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LBird wrote:

… Piketty can logically argue that it can happen again?Can reforms once again reduce the 'top 10% wealth share' to '60%'?If not, why not?

Piketty's basic argument is that the returns to capital tend to increase faster than production (GDP) and that, as a consequence, those who hold capital (the rich) get richer in relation to those who don't.This is not incompatible with a change in the distribution of the income from capital which would reduce wealth inequality. For instance, the same total capital income could be divided between a large number of small property owners or a smaller number of large property holders. In fact in Britain the latter is the case due to members of the capitalist class, such as the Duke of Westminster,  whose wealth originally came from owning land in town centres as opposed to industrial production; which is not the case in other countries, where the distribution of wealth is not so unequal.While he doesn't think that the basic tendency for returns to capital to increase faster than production can be changed (at least I don't think he does), he does think that its consequences can be mitigated through government intervention to reduce the amount of income from capital going to individuals and to distribute it differently. He is on record as advocating for instance an 80% tax on property incomes and a world-wide wealth tax to achieve this.As Graeber says:

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Piketty, in contrast, begins his book by denouncing "the lazy rhetoric of anti-capitalism". He has nothing against capitalism itself – or even, for that matter, inequality. He just wishes to provide a check on capitalism's tendency to create a useless class of parasitical rentiers. As a result, he argues that the left should focus on electing governments dedicated to creating international mechanisms to tax and regulate concentrated wealth. Some of his suggestions – an 80% income tax! – may seem radical, but we are still talking about a man who, having demonstrated capitalism is a gigantic vacuum cleaner sucking wealth into the hands of a tiny elite, insists that we do not simply unplug the machine, but try to build a slightly smaller vacuum cleaner sucking in the opposite direction.

This is not going to happen of course even if theoretically it could. But even if it did there would still be capitalism and the exploitation of wage-labour as this is the source of capital incomes. And it's this that we are against not the way its proceeds are distributed, isn't it? In other words, we are against the fact of there being income from capital rather than how this income is distributed.

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Was reviewed in the May Socialist Standard:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2014/no-1317-may-2014/cooking-books-capitalism-and-inequalityKey point is:

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The similarity between Piketty’s view and that of Marx on how capitalism works to make the rich richer is obvious but there is a difference. Piketty is more concerned with the distribution of the income from capital while Marx was concerned with the accumulation of capital itself irrespective of who owns it (whether individuals, corporations or the state) or who benefits personally from it.

Also this from the dreaded David Graeber (which is not too bad, considering it's him):http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/30/savage-capitalism-back-radical-challenge

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Alberto has already pointed out that Jose Carlos Monedero is also a supporter of Chavez and Chavism. Some stuff in English by him here:http://hiredknaves.wordpress.com/2014/05/27/podemos-left-unity-participation-and-the-right/http://cunninghiredknaves.tumblr.com/post/9919061644/run-social-democrats-runMore here on the thinking behind some of those in Podemos:https://hiredknaves.wordpress.com/2014/05/30/occupy-representation-podemos-and-the-politics-of-truth/https://hiredknaves.wordpress.com/2014/05/31/podemos-representation-and-overflow/To tell the truth I'm not too sure what they are trying to get at.

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This was discussed at Conference, when the "Vote No and write World Socialism" idea was shot down in flames. All will become clear when the Proceedings are out, soon.

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

My main concern with the London Mayor idea is that it reinforces the impression that we are mainly a London party. That is inevitable but would require to be countered somehow.

Elections to the Welsh Assembly will take place the same day in May 2016.Elections to the Scottish Parliament are also scheduled for that day too. Of course in the unlikely (in my opinion) event of Scotland having broken away by then the situation there would be different. Presumably, there'd be a separate Scottish Electoral Commission with which we'd have to register. Be interesting to see if they would accept one from a party calling itself "The Socialist Party of Great Britain" or, in fact, whether we'd want to register under World Socialist Party (Scotland) instead. All very (very) hypothetical.

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Send him the "Poles Apart" DVD of a debate between us and an environmental activist (who has since joined the party) which explores this sort of issue, in this case in respect to the Arctic:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/catalog/dvd/poles-apart-capitalism-or-socialism-planet-heats

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I'm not sure where the figure of contesting 50 seats to qualify for a election broadcast has come from (maybe it was once the case) but the current Ofcom rules on political broadcasts state:

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Other registered parties if they are contesting one sixth or more of the seats up for election in the case of first-past-the-post, multi-constituency elections such as a General Election.

There are currently 650 MPs. One-sixth of this is 109.Frankly, I don't think we could do this, even if we relaxed the Rule about candidates standing in single-member constituencies having to have passed the Speakers Test.  Incidentally, the Rule currently says that in multi-member constituencies only one of the candidates has to have and in fact in the South East Region only one of the 10 had. Despite this 7 of the others were interviewed or wrote statement or letters to the press. They were quite capable of expressing the socialist case. After all, we have no leaders. The Speakers Test is essentially a test of knowledge and could probably be done away with (it already has for everything else) but one lesson of this election is the need to train members to answer questions on radio and TV.In any event, I don't think the PEB itself had much more than symbolic significance. It wasn't it that brought in hits to our website, but its posting on Youtube.  We could still do this even if we didn't qualify for one (as I can't see us doing). Also, the television interview with one of our candidates on the BBC2 Daily Politics Show will have been seen by many more than saw our PEB on the two occasions when it was broadcast.Obviously we have to follow-up our Euroelection campaign at the General Election by contesting seats in the areas we contested. The results, both in terms of votes and responses, identify Oxford and Brighton as must-contests. Also in Wales Swansea. Others such as Reading, Canterbury or Cardiff or Rhondda could be added.Outside the areas where we contested, we could do, say, 3 in London, and, taking into account where we have people on the ground (I think Brian has a valid point here), one in Norwich, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Lancaster, Doncaster, Sunderland, Glasgow and Edinburgh. That would be 19 or 20 as a realistic maximum figure. That would still be 4 times the largest number of seats we have contested before. I don't think that in practice we would reach that figure. Try convincing the branches in the North West and Scotland to engage in election activity !Looking beyond the 2015 general election, there's regional assembly elections in London, Wales and Scotland in 2016. These are easier to manage except there's no free postal distribution in them.If you want to think big there's the London Mayor election in 2016. It costs £10,000 to stand but every elector in London gets a booklet with statements from all the candidates. Here's the one from 2012. That's more than 5.4 million. We've never covered that number before. It's 4 times what we've just done. The "Independent Working Class Association" took advantage of this in 2004 mayor elections. But, since we are against the principle of elected mayors, could we contest these?Two other points. Candidates wouldn't have to be their own agents. And if we put up the same candidate in different constituencies we'd look silly (but we wouldn't need to as we could easily find 20 candidates. In fact, with the local elections in London and the Euroelections, we just fielded 17).

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Actually it's 114, but still 8th best out of 67. It was the Roman Party, campaigning for more recognition for what the Romans did for Britain, that got that but he was a local candidate.Results here too: http://www.reading.gov.uk/council/elections-and-voting/election-results/european-election-results-2014/

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For the record, here are the other two articles that appeared in the Powys County Times.From Friday 1 May:To enlarge click here.From  Friday15 MayTo enlarge click here.

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Grillo likes Farage and UKIP:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/10862817/Nigel-Farage-is-no-racist-says-Italys-Beppe-Grillo-in-defence-of-possible-Ukip-alliance.htmlHow is this possible? Doesn't he realised that they are not much more than breakaway Tories? If he doesn't some of the others in the Five Star Movement seem to.

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Thanks. They'll probably correct it themselves. There's another error in their report and that is that in Southampton ex-Labour councillor Keith Morrell was re-elected as a TUSC candidate. He stood as an Independent. See:http://www.southampton.gov.uk/Images/All_tcm46-357556.pdfScroll down to Coxford ward, noting on the way and after that in every other ward there was a candidate standing as TUSC. Could it be that Councillor Morrell thought that this label would be a vote loser?I like their obituary on the welcome demise of the ineffable No2EU.

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

The WW also got confused on our vote in the Euro-election, that somebody can rectify.

What did they say and where exactly?

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This from this week's Private Eye is probably a breach of copyright but too good to be missed. Click here to enlarge:Four Party members are identifiable and they actually said the words attributed to them.

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gnome wrote:

We even did surprisingly well in Tunbridge Wells  And as already mentioned even better in Medway and Canterbury…http://www.yourtunbridgewells.co.uk/news/european_election_results_by_district_ukip_top_in_all_but_one_1_3616632

The Regional Returning Officer has supplied a spreadsheet giving the full results for all 67 "local counting areas", which were the local councils in the area. They confirm that in all but three of the councils covering the 20 Westminister parliament constituencies we targetted with free postal distribution we did better than average.(The three where we didn't were the Kent constituencies of Folkestone, Maidstone & the Weald and Sittingbourne & Sheppey).One curiosity is why we should have received a higher percentage in Eastbourne, Worthing, Runnymede, Surrey Heath, Cherwell (Banbury) were none of our leaflets were distributed except 200 in Banbury.  We also did better in Basingstoke, Ashford and Thanet where members and sympathisers only distributed a few thousand. In general we did best in Oxfordshire and worst in the rural parts of Surrey and Hamphshire.So receiving our election manifesto does make a difference to the number of votes we get, but of course we were not in it for the votes but for the contacts and the general publicity. The TV, radio and press contacts have been recorded here (though there will be some press publicity we are unaware of). Our standing was also discussed on the internet discussion forums RevLeft, Urban 75 and Libcom.As to contacts, these are still being collated, in fact still coming in, but  the count so far is:50 telephone requests for more information35 email requests15 letter requestsThis means that we are now sending out an extra 100 copies of the Socialist Standard each month. Applications to join are also up.There were also 20 or so other email replies and 10 letters, some of which we were hostile or abusive (one nutcase sending us a tile to our Freepost address) but most we were genuine disagreements. These are being replied to by the Enquiries Committee.We also know that we received 150 or so hits on our website from the South East leaflet, 150 from our election video (though mostly from Youtube rather than the broadcast itself) and 25 from the Wales leaflet. Some of these will also have emailed, but we will have missed some because our website was slow or down during the key period just after out leaflets had handed on people's doormats.

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jondwhite wrote:

The CPGB-PCC urged support for the SPGB too.

But they didn't argue our case and in fact urged people to support other parties in other places and other elections. Of course we should thank the Oxford Corresponding Society for distributing our leaflets and arguing our case and maintain friendly contact with them. End of.

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