ALB
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Here's one suggestion as to what may have gone wrong:It looks like the only way to access to NEB list is to join. It looks unfixable. Yahoo may have changed a policy or a box may have been unchecked in error. The only solution may be to set up a fresh group.
Don't know if this has any significance. Probably not, but something to at least note.Swedish neo-nazis are planning to go to the Ukraine to support the "revolution" there, according to this article:http://www.expressen.se/nyheter/svenska-nazister-uppmanas-aka-till-ukraina-1/
Quote:SWEDISH NAZIS ENCOURAGED TO GO TO UKRAINESwedish Nazis are being encouraged to go to Ukraine to support the revolution. According to a new Swedish right-wing site with close ties to the Nazi Swedish party the aim is to show that they "stand united with white, European nationalists in more than words." By helping, we hope that the new government formation is to be nationalist, says Magnus Söderman, who is behind the petition which calls itself the "Swedish Ukraine Volunteers".Reply from a comrade not on this forum:Trotsky was of Jewish origin. His father is described as a "well-to-do farmer" (itself an anomaly, as Jews were legally prohibited from owning land, though in fact quite a few did). However, the family was not part of a Jewish community and therefore spoke not Yiddish but the same language as their Gentile neighbors, which in that area was surzhik. As an adult Trotsky mostly used Russian. Of course, he did not think of himself as Russian, Ukrainian or Jewish but as a revolutionary internationalist.
Pub quiz question: What nationality was Trotsky? Was he a Ukrainian? He was born in the Kherson region (see map above) and, according to this, his father spoke surzhyk, a dialect between Ukrainian and Russian. He also wrote articles in 1939 justifying independence for the Ukraine.
I've nothing against history. Nor has the SPGB. Far from it. At this stage of the development of the socialist movement, when we are so few, a degree of knowledge about it is important. I would have thought, though, that this criticism would be more appropriately directed at those at the meeting who argued that workers can spontaneously reach a socialist consciousness simply through struggle without needing to hear the past experiences of the working class as encapsulated in socialist principles and conveyed in publications or by word of mouth. For the record (and for discussion, if you want) here's my take on the "soviets" in Russia.It was just that I was disappointed that the meeting might turn into a discussion about the details of what did or did not happen in the upheavals in Russia in 1905 and 1917, as has so often happened in discussions we've had with the ICC and CWO. Fortunately, in the second part, the discussion did centre on contemporary political, economic and social conditions which are significantly different from those in Russia a hundred years and the implications of this for revolutionary socialists today.For instance, the internet and its use to organise demonstrations and strikes and to spread socialist ideas; the fact that today most workers do not work in big factories in huge industrial complexes as they did in St Petersburg in the days of "soviets" and the implications of this for factory workers councils; and how to involve in the struggle for socialism workers not at work (the unemployed, the retired). We tried to bring out the use as a weapon in the class struggle of the vote (which didn't exist in Russia in 1905) by revolutionary socialists and by the working class in general, but came up against a brick wall.Incidentally, to return to history, if you re-read Luxemburg's 1906 pamphlet on the mass strike you will see that at the end of the first chapter (which also contains a vitriolic attack on anarchist anti-parliamentarism) she is advocating its use in Russia (and by implication in Germany too) to try to get political democracy:
Quote:… the mass strike in Russia has been realised not as means of evading the political struggle of the working-class, and especially of parliamentarism, not as a means of jumping suddenly into the social revolution by means of a theatrical coup, but as a means, firstly, of creating for the proletariat the conditions of the daily political struggle and especially of parliamentarism. The revolutionary struggle in Russia, in which mass strikes are the most important weapon, is, by the working people, and above all by the proletariat, conducted for those political rights and conditions whose necessity and importance in the struggle for the emancipation of the working-class Marx and Engels first pointed out, and in opposition to anarchism fought for with all their might in the International. Thus has historical dialectics, the rock on which the whole teaching of Marxian socialism rests, brought it about that today anarchism, with which the idea of the mass strike is indissolubly associated, has itself come to be opposed to the mass strike which was combated as the opposite of the political activity of the proletariat, appears today as the most powerful weapon of the struggle for political rights.I suppose I could have mentioned this too but appeals to authority was another thing I was trying to avoid, but we can by all means discuss it here or even at a future meeting. Anyway, you can use her against us !
I must confess to be being surprised at the turn of events. It seems that the government collapsed as a result of losing the support of the army. It remains to be seen whether the West will be able to benefit from the victory in Kiev of its side. There are already indications that part of the country won't accept the new regime. The map at the end of this article from RT (Russian government world TV) shows what these areas might be.It is also ominous that in other reports RT is referring to the people living there as "Russians" rather than Russian-speaking Ukrainians as well as referring to the western part of the country as "Galicia" The EU could end up with only a land-locked poor region in its sphere of influence.The real tragedy of the events in the Ukraine is that the working class there, insofar as it has got involved, have agreed to line up behind one or other capitalist State that wants the area to be in its sphere of influence and/or with one or other group of local oligarchs.
I went to a meeting of Labour Heritage (a Labour Party history group) yesterday. One of the talks was by Ivan Gibbons, Director of Irish Studies at St. Mary's University College in Twickenham, on "The Dublin Lockout of 1913 and its impact on the future of Labour in Ireland". It was quite an impressive analysis which punctured Irish leftwing Republican mythology both about the lockout and about James Connolly. Its main points can be found here:http://www.labour-heritage.com/Bulletin%20Autumn%202013.pdfHe also, perhaps inadvertently, brought out that, from the point of view of the material conditions of the working class, Irish "independence" made things worse. As he points out in the article, even before independence the IRA had sought to suppress labour unrest in the west of Ireland and one of the first acts of the Irish Free State was to use its new army to break a postal workers strike (its second act was to abolish divorce). A few years later pensions and other benefits were cut because the new State could not afford to keep paying them at the same level as in rest of the British Isles. There must be a lesson here for those who support Scottish "independence" on leftwing or "socialist" grounds.
LBird wrote:Hence, I see the role of propaganda and the battle of ideas within our class as a fundamental one, rather inclined to think that there is a necessary link between Engels' positivist view of science, and the notion that 'struggle/experience' leads to consciousness. The Left Communists, I think, espouse Engels, rather than Marx, on this issue.I wouldn't have thought that Engels can be made to carry the can for their peculiar ideas on how socialist consciousness arises, as what Engels wrote in his introduction to a reprint in 1895 of Marx's Civil War in France directly contradicts their view:
Quote:The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organization, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for [with body and soul]. The history of the last fifty years has taught us that. But in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long, persistent work is required,I think Engels is with us (both of us) on this one.
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.
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.
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.
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):
Quote: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.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):
Quote: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.
