ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
ALB wrote:it confirms one theory I have been reluctant to accept — that UKIP is attracting voters from the traditional working class.
I think we have to accept this. Just read this, in a book just out Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box. 50 Things You Need to Know about British Elections. It's from a chapter 'Not What You Think: UKIP Voters' by Matthew Goodwin:
Quote:Yes, the party's base is very socially distinctive but it is blue-collar, poorly educated, old, white and male. Far from a rebellion of the golf club, UKIP is Britain's most working class party. Indeed, to find a party support base that is disproportionately working-class you need to go back to the Labour Party in the early '80s, and the days of Michael Foot. Since 2010, the voters who have flocked to Farage look more like Old Labour than True Blue Tories; they are older white men, working-class, struggling financially and poorly educated (…) UKIP have succeeded in winning over Britain's 'left behind' voters: groups in society who have long struggled to adapt to the global economy, who hold a very different set of values from the new, middle-class and professional majority, and who were hit the hardest by the post-2008 financial crisis.If this true, as the evidence seems to be suggesting, this would explain why TUSC with its Old Labour appoach picks up votes which would have gone tor UKIP if it had been standing.It also has various implications. First, that the trotskyists might try entering UKIP. But, more seriously, it refutes the view that the experience of an economic crisis will spontaneously generate a socialist or even a anti-capitalist consciousness. It emphasises the need for people to hear the case for socialism, for this to become part of their experience, for a socialist consciousness to have a chance of emerging.
It remains to be seen if the number of votes their dozen candidates get next May merits the term "electoral response" ! The same criticism applies of course to TUSC as well, even more so given their dream of launching a Labour Party Mark 2 and so of repeating in the 21st century the mistake of the 20th century of thinking that a trade-union based workers party could bring "socialism" or even sustain reforms to capitalism.
alanjjohnstone wrote:With 2000 signed up LU members registered, 500 attended their conference as delegates, 1 in 4. That is not bad a turn-out.I await the reports of their conference.I don't know where the figure of 500 came from. According to this report, there were only 250 there and that only on the first day. That's 1 in 8. If we count both delegates and non-delegates we can manage about 1 in 10 at our conferences. But in the other respect we're the same:
Quote:Present: There were around 250 people present, fewer on Day two – predominantly male, white, not generally young.I think they are only saying that research should continue. There can't be any harm in that. After all, if global warming does get worse than anticipated it will be as well to have a Plan C (Plan B being to use nuclear power despite its risks instead of burning fossil fuels). "Just in case", as they say.
Just remembered. Someone posted this on our facebook page. That's just how we would put it (in terms of resources not money)
User555net wrote:Have you ever wondered the amount of money spent in warfare’sYes, many times. It's part of the waste and misuse of resources built into capitalism.
User555net wrote:and how that money could help the people in needs?In theory it could, but in practice it wouldn't as capitalism is not a system geared to meeting people's needs. Before adequate resources can be properly directed to this we need to get rid of the whole profit system and replace it by one where resources are owned in common and so can be used, under democratic control, to provide what people indicate they need. This can be done directly, without money, according to the principle "from each their ability, to each their needs".
I see Paxman has since come out as a "One Nation Tory" and has been canvassed but turned down being the Tory candidate for Mayor of London in 2016:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/tories-urge-jeremy-paxman-to-run-for-london-mayor-9889047.html
Yes, there are plenty of "Asian" capitalists (quite a few figure in the Sunday Times Rich List) and African kleptocrats. It's true, though, that people from the West Indies seem to be under-represented in the higher ranks of the capitalist class.
Agreed, we could take up the question of "human weaknesses" (but they presumably exist as nobody's perfect) but there's nothing wrong with "resource management" as isn't doing this rationally what socialism is about? But this part (emphasis added) is something for one of us to take up:
Quote:We should be aiming for a utopia: the best of societies, the one that provides in the highest degree all that a society should provide to its citizens. In utopia, the individual is the fundamental reality, not the state. Its fundamental concerns are respecting the natural rights of each person, which entails justice and the happiness of each (as opposed to justice and happiness for classes, averages, or majorities). To achieve this, society should be organized under the governance of robots.After all, we've got a talk entitled "I for one welcome our new robot overlords" (even if it's a provocative title not supposed to be taken too literally):http://www.meetup.com/The-Socialist-Party-of-Great-Britain/events/192228162/
Yesterday Podemos presented its "realistic" economic programme:
Quote:Podemos, the new left-wing party that has taken Spanish politics by storm, unveiled plans for a swathe of economic reforms yesterday, including the nationalisation of key industries, tax rises and banning redundancies at profitable companies, as part of an emergency programme to pull the country out of six years of financial crisis.Pablo Iglesias, the pony-tailed leader of Podemos, which means “We Can”, said his party was launching a realistic programme to help Europe’s fourth biggest economy to recover, and reduce its devastating unemployment. (….)It proposes to make it illegal for Spaniards to be denied access to borrowing, and would seek to secure loans from the European Central Bank to families and small businesses on the same terms as private banks. The measure is designed to encourage spending to help to boost growth and investment to small businesses.Mr Iglesias said he would cut the retirement age from 66 to 60 to free up jobs for young people and raise taxes to pay for a Nordic-srtyle welfare system. Podemos also proposes to introduce a 35-hour week and nationalise key industries such as energy companies.Mr Iglesias proposed to cut state incentives for short-term employment contracts, on which many Spaniards are employed, and introduce fiscal reform to improve tax collection.The party would raise funds by cutting expenditure on Spain's high-speed rail network and use the proceeds to pay for schools.And they call us impossibilists!Another new party with feet of clay.
Looks as if this thread could be combined with the one on diversity under General Discussion. These people could borrow from the apartheid era in South Africa for a definition of "non-white", though in their case to exclude "whites".
Interesting article here by Danny Dorling on the decline of racist attitudes:http://www.dannydorling.org/wp-content/files/dannydorling_publication_id4238.pdfHistory is on our side on this one.
Quote:Walmart spokesperson, Kory Lundberg, thinks this is all just the most wonderful thing—bragging that the drive to collect holiday food for fellow employees shows just how much Walmart employees care about one another.[/quote]Maybe that's why they call it Black Friday:http://www.asda.com/blackfriday/index.htmlIt's today if you're interested.
Vin wrote:I agree tho' that socialists need to find a way to explain exploitation in simple terms.One of the problems we face these days is that many, perhaps most workers in an advanced capitalist part of the world like Britain, are not actually producing any "value" let alone any "surplus value". Some of them can still be said to be "exploited" in the sense of capturing for their employers more surplus value produced elsewhere than what they are paid in wages. Others are in effect just servants of the capitalist class as a whole paid out of the surplus value produced by the productive section of the working class, i.e part of the consumer spending of the capitalist class.There are various ways out of this, the most plausible being that the working class as a whole (irrespective of the job they do) are exploited by the capitalist class as a whole. This is plausible because, although health workers, teachers, civil servants don't produce any value their work helps the functioning of the capitalist system and without it the productive section of the working class would not be able to produce as much value and surplus value as they do.This could even be explained without needing to have recourse to the concept of value, by just using a Labour Theory of Wealth. It is obvious that wealth (useful things) can only be produced by humans applying their mental and physical energies to materials that originally came from nature. So that if anyone gets an income merely as a result of ownership rights that person is living off the backs of those who work and so are exploiters. The concept of "scrounger" is already well understood by most workers, though seriously misapplied.Of course it could still be explained in terms of value and surplus value, but our critique of capitalism should also concentrate on the indignity of "wage slavery" and on the corrosive effects of money and of not having it on people's life and society in general. I think in fact that this has already happened though we don't always realise it.
