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More on this here:http://links.org.au/node/3642This decision strikes me as being OK from a trade union point of view:

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Decisions Therefore the congress decided the following:NUMSA as an organisation will neither endorse nor support the ANC or any other political party in 2014. Although endorsing no political party, the union however recognises the constitutional right of its members to vote. Officials and shop stewards who feel the need to campaign for the ANC or any political organisation will have to do this in their own time and using their own resources. Any individual member is entitled in their own time to be active in any political party including getting elected to leadership positions. However, no NUMSA Office Bearer is allowed to hold any office bearer position in any political party. NUMSA will cease to pay into the COSATU/SACP political levy.

In fact it's what the unions here should decide in relation to the Labour Party !

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There's another thread here just on this. One of the posts there links to 2 articles from the Socialist Standard on the scheme:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/basic-income-reformismBasically, it's impracticable under capitalism and doesn't make sense in socialism.Welcome back, by the way.

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The capitalist class would really have to be on their last legs to offer this which would undermine the wages system. I imagine that the mass socialist movement of the time would reject it with contempt and say they want nothing less than the unconditional surrender of the capitalist class. It's conceivable, I suppose, that they might say: we'll take the slice of bread but we still want the bakery and the wheatfields.

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This has long been the policy of the Green Party too (another illustration that Left Unity is hunting on the same territority as them and will have to drive them out to make any headway).Here's a couple of articles analysing this proposed reform showing why it wouldn't work as expected::

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1980s/1988/no-1009-september-1988/green-partys-basic-income-scheme-could-it-work
 http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2008/no-1243-march-2008/basic-income-dangerous-reform

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Maybe the information that he is a descendant of Hugenot refugees from Catholic France where they were persecuted in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the use that has been made of this against him, has made him be more cautious on this issue. Not that this has stopped Miliband being anti (other) immigrants either.

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Good stuff even if Linguet did hold that slavery in some form was inevitable and that chattel slavery was better than wage slavery. At least this is what Marx quotes him as holding. It seems in fact to have been Marx who first drew attention to Linguet's views on this and other related subjects:http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch07.htm

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I don't think Mattick is arguing against the so-called 'Spanish Revolution' (the takeover of some factories and farms by anarchists and others) is he? What he is criticising is the position taken up by the CNT of supporting the Republican government against the Franco rebels. Maybe if a socialist revolution had been on the cards in Spain this criticism might be justified, but this was not the case.The choice was not between capitalism or socialism, but political democracy or political dictatorship. In this case the CNT position was not entirely unreasonable. The situation was complicated by the fact that the Republicans were backed by those Mattick rightly calls the "Moscow Fascists" and between them and Franco there was no essential difference (only over who would impose the dictatorship and do the oppressing). But saying there is no difference between Franco Fascism and Moscow Fascism is one thing. Saying, as Mattick comes close to here and as the 'Left Communists' still do, that there is no difference as far as the working class is concerned between Fascism and Political Democracy is another. Clearly there is, even if recognising this presents the problem of what attitude socialists should take in such a situation (as it did for us in the 1930s with regard to the Spanish Civil War).In any event, I think the 'Spanish Revolution' has been exaggerated as pointed out in 1996 in this article from the now defunct magazine Subversion:http://libcom.org/history/spain-1936-end-anarchist-syndicalsim-subversion

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steve colborn wrote:

I can see a time when it could be, "behave or it's a bullet in the head" though.

I can't. Modern capitalism could never function on that basis.

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There's a review in the January Standard (already out but not online till 1 January). I don't think we are necessarily committed to his view (extensively argued, with graphs and statistics, in this pamphlet) that there was no redistribution of income (which would be brought about by the spontaneous operation of the economic laws of capitalism) from the working class to the capitalist class in the years preceding the outbreak of the present crisis in 2008. This would certainly show that crises are not caused by the working class coming to consume too small a portion of national income but is not absolutely or logically necessary to demonstrate this point.The speakers from "Internationalist Perspective" disagreed with him on this and I think we too, accurately or inaccurately, have accepted and publicised that working class living standards in the US have stagnated over the past 30 or so years. He may be right that in fact they didn't but have even increased (taking into account the so-called "social wage") but this is still a matter of controversy. In any event, as one of the IP speakers pointed out, quoting CLR James (originally Marx), that whether their wages be higher or lower the working class are still exploited.

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imposs1904 wrote:

The IP is holding a joint meeting in NYC on December 2nd:http://fischerzed.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/can-redistribution-solve-capitalisms-crises-public-meeting-in-new-york/I'm hoping to pop along to it, but it depends on family considerations.

There's a You tube video of this meeting here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGxp4C04YbA#t=4996In their opening speeches the four speakers virtually put our case against "underconsumption" theories of crises and of an increase in popular consumption as the way-out.One of them coins the new word "redistributionism". I think that might convey better what we mean as it's a good description of the policies of those who say "Tax the Rich to pay for the Crisis they caused", e.g. the trotskysit groups and leftwing trade union leaders.All the speakers call for the aboition of wage-labour (as opposed to higher wages, which like us they are all for, though not for "redistributionist" reasons), though only one (McIntosh of IP) explicitly spells out that this involves the abolition of money too. He also rejects "labour-time vouchers" (whick Kliman and the MHI don't, but they didn't rise to the bait).          

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mcolome1 wrote:

Rosa was ambivalent because she ended up supporting the uprising of the Spartacists

She did support it, yes, but I thought this was because she respected a party decision which she had spoken against, i.e she thought that the uprising was ill-advised but loyally went along with the majority decision. I think she was also outvoted on her view that the Spartacist League should take part in the elections to the Reichstag. In other words, she realised that the Spartacist uprising, being that of a comparatively small minority, was likely to fail. She was right, but it cost her her life.

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An excerpt from the December EC Minutes has been given, in fact it was from a report from the election committee to the EC, but not the follow-up. The EC rejected the election committee's recommendation to drop the party election video and passed instead the following resolution:

Quote:

Motion 17 – Foster and Cox moved that the EC authorises Cdes M Foster and J Mercer to use existing scripts to explore other ways of producing an election film, which need to be completed before the end of March 2014. Agreed.

The two comrades are already working on this on the basis of a script which had already been agreed and which concentrates on putting over the positive case for (world) socialism and how it would affect people's everyday life (as opposed to attacking our political opponents).A previous EC Meeting (in September) had considered a request from South West Regional Branch to seek permission to use "Imagine". This was not agreed:

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Cox and Craggs moved that the EC makes an informal approach to the PRS to find out costs and the likelihood of using the lyrics of the song Imagine. Lost (2-5-0)

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As it's the supposed season of goodwill, apologies, seafire, but there's a good (actually, excellent) article on this here:http://www.critique-sociale.info/category/english/

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Sorry, mate, we've been had by scammers from the Ukraine before. So were others:http://www.internationalist.org/ukraineimpostors0803.html

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Today's Financial Times contains a full page (and the FT is a broadheet) reply to the Pope trailed on the front page as "Capitalism's promise. The Pope is wrong about inequality".  Actually, this is not really an accurate description of what the article, by John Gapper, actually argues. More accurate is the subheading:

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Capitalism While the income gap in industrialised societies grows inexorably wider, global inequality is shrinking.

Grapper's argument is that capitalism can claim the credit for reducing the gap between the industrialised and industrialising countries as it spreads in China, India, etc. He is not so keen to proclaim that it is capitalism that is leading to the "inexorably wider" income gap in the industrialised countries, even though this follows from his argument.He also produces a quote from the same papal bull:

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The Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike, but he is obliged to remind all that the rich must help, respect and promote the poor.

Not a Marxist then, just an advocate of charity, as of course we knew.

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