ALB
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IP is "Internationalist Perspectives", a breakaway from the ICC. They are reasonably ok (despite being anti-elections and anti-unions). In fact, when I left Belgium, I gave much of my collection of French-language "ultra left" pamphlets, leaflets and journals to one of their members.The French section of the ICC is particularly "cultish". They even have or had their own internal police force. See this article (which also has relevance to the thread on the so-called "slavery case"):http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2005/no-1215-november-2005/cult-professional-revolutionary
I'm looking forward to next year's anarcho-bookfair to see what happens if the CWO get accepted and the ICC rejected.
I think this does have political implications. Many Maoist and Trotskyist groups are self-styled "vanguard parties" formed around a single leader (or Leader). People who join such groups already consider themselves followers and are psychologically prepared to submit to the will of the central committee or its leader(s).It is not surprising that from time to time some of these leaders take advantage of this. Why for instance would women have submitted to Trotskyist Leader Gerry Healey's sexual advances if they had not already been prepared to submit to him politically? This incidentally also happened just up the road from us, actually in Clapham High Street where the SLL/WRP had its headquarters. Simon Pirani, ex-WRP, has attempted to explain this phenomenon in this article on his blog:http://piraniarchive.wordpress.com/home/investigations-campaigns-and-other-stuff/the-break-up-of-the-wrp-from-the-horses-mouth/It appears that the vanguard party, especially when led by a single leader, is a much more dangerous form of organisation than we normally assume.
Ukraine is an artificial country. The western part was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and Catholic while the rest is Orthodox and more Russified. Those who demonstrate to join the EU will come from the wesern part (the same part that supplied the Nazis with concentration camp guards).The dilemma for the people of eastern Europe is that "independence" is an illusion. Their only choice, within capitalism, is to be dominated either by Germany or by Russia. Poor sods.
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?
