ALB
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I see the date of that tweet was 1 November:https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/396302820648837120Interesting because, to back up his claim that Marx thought there could be a peaceful winning of political power under certain circumstances, Owen Jones quoted not from his speech in 1872 in Amsterdam but from something he wrote in the 1850s and which is quoted in the blog of our friends North of the border but which is rarely quoted by anyone else.Speaking of the Chartists, Marx wrote in 1852:
Quote:But universal suffrage is the equivalent of political power for the working class of England, where the proletariat forms the large majority of the population, where, in a long though underground civil war, it has gained a clear consciousness of its position as a class and where even the rural districts know no longer any peasants, but only landlords, industrial capitalists (farmers) and hired labourers. The carrying of universal suffrage in England would, therefore be a far more socialistic measure than anything which has been honoured with that name on the continent. Its inevitable result, here is the political supremacy of the working class. [Marx emphasis]This was in an article he wrote in August 1852 for the New York Tribune which curiously (though perhaps not) is not on the Marxist Internet Archive.Are we allowed to speculate that Jones mugged up on Marx before the programme by consulting what we say? But then where else would a Social Democrat go to built a case that Marx wasn't a Leninist?
You can watch it here for another 7 days (it starts 24m 29s in);http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03gprs0/Daily_Politics_01_11_2013/A comrade rang me this morning to say Owen Jones had been on TV talking about Marx, so I watched it expecting a load of rubbish (Jones being a trendy reformist) but in fact I have to confess that he wasn't all that bad at all. He pointed out that Britain wasn't a political democracy in Marx's day and that Marx envisaged the possibility, with the extension of the franchise to most workers, of a peaceful winning of power for socialism. Strange, though, to see a Labour Party supporter speaking favourably of Marx.What was bad was not him but the woman professor from Oxford who said that Marx foreshadowed a vanguard party such as Lenin formed and Andrew Neil himself who kept on implying that the USSR had been "Marxist". Jones actually used an argument we've often used to refute this: East Germany called itself the "German Democratic Republic" but nobody thought it was democratic, so why consider the USSR socialist just because it called itself that?
Dave wrote:A couple of questions to start of with.Does the SPGB branches become involed in campaigns such as keeping open hospitals, schools etc?No, but not because we are against what such campaigns are trying to do but because we say that the job of a socialist party is to concentrate on campaigning for socialism. So, we don't try to hi-jack such campaigns as some groups do, but leave it to organisations formed by those concerned, especially the unions to organise the campaign as they think best.I don't know if this leaflet was one you saw on our website. It's to do with a campaign to stop parts of a hospital being closed:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/world-socialist-movement/whittington-hospitalWhen we stand in elections we stand just for socialism and only seek the votes of those who want socialism. We don't promise or advocate reforms to capitalism. Which is why, unfortunately, we don't get many votes.
Dave wrote:What do branches do?Public meetings, street sales, stalls at events, leafletting and speaking from the floor at other meetings, writing to the local press, contesting elections (some branches), all aimed at spreading socialist ideas.
Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:Well, my work has nothing to do with Ordinary Language Philosophy. And, despite what you might have been told, neither has Wittgenstein's.You say that, but later on your give a series of quotes from him which form the basis of Ordinary Language Philosophy, eg:
Quote:When philosophers use a word — 'knowledge', 'being', 'object', 'I', 'proposition/sentence', 'name', — and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used this way in the language in which it is at home?Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:You plainly didn't read my article on WittgensteinI have now. Very interesting. I hadn't realised before he was such a fellow traveller of the Russian state capitalist regime. Nor that he converted to Roman Catholicism even if on his deathbed (enough to damn anyone in my eyes). But I notice that you describe him as a "philosopher" and even use his flirting with Hegelian language as evidence for him being a leftwinger !Since you obviously have some sympathy for Ordinary Language Philosophy (acquitting it of the charge of being a part of ruling class ideology) you might be interested in this book written by a member of the SPGB in his work capacity:Keith Graham J. L. Austin: A Critique of Ordinary Language Philosophy
Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:But, in fact, the opposite of that is the case: what I have to say is in fact staring us in the face (based on what Marx told us about the need to return to ordinary language –, and as I interpret him through the eyes of Wittgenstein) — an adherence to ordinary language blows all of philosophy apart. Ordinary language is the language you use every day, the language created as a result of the collective labour of the working class, it is the enemy of elitism (which is why the majority of philosophers and theorists denigrate it and also depreciate 'commonsense', and have been doing so at least since Plato's day)..Oh, I'm beginning to see where you are coming from. Is this, then, your point of view:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_language_philosophyIf so, why isn't it too a ruling class idea? After all, didn't it originate and was/is propagated by professors in Oxford and Cambridge?I tried to read Wittgenstein once. If that's ordinary language (even the title was in Latin), give me philosophy !
I don't see anything wrong with streaming meetings online like Zeitgeist do, but I'd start with the public meetings we do in London, Glasgow and Manchester. I think there's a demand for this. Already people have been asking for the one in London on Sunday on the English Civil War to be recorded. That's the sort of meeting we could/should stream. No doubt we will sooner or later when people come forward to do it (and know what they're doing).
RL, Nobody here has defended "diamat". In fact, I think we would agree with your criticism of it. The trouble is that you are arguing not just against it, but also against all "philosophy" (idealism, materialism, positivism, even logical positivism, etc). That's what you've been challenged on here, not on criticising Leninist/Stalinist/Trotskyist/Maoist "dialectal materialism".
alanjjohnstone wrote:i agree with you that we should strike when the iron is hot and make the most of the opportunity. There is no dispute about that. But on the long term, we should realise that Brand may well be a flash in the panMaybe, like Sinead O'Connor 20 years ago (though she got it right about the Catholic Church and child sex abuse):http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1990s/1993/no-1061-january-1993/%E2%80%9Cabolish-money%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%93-sinead-o%E2%80%99connorBut, as others (not just me) keep saying, we can and should use the opening to get a better hearing for our case.Twenty years later the author of the Sinead O'Connor article will be writing the one on the Brand interview for the December issue of the Socialist Standard.
Quote:"This may bring his message to millions but at the same time, I fear, it dissipates its power to effect change.” http://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2013-09-14/russell-brand-half-way-to-subversion/That concedes the point that his criticism of capitalism and his call for revolution did reach millions. What people will do about it is another matter. But it's an opening for us.
alanjjohnstone wrote:The MediaLens website is devoted to exposing the BBC and the media's false liberalism. http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/10/launchpad-for-a-revolution/This article supports the argument that the Brand/Paxman interview was not as "revolutionary" as some wish it to be and may have an underlying ulterior purpose.I think this belongs on the long-dreaded conspiracy theories thread. If radical ideas are not allowed on the media it's a plot, but if they do appear it's also a plot !
Quote:Noam Chomsky has a cautionary note on high-profile exposure in the corporate media: ‘If I started getting public media exposure’, he once said, ‘I’d think I were doing something wrong. Why should any system of power offer opportunities to people who are trying to undermine it? That would be crazy.’Sounds like sours grapes to me. In fact Chomsky has been interviewed by Paxman on two occasions.In 2011: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_1A8er-bGUand in 2004: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/3732345.stmAnybody remember anything about them?
admice wrote:I thought you were a party, just without enough members to run candidates?Actually we do run candidates, not many true but on a regular basis. See:http://spgb.blogspot.co.uk/
I remember an anecdote that used to circulate in the party about a visit in the 1930s to our Head Office by an equerry of the then Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII, who would be Prince Charles's grand-uncle) who purchased all the party pamphlets for his master to read. Apparently he wanted to know the cause of the misery his future subjects were suffering. I thought it was in Baltrop's book The Monument, that book of anecdotes about the party, but can't find it there. Anyway, it made me suspicious of the common view that he was a Nazi sympathiser.
Not just the CBI, according to today's Times:
Quote:City Votes for Europe.More than eight out of ten senior City professionals believe that staying in the EU is the best option for the competitiveness of the UK as a financial centre, according to a survey by TneCItyUK. It said that the country has to be in the single market to shape how it operates and develops.So that's finance capitalists as well as industrial capitalists against withdrawal. The dominant section of the UK capitalist class is never going to forgive Cameron if he gets it wrong and in the promised in/out referendum people vote to withdraw.
He's done it again. Here he is offering a materialist explanation for the initial uprising in Syria:
Quote:"The tragic conflict in Syria provides a terrifyingly graphic example, where a severe drought for the last seven years has decimated Syria's rural economy," he said."Driving many farmers off their fields and into cities where, already, food was in short supply."This depletion of natural capital, inexplicably, little reported in the media, was a significant contributor to the social tension that exploded with such desperate results".What next? An interview with Paxman in which he calls for revolution?
Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:ALB:"I would have thought that by "philosophy" Marx meant the German philosophy of his day (which was both speculative and metaphysical) of which he was once an adept himself, both before and, for a while, after he became a socialist. I don't think he included the English, Scottish and French materialists in this."Well, had he meant this he'd have said :I am surprised that anyone should try to deny that in his writings of 1844-5 by "philosophy" and "philosophers" Marx meant German philosophy, i.e that of Hegel and in particular its radical offshoots. In fact, your quotes are from a writing which was called The German Ideology. The other work that you ought to re-read is his A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (the one where he coined the phrase that religion is the opium of the people). Here he uses interchangeably the terms "German theory", "German ideology", "German philosophy of right and the state".Marx began (the italics are his):
Quote:It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.and wrote::
Quote:Even historically, theoretical emancipation has specific practical significance for Germany. For Germany’s revolutionary past is theoretical, it is the Reformation. As the revolution then began in the brain of the monk, so now it begins in the brain of the philosopher.It ends:
Quote:As philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapon in philosophy. And once the lightning of thought has squarely struck this ingenuous soil of the people, the emancipation of the Germans into men will be accomplished. […] The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence [Aufhebung] of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization [Verwirklichung] of philosophy.There is no possible way in which Marx's use of the terms "philosophy" and "philosopher" in this concluding passage can be interpreted as meaning philosophy and philosophers in general. In fact it would be absurd to do so (Marx imagining all philosophers of whatever kind uniting to lead the proletariat in a revolution !) Later, of course, Marx abandoned this elitist view of the proletariat as a tool in the hands of philosophers to accept that, rather, the emancipation of the working class must be the task of the working class itself (Lenin, on the other hand, made it the basis for his theory of the supposed need for a vanguard party to lead the workers).This said, I agree with you that most philosophy is useles (I don't even like the word "philosophy" in relation to socialist ideas: "theory" is the more appropriate term). I'm just pointing out that you are historically wrong about what you claim Marx meant by "philosophy". In fact, accepting that Marx meant Hegelian philosophy and its radical offshoots strengthens your case that Marx wasn't a Hegelian (except in his early days, mainly before he became a socialist).
