pannekoek  was the whole universe (everything as a whole). I'm not sure that Engels was interested in this sort of thing either. They were more interested in explaining what happened in history and in changing society. The both of them probably just assumed that what the scientists of their day were doing (and Marx was as interested in this as Engels) was "discovering" or "uncovering" the physical world "as it really was". I could be wrong. It doesn't matter all that much anyway.Re 2. is about the status (valid, useful, etc) of desciptions of parts of the world of phenomena (parts of reality).  This is where idealism, materialism, etc come in. They are rival descriptions of parts of reality. Personally I've long been convinced that materialism is the best/most useful description in terms of describing what happened and predicting what will happen (if something else happens), e.g. that the physical world existed before life, that a brain can't function in the absence of living physical body, that there is no afterlife,that  no supernatural being intervened or intervenes in the evolution either of the physical world or of life or of history or of present-day society.  I'm sure both Marx and Engels would have been materialists in this sense. After all, it was atheism (the criticism of religion) that led them to socialism (the criticism of the existing material conditions of life).I don't know why Stawson wants to give some credibilty to "panpsychism"(that mind is part of everything). which strikes me not only as a useless theory but as mumbo-jumbo. Or was he being ironic or provocative?

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Actually, I thought you're supposed to be high priests of Mammon.

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DJP wrote:

I think Strawson would say that there are concrete and abstract elements to nature. We can only abstract from the concrete and can't really know that much about the nature of the concrete. Concepts belong to the experiential side of the physical are abstract not concrete. Numbers, beauty and love exist but you can't touch them so they are abstract not concrete. Though mental goings on are part of the concrete..Or have I missed the point of what you're asking?

I was just concerned that he was apparently ruling out ideas as being part of "reality" but I see he seems to be saying that thinking is a form of experiencing like hearing or touching and that experience is the only reality, so thinking is an experience of reality. But I'm still not sure where this leaves thinking about thinking.There was one passage which has some relevance to what we are discussing here:

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All materialists until the twentieth century were real materialists, where this means, crucially, that they were real realists about experience, and took experience so conceived to be wholly physical. It seems to me that present-day participants in the debate need to be more aware of this—aware that the view that experience is wholly a matter of what is going on in the brain (or body) is not new. Joseph Priestley, a strict materialist, holds in the 1770s that «the faculty of thinking is the result of a certain arrangement of the parts of  matter»; that «sensation and thought do necessarily result from the organization of the brain»; that «mind […] is not a substance distinct from the body, but the result of corporeal organization». This is also Hobbes’s view in 1641, as remarked. It’s Regius’s view in 1647, Locke’s suspicion in 1689, Toland’s view in 1704, Collins’s view in 1707–8. It’s extremely widespread in eighteenth-century France, it’s old news in the powerful nineteenth-century movement in Germany that followed German idealism and was known as German materialism.There’s no reason to doubt that Democritus and other ancient materialists and atomists held essentially the same view.

He adds a footnote to "German materialism":

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German materialism is really just a kind of straightening out of German idealism, which is itself arguably best described as a form of naturalistic realism. The present resurgence of interest in panpsychism among German-speaking analytic philosophers may help to bring this point into the light

I'm trying to remember my grammar here and the significance of the comma after "German idealism". Is he saying that German materialism is a form of his "naturalistic realism" or that "German idealism"  is?Anyway, it seems that Marx wasn't the only "German materialist" who straightened out "German idealism".

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