ALB
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I know Veolia is one of the private firms that try to rip off local councils as much as they can get away with for collecting rubbish. I see their vans passing by every Tuesday. But I think the academics at the LSE may have taken them for a ride.The report outlines two scenarios:
Quote:A report published today by Veolia Environnement and the London School of Economics envisages the home of the future with nanoscopic robots sorting materials, self-cleaning bathrooms and ultrasonic baths. However it also contains stark warnings with two contrasting visions of urban living in 2050. ‘Imagine 2050’ was developed by leading environmental services company Veolia Environnement in partnership with the LSE. Under both scenarios, environmental technology will transform the home of the future – one in the context of a circular economy, the other in the context of a linear economy.The report describes one future city in which system-level planning has created a dense, resource-efficient society characterised by collaborative consumption, shared ownership and local self-reliance. Alongside this, it models a scenario in which disparate and unregulated development has led to a resource-hungry urban sprawl where private consumption and ownership is prioritised over long-term communal thinking.It is clear that the first scenario is only achievable in socialism while the second is what happens in capitalism and still will in 2050 unless we get socialism by then. In fact, it's surely the scenario that's best for Veolia from a profit-making point of view.I think we can use the first scenario to back up our case. So can the Greens, but they think it can happen under capitalism. My speculation is that the LSE academics were covert Greens. Anyway, as I said, I think we can turn their public relations exercise to our benefit.
There were about 200 there. It was organised by the ex-Living Marxism people from the ex-RCP now calling themselves the Instutute of Ideas. They now no longer pretend to be socialists but dedicate themselves to defending the universal humanist ideals of the 18th century Enlightenment against the post-modernists and advocates and practioners of identity politics. So James was held up not as a role model for black people but as a "humanist" and "modernist" who had absorbed and propagated the ideals of the Enlightenment.Much of the discussion was taken up with what should be the "canon" of English literature as taught in schools and universities. The panel (except one) was in favour of everyone studying the same thing, not Jews "Jewish Studies", black people "Black studies" or women "Women's studies". Sounds a good idea, but not everyone in the audience seemed to agree.Obviously cricket came in. I hadn't realised that until 1960 the West Indian touring teams always had a white man as captain. You live and learn.So did his political views. James was described as "a lifelong Marxist" and his writings from his Trotskyist and post-Trotskyist periods were on sale. I bought a copy of his State Capitalism and World Revolution.The meeting was filmed and I was one of those who was interviewed afterwards about what we thought of the meeting. I said that the only "cannon" I'd heard of was in billiards, that I didn't read English literature and hated Shakespeare but liked James's views on state capitalism in Russia and was against his picture appearing on the Brixton pound as he was ultimately for a society without money. It might appear on their site but, don't worry, I didn't say I was from the Party so we won't all come across as philistines.
There used to be a publication called Trotwatch which was useful:http://libcom.org/tags/trotwatchWe also have "trotspotters" (a variety of train-spotting) in our party:http://www.meetup.com/The-Socialist-Party-of-Great-Britain/events/59391582/I used to be one myself in my younger days but there are too many splits to keep up with.
Talking of Raymond Williams (which we weren't but he was one of the same set of ex-CP Marx-influenced writers), the latest issue of Prospect on "Poverty in the UK" has an article by Leanne Wood, the leader of Plaid Cymru, claiming him as one of theirs. In fact Plaid Cymru are making a big thing of this, Wood describing him as "one of the towering figures of the 20th century left".Can it be that he ended up a Welsh Nationalist? Talk about from the sublime to the ridiculous. Or did he make a couple of passing remarks at one stage of his life? Does anyone know?
slothjabber wrote:are you happy about your members saying things that aren't true?You should become a lawyer. You've already mastered how to ask: "Have you stopped beating your wife?"
Morgenstern wrote:Hence, the dictatorship of the proletariat, just as the bourgeois dictated to their former feudal masters. It will last as long as the revolution is in doubt; as long as capitalist ideas are strong enough to need suppressing.Surely the use of state power by the majority working class to force the minority capitalist class to give up their ownership and control of the means of production (call it the "dictatorship of the proletariat" if you like, like old-fashioned terminology that is) will not involve the suppression of "capitalist ideas" or any ideas for that matter (not sure how this could be done, anyway, a ban on their expression at meetings, in print, on the media?). What it will involve is the suppression of capitalist property rights and of any action the capitalist minority might take to try to stop this. In other words, the suppression of "capitalist actions". Mere "capitalist ideas" are no threat to a majority with socialist ideas. We may, in fact do, want capitalist ideas to disappear but not by suppressing them.But this of course is a topic for another thread..
slothjabber wrote:it fosters a spirit of distrust towards the CWO who can be perceived as somehow tricking their way in to something that 'should' be the SPGB's;Ah, now I understand !All I can say is that the criticism was not directed at the CWO but at the organisers of the bookfair. Please pass this on to the CWO.
LBird wrote:I think that they were trying to express what I wrote earlier:The production of knowledge of both natural and social science is done by humans.Natural and social science both employ the same method.If social science can be bourgeois, so can natural science.If natural science can be socially-neutral, so can social science.Maybe that was what Marx and Engels meant, but they could also have meant what they actually wrote later on in the manuscript:
Quote:Feuerbach speaks in particular of the perception of natural science; he mentions secrets which are disclosed only to the eye of the physicist and chemist; but where would natural science be without industry and commerce? Even this pure natural science is provided with an aim, as with its material, only through trade and industry, through the sensuous activity of men. So much is this activity, this unceasing sensuous labour and creation, this production, the basis of the whole sensuous world as it now exists, that, were it interrupted only for a year, Feuerbach would not only find an enormous change in the natural world, but would very soon find that the whole world of men and his own perceptive faculty, nay his own existence, were missing. Of course, in all this the priority of external nature remains unassailed, and all this has no application to the original men produced by generatio aequivoca [spontaneous generation]; but this differentiation has meaning only insofar as man is considered to be distinct from nature. For that matter, nature, the nature that preceded human history, is not by any means the nature in which Feuerbach lives, it is nature which today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral-islands of recent origin) and which, therefore, does not exist for Feuerbach.That "natural science" was a human activity that depends on material conditions, themselves the product of human activity. So any history of natural science would also have to be a history of human activity.That nature as we see it today has been shaped by human action, so that the study of nature today is also part of the study of human history.Maybe they crossed out the passage because they felt that the second was a bit too sweeping because it wouldn't apply to all parts of nature, i.e not to those parts that had not been changed by humans.Note in passing their ignorance about the origin of humans. Spontaneous generation ! But they were writing in 1844, before Darwin and his The Descent of Man that came out in 1871.None of this invalidates your theory. At most it would show that Marx and Engels meant something different.
I still do not why know you are attacking us in this way or what your agenda is.Even the grammar of what I wrote doesn't bear your interpretation:
slothjabber wrote:ALB wrote:How come that the CWO, which favours political action by a vanguard party and envisages a transition period with a state, are admitted to the Anarchists Bookfairs while we are banned? …Not 'were banned, when we could be bothered to apply', but 'are' banned, implying that it is happening now.
Yes, "are banned" does imply that the ban applies now but it says nothing about when it started, only that it is still in force. In fact, it's saying "were" banned that would suggest that it was a decision taken this year (that we had applied and been banned and that the CWO applied afterwards and had been accepted).Why would I want to say something that I knew not to be true? I knew perfectly well that we had not applied this year nor for a number of years (because there was a ban on us in force). Your argument that we should have tested if it was still in force by applying this year is irrelevant. If we've been told "no" a number of times we get the message. If they don't want us, fair enough. We're not going to grovel to get in. I was just pointing out the organisers' inconsistency in admitting the CWO while having a ban on us.This is a silly argument anyway. More interesting would be your reasons for making this an issue.
Interesting quote and interesting idea, but two things. Wasn't the German Ideology a joint Marx-Engels production? And this is a passage they crossed out. It would be interesting to know why, but we'll never know.What do you think they were trying to express in the crossed-out passage?
No doubt these xenophobic, nationalist parties will do well in next year's elections to the European Parliament but that will be because, as the EP is only a talking shop not a real law-making parliament, people can and do use elections to it just to protest. IIt is bad that this will take the form it is likely to, but rallying round the mainstream parties of capitalism,as Palmer and the other bloke advocate, is not the answer.An actual return to the national protectionist policies of the 1930s (as advocated by leftwing No2EU type parties as well) is highly unlikely, as the capitalist class and their mainstream political representatives have learnt the lessons of that period. They are not going to dismantle the tariff-free "common market" they've worked so hard to build up over the years as they know that would only make things worse.
I don't know what's provoked this vituperative attack. The statement criticised is not a lie. We have been turned down on a number of occasions in the past and, as you rightly assume, have given up applying on the natural assumption that we are not welcome, "banned" if you like. It was not a reference just to this year's bookfair.More interesting is this:
slothjabber wrote:the CWO was allowed to have a stall after they put in a request, and were then contacted by the organisers to provide further information, which they did, after which the organisers accepted that they had a sufficient relationship with Anarchism to be given a stall – this year.What "further information" did they ask and what further information did you supply that convinced them that you were sufficiently anarchist?We readily concede that your anti-election stance puts you closer to Bakunin and the anarchists than to Marx.We have of course never claimed to be "the parliamentary wing of the anarchist movement". That's something others have said about us. In any event this niche is filled by Ian Bone and Class War (see the separate thread on this in the General Discussion section).
alanjjohnstone wrote:" WIC has not decided to "enter the new party" since that would be completely at variance with its stated purpose."Out of curiousity what arguments pro or con were raised in this WIC decision? Did a debate on the question actually take place?If I can reply for Robin. To say that someone has "not decided" to do something is not the same as saying "they decided not to" do it.
Welcome back, Robin. People had been wondering what had happened to you
robbo203 wrote:WIC has not decided to "enter the new party"That's good news, but it's interesting to speculate on what an individual socialist or group of socialists could do if they decided to "enter" and bore from within, like the Trots do, a non-socialist party such a the new LU party (or, for that matter, the Green Party or the Labour Party)Most of the discussion in such parties will be about which reforms to advocate and prioritise and, presumably, socialists wouldn't have much to say about that except to bang on about their temporary nature, how they couldn't solve the problem, etc. In fact, they'd be doing what we do outside any party: trying to convince fellow-workers that the capitalist system cannot be reformed so as to work in the interest of the majority class of wage and salary workers and that the only way out is to convert the means of production into the common property of all under democratic control so that they could be used to satisfy people's needs not to make a profit for their owners.I would imagine that sooner or later the non-socialists in the party would be questioning what people putting such arguments are doing in their party. They might even have more respect for people like us who stay out and argue our case independently. I would guess that this is the position of Andrew Burgin, one of the leading promoters of the new party, who Stuart says likes us. He has in fact visited our offices a number of times to buy up old pamphlets and books and back issues of the Socialist Standard to sell in his bookshop.
