ALB
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Actually, it looks as if the qualification for getting a Party Election Broadcast in the Euroelections in Wales will be to present a complete list (last time only a nearly complete list was required). As the Wales Region elects 4 MEPs this means that we would have to find the full 4. No problem of course.Speaking of candidates, anybody from an EU country can stand, so we could have a member on our SE list who lived in Germany or France or Italy, etc. That might have some value in showing that we are not just interested in the UK (even though there'd be a lot of bureaucracy involved). Pity we haven't any members in Rumania or Bulgaria to ram home this point ! After all, Farage is one of the MEPs for the SE region. We'd get a lot of publicity if our list contained a socialist from one of these countries.
Brian wrote:According to my welsh dictionary the translation for World Socialist Movement is Byd Sosialdaidd Symudiad.Although I only learnt Welsh to primary school level (so I am only able to talk about cows, horses or pigs in a field but not about politics) this doesn't seem quite right. Surely we don't have to rely on consulting a dictionary. Isn't there a native Welsh-speaker in Abertawe branch?
The election video is primarily concerned with the Wales Region if we decide to contest that too (but that depends on the video being done) because it's only there that it would be broadcast on TV. It could also of course be publicised in the South East Region too, eg on our manifesto.Our name in Welsh, by the way, is Y Plaid Sosialaidd Prydain Fawr.
admice wrote:Just listened to 6, 7, 8 and 12 of this. The trouble is although he defines "money as a claim on labor" and "debt as a claim of future human labor" he then ignores the labour (production) aspect and sees the growth of the economy as being driven by the need to pay interest on debt rather than as by the imperative to accumulate more and more capital out of profit created by labour. This makes him give a purely monetary and financial explanation of how capitalism works, including crises.But it's production for profit not production for interest that drives capitalism and leads to uncontrollable "growth". Interest is only a subdivision of profit and so can only come out of this (as the definition "debt is a claim on future labor" implies) and does as profits are generally greater than legally-payable interest (if not, of course, the interest cannot be paid and isn't).He also says, at the beginning of 6, that money is inevitable, which of course we don't accept.
More on this here:http://links.org.au/node/3642This decision strikes me as being OK from a trade union point of view:
Quote: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 !
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.
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.
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-reformMaybe 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.
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
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
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.
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.
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).
mcolome1 wrote:Rosa was ambivalent because she ended up supporting the uprising of the SpartacistsShe 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.
