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You're right. Just tried https://uk.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/NEB-SPGB/conversations/topics myself and got the same message but a few days ago I got in. Must be something to do with yahoo. Maybe this should be in the technical questions section.

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LBird wrote:

Perhaps we need to define what actually we mean by a 'trades union', to determine whether it's meaningful to say they can be 'reformed'. I think 'breakaways' or 'completely new organisations' will be the Communist route, rather than 'reform'.

There is no point in being dogmatic about it at this stage. What will happen will happen irrespective of what we today think should happen. But, as the saying goes, trade union members get the union they deserve, i.e the union reflects what they think and want. This being so, and since most unions have sufficiently democratic constitutions, if the members become socialist-minded they could transform the union. OK, they might prefer to break away and form a new organisation, but I don't think we can completely rule out the transformation from within of existing unions.

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LBird wrote:

Hence, I see the role of propaganda and the battle of ideas within our class as a fundamental one, rather than struggle alone.

Exactly, but that's the point the Left Communists don't get and accuse us of "revolutionary pedagogy" and of being "socialist teachers" from outside the working class. A caricature of our position which shows that they don't learn from the experience of struggling to hear what exactly we do say.

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LBird wrote:

But 'trade unions' are defensive organisations for workers within capitalism. They are not organisations for building offensive means against capitalism, to destroy it.Surely, with the development of Communist class consciousness, workers will themselves realise that the defensive trade unions have to be also destroyed, and replaced with offensive workers' organisations.

Yes, the trade unions are merely defensive organisations of the working class within capitalism, but I don't think it follows that they necessarily need to be destroyed to play a part in the socialist revolution. As we say in our pamphlet What's Wrong With Using Parliament? (emphasis added):

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This is not to say that the socialist majority only needs to organise itself politically. It does need to organise politically so as to be able to win control of political power. But it also needs to organise economically to take over and keep production going immediately after the winning of political control. We can’t anticipate how such socialist workplace organisations will emerge, whether from the reform of the existing trade unions, from breakaways from them or from the formation of completely new organisations. All we can say now is that such workplace organisations will arise and that they too, like the socialist political party, will have to organise themselves on a democratic basis, with mandated delegates instead of leaders.

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Apparently the SPEW member who wrote this criticism of their theory of crisis has now been expelled:http://socialismiscrucial.wordpress.com/2013/08/16/how-many-straw-men-does-it-take-to-reply-to-my-critique-of-the-cwis-crisis-theory/?relatedposts_exclude=329Like this last point (but not too sure about all of the rest):

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And at Number One: “Have your wages gone down since the crisis? They have?! Well, that’s your answer to the cause of the crisis!”This is one of the crudest false arguments and yet one that seems to crop up all the time. No one is denying that real wages have fallen since the crisis. The evidence is very clear on that and scientific socialists would be foolish to deny there has been a sustained fall in average wages since the crisis.However, I assert (like the CWI used to do) that the ‘fall in/lack of demand’ (underconsumption) is a result of the crisis, and not the cause. This is why Keynesian stimulus packages don’t work, because although they may give people more money to increase demand and thus profits in the short term, they do not solve the underlying problem in capitalist production of the low rate of profit, and so any recovery is temporary at best.

Not surprising they've booted him out as his reply undermines their whole strategy of seeking a working-class following on the basis of demanding that the government can and should stimulate the economy by spending more on building houses, infrastructure, etc as a way out of the current slump.

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Fair enough Alan, I accept your amendment. But, to test their ideas, they'd have to be on strike all the time as they are opposed to any permanent workplace defensive organisation (as proto-unions, even the IWW) and favour only strike committees which are dissolved after the end of the strike.

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The other interesting thing about that interview, apart from the acute observations of Denis the interviewee, are the questions posed by the interviewer desperately trying to find something worthwhile from the employment of a tactic he favours. But not finding it. Occupations and street demonstrations are normally associated with the tactics of the left, but events in Ukraine (and also as Alan as pointed out those in Thailand and Venezuela) show that this is a tactic that can be, and is, used by the right too. The same with "anti-parliamentarism". I can imagine the ultra-right agitators in the crowd arguing that the offer of elections is a trap designed to derail the movement.What is important about any tactic is not so much the tactic itself as the ideas of those using it.  Let's not forget that the only successful political strike in Britain was the one organised by the Ulster Workers Council (yes, that's what they actually called themselves) against the Sunningdale Agreement in 1974.

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Proletarian, your proposal to elect a single socialist MP as an experiment won't work as it assumes that socialist understanding would express itself in just one constituency whereas it is much more likely that when the movement for socialism takes off it will spread more or less evenly in different areas.I've got a counter suggestion. Why don't all the Left Communists (and any anarchists they can get to tag along) get a job in the same factory, acquire some arms, take over the factory, proclaim a "workers council" , form a workers militia and see what happens?Fortunately there is no need to carry out this experiment for workers to know that this won't work. There are other ways of learning than through direct experience, again fortunately. People can learn from the past experience of others as by hearing or reading about them.

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A comrade from America recommends this interview as "by far the best" source for what's happening in the Ukraine. It's long but it brings out the importance of the cultural divide there (between Ukrainian-speakers and Russia speakers) as well as the prominence of far-right ideologists and thugs in the protests and the absence of any class-conscious working class involvement. His own article on the Ukraine (which brings out that it is also a conflict between rival oligarchs) will be in the March Socialist Standard:http://avtonomia.net/2014/02/20/maidan-contradictions-interview-ukrainian-revolutionary-syndicalist/There's another, shorter syndicalist statement here:http://www.aitrus.info/node/3540

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

"There could have been some sort of settlement after the NACODS vote but it didn't happen"Your unspoken inference is that it was Scargill who thwarted it.

Yes that is what I'm saying but that's not to question his sincerity or his commitment to the miners' cause (the gutter press continue to attack him to this day), only to criticise his skill as a trade union negotiator. And of course the miners were responding to a well-planned assault on them and had no alternative but to resist by going on strike. My criticism of Scargill is that (supported by a majority of the NUM Executive, I agree) he held out for All (=No Pit Closures) or Nothing which resulted in complete and utter defeat. Worse than Nothing in fact since the NUM was smashed too. Some deal which would have saved some pits and the union could have been reached. That's just my opinion.

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Vin Maratty wrote:

The miners were in defence not on the attack. To suggest we wanted to go on strike just to bring down Thatcher is simply way off the mark

Of course it was defensive and of course the miners themselves weren't on strike to bring down the Thatcher government. But that was part of the rhetoric Scargill employed (not so sure about Peter Heathfield, he was more cautious in the language he used). He certainly believed that industrial action could/should be used for political ends. Members can and will  disagree on this, but I think Scargill mismanaged the strike. There could have been some sort of settlement after the NACODS vote but it didn't happen. Even when it was clear that the strike had been lost Scargill afforded himself the luxury of voting against a return to work which had to be proposed by the Communist Party members on the NUM Executive.As to Dave Douglass, it is difficult to work out how reliable he can be regarded . I remember during the 1972 strike (at a time when I was working for the NUM) that his proposal to stop the pit closures was armed miners militias .On the other hand, he did later write a pamphlet refuting the anti-union position of groups like the ICC and CWO in the same sort of way we do, reviewed favourably in the May 2000 Socialist Standard.

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Young Master Smeet wrote:

Fetishising workers councils is as sensible as fetishising the chairs in the meeting hall, they're just how it's happened sometimes.  The point is that the working class will need a democratic forum in which to organise.  Within that, I would also note that local councils and other elective bodies would do just as nicely, except they can't be as exclusive.  'Worker' isn't a definite category on which to base a franchise, so we will continue to need universal suffrage and the free association of self-identified workers to ifnluence it.

This question came up at the recent discussion we had in Birmingham with the Midlands Discussion Forum. One of them took on board the criticism that "workers councils" excluded workers who weren't actually at work and suggested they could be supplemented by "neighbourhood councils".In discussing with him during the break I asked him what's the point of duplicating the already existing local councils structure (why set up a rival rubbish collection service, for example), but I couldn't get through to him. He wasn't prepared to exclude local councils from the destruction of the state; they too had to be "smashed". But if there's a majority of socialists in an area why can't they simply take over control of the council via the ballot box and use its existing structure to keep local services going during the changeover from capitalism to socialism?  I could have mentioned the Paris Commune as an example of this but there had already been enough exchanges in the meeting about what Marx said or meant or didn't say or didn't mean (which, in the end, is irrelevant).I can sort of understand why they might want to destroy the central state with its coercive functions, but why local councils which are already purely administrative bodies? Why abolish the wheel and then re-invent it? The "workers council" fetishists seem to want to reconstruct everything from scratch, but what's the point and, anyway, that's not how social change occurs. 

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I think an "uneconomic" pit was defined as one where its income did not cover its costs, but there were other pits where this only just happened and others where it was below average. So it would have been possible to draw up a list of pits which did cover their costs even if only just in some cases. In fact, I would even say that if Scargill and some of the other NUM leaders had not have had the political aim of bringing down the Thatcher government they might have been able to have reached a deal to keep more pits open for longer as well as to obtain better redundancy terms. But what happened happened and one lesson would be that, if a government is determined enough, it can defeat any strike and that only political not industrial action can overthrow capitalism (or even one of its governments).

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Today's Times reports that Bob Crow's union, the RMT, has given him £35,000 to stand as head of the No2EU list (a sort of leftwing UKIP) in the Euroelections in May. I have to confess to having to agree with the Tory quoted in the article as saying:

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Trade union leaders should be using their money to defend members' interests, not for their political hobby horses.

I dare say quite a few non-Tory RMT members will agree too.

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Brian wrote:

See if Swansea can attend this.

Hope so. By 5 April the Euroelection campaign will be about to begin, so this will be a chance to hand out some leaflets about us standing in Wales (looks as if we will since the video for the election broadcast seems to be coming along ok). Maybe also to sell some copies of our Strike Weapon pamphlet  It's out print but Kent & Sussex Branch reprinted a few copies for a miners' event in Kent. I wonder if there are any left or whether they could do some more?

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