ALB
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Just saw a truck from the haulage firm Tony Starmer. Perhaps a long-lost relative but evidently a true blue patriot too:
Two letters from us in this week’s Weekly Worker in reply to Mike McNair’s article:
Reeves has refused to say that she is a socialist. Which is rather obvious and it’s a good thing she doesn’t claim to be one, as the word has been dragged through the mud enough already:
She says here that she has “always called myself a social democrat” (which today means a bourgeois democrat who favours a few social measures for people). But in her book The Women who made Modern Economics, at the end of the chapter on Rosa Luxemburg, she says that she is a Fabian rather than a Marxist. Yet the Fabians claimed to be socialists (by which they meant state capitalism run by them). Maybe she didn’t know this. Or maybe this was part of her book that was exposed as plagiarism. And of course Rosa Luxemburg also called herself a Social Democrat (which at one time meant a socialist).
Looks as if Starmer has inadvertently brought socialism back on the agenda, giving us a foot in the door.
We will need to answer this at some point.
He certainly sounds like someone trying to dig themself out of a hole. And on the same day that a number of capitalists call for a vote for Labour in a letter to the Times
So Starmer has said he is a socialist. The best comment on this comes from the SNP MP quoted here:
https://www.thenational.scot/news/24348401.labour-keir-starmer-calls-progressive-socialist/
This could be a gaffe that will cost him tens of thousands of votes. After assiduously pursuing Tory votes by trying to convince them that the “changed”Labour Party is the same as the Old Conservative Party he throws it all away by an impromptu reply extracted by a clever journalist.
His PR team must be tearing their hair out.
All the papers picked this up too so, for future reference, we now have a record that he said this on 27 May 2024.
For example:
Discussion of it on the Labour Bankruptcy thread.
Meanwhile Starmer tells the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason that he’s a socialist:
Starmer told me today he sees himself as a socialist. For those scared of that label, he said he saw it as putting ‘the country in the service of working people”.
Here at 18.04
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-politics-69063295
I don’t know how long this will be visible if somebody wants to take a screenshot of it for the record.
When talking to capitalists he proclaims Labour as the Party of Business. When it comes to election time and he needs workers’ vote to further his career he says he wants to serve working people.
Even if he really meant this, he won’t and couldn’t as capitalism can never be made to do his.
Still, if he wants to be judged on whether or not he does this, let him be judged by that.
If the Tories win, but they won’t, will they? Looks like they have gone bonkers. That won’t even get them many votes, except perhaps in Tonbridge Wells and other places where retired colonels live.
Measures to soften up the population to accept increasing state spending on weapons of individual and mass destruction, probably in fact also aimed at the Russian government in accordance the doctrine that “if you want peace, prepare for war”. Which has a certain perverse logic under capitalism. And one reason why resources will always be wasted on preparations for war and disarmanent remain a dream as long as capitalism lasts.
By way of contrast:
So the ball is in the West’s court. But they don’t really want an end to the conflict. The US’s stated aim from the start has been to weaken rather than defeat Russia by keeping it bogged down in a never-ending war. But they might have to compromise as they’ll soon be down to the last Ukrainian.
That letter in last week’s Weekly Worker has provoked a full page reply to it and another letter:
https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1492/minimal-symmetrical-errors/
Apparently SPEW’s reform programme was not the pre-WW1 Social Democrats’ “minimum programme” but was supposed to be Trotsky’s “transitional programme”. However, the author (Mike McNair) realises that “in practice, what is ‘transitional’ turns out to be merely what is currently popular – “attractive-sounding reforms”.”
Like we said. SPEW have been advocating these sorts of reforms for so long that they have come to really believe that they could be achieved under capitalism and is in practice a common or garden reformist party.
McNair goes on to argue that by “minimum programme” the pre-WW1 Social Democrats meant a more complete (or less incomplete) political democracy. No doubt they did stand for this but I think it wasn’t just this but did include social measures to be achieved within capitalism as well. In any event, it was these that got them electoral support and made them prisoners of their reform-minded voters and led to them eventually becoming ordinary reformist parties.
Mind you, it’s their own fault as, to curry favour with the demonstrators, they had a leaflet calling for a “socialist intifada”.
They just meant a mass uprising. That will teach them to be opportunist (but it won’t)
Yes, we shouldn’t let this pass unchallenged.
Actually, Gove is being unfair to SPEW. They don’t agree with the SWP and RCP position of “smashing Israel”. I have been at various Gaza events and can confirm their lit sellers do not join in the chants of “from the river to the sea”. They are for a “two-state” solution, with a Labour government in Israel and a Labour government in Palestine co-operating.
Just seen that they have already replied to him pointing this out:
As you say, Gove has not done his homework.
