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Dave wrote:

History shows that no ruling class ever gives up its power voluntarily or peacefully.

This is often said, but is it actually true? It can certainly be said that no ruling class has ever given up power "voluntarily" in that it has spontaneously decided of its own accord to do this without being put under any sort of pressure to do so, but there are a number of historical examples of a ruling class giving up "peacefully" when put under overwhelming popular pressure, under the force, if you like of mass popular opposition. The state-capitalist ruling class in East Germany and Czechoslovakia for instance. Here were hard-line regimes with repressive force at their disposal which, when faced with mass popular opposition, decided not to use this force but literally to give up, knowing that they had no chance of holding on to their power and that if they tried, as some elements of the ruling class in Rumania did, they would be signing their own death warrants.Surely, the situation on the eve of the socialist revolution will be like that in Eastern Europe twenty or so years ago, only more so. A mass popular and democratically-organised socialist movement enjoying majority support. Under these circumstances the capitalist ruling class will have no realistic choice but to surrender, especially if majority socialist support is confirmed by an election victory. They wouldn't be doing so voluntarily but will have been forced out by mass popular pressure. So I think your statement needs to be amended to read:

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History shows that no ruling class ever gives up its power without being forced to do so.

That's more historically accurate.

Dave wrote:

What is certain is that as the working class develops a revolutionary consciousness then the ruling class will take military means to smash the developing workers movement.

I don't think this argument can be sustained either. Certainly, we cannot say that this will be "certain" to happen. One reason for this will be that as a revoluntary consciousness develops among the working class this will, as has already been mentioned in the discusssion here, be bound to affect workers working for the state, including those in the armed forces. Which will make the armed forces, and the whole state apparaus, an unreliable weapon in the hands of the ruling class.Any ruling class that tried to use military force against a growing democratically-organised socialist movement would be taking the enormous risk, for them, of making the instrument by which they rule unstable and unusable.  In fact it is hard to see the ruling class being united on this any more than the armed forces would be.One section of the ruling class might prefer to try an alternative strategy to counter the growing socialist movement — offering reforms and improvements to try to defuse it. Actually, I would suggest this is the more likely scenario and describes how ruling classes have behaved when faced with growing popular discontent. "Give them reform or they'll give you revolution", as one Tory politician once put it. So, here again, your statement needs to be amended:

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What is certain is that as the working class develops a revolutionary consciousness then the ruling class will take measures to counter the developing workers movement.

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Personally I don't like the phrase "the parliamentary road to socialism" (although we have occasionally used it). I prefer "the political road to socialism" which will involve using elections and parliament. We have in fact never been committed to a purely political road but have always held that the working class need to be organised outside parliament too, to control any elected MPs and councillors but also at work to take over production and kee it going. As we say in our latest statement of this case, our pamphlet What's Wrong with Using Parliament?:

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The socialist political party (of which we are just a potential embryo) will not be something separate from the socialist majority. It will be the socialist majority self-organised politically, an instrument they have formed to use to achieve a socialist society. The structure of the future mass socialist party will have to reflect – to prefigure – the democratic nature of the society it is seeking to establish. It must be democratic, without leaders, with major decisions made by conferences of mandated and recallable delegates or by referendum, and other decisions made by accountable individuals and committees. It won’t have a leadership with the power to make decisions and tell the general membership what to do. In other words, it will be quite different both from the parties of professional politicians that stand for election today and from the vanguard parties of the Leninists. This is not to say that the socialist majority only needs to organise itself politically. It does need to organise politically so as to be able to win control of political power. But it also needs to organise economically to take over and keep production going immediately after the winning of political control. We can’t anticipate how such socialist workplace organisations will emerge, whether from the reform of the existing trade unions, from breakaways from them or from the formation of completely new organisations. All we can say now is that such workplace organisations will arise and that they too, like the socialist political party, will have to organise themselves on a democratic basis, with mandated delegates instead of leaders. With the spread of socialist ideas all organisations will change and take on a participatory democratic and socialist character, so that the majority’s organisation for socialism will not be just political and economic, but will also embrace schools and universities, television, film-making, plays and the like as well as inter-personal relationships. We’re talking about a radical social revolution involving all aspects of social life.

I suppose you could, at a pinch, call these socialist-minded workers' organisations "workers councils" but we haven't because of the term's association with the "soviets" that emerged during the Russian anti-tsarist revolution and which have idealised, not to say idolised.The armed forces are part of the state and whoever controls the state will control them. This will apply to a socialist=controlled parliament, so why should the question arise of handing over control to some other body. Presumably you are thinking of some central council of "workers' councils", but would be the point of setting up such a parallel organisation? Other means will exist of controlling socialist MPs (as set out in the extract above from our pamphlet) who, I repeat, won't be separate from control by socialists outside parliament than would the delegates to any central workers council. And it wouldn't be an "SPGB dominated parliament" but a socialist-minded working class dominated parliament.In a sense this is speculation, but the important factor before socialism can be established is to have a democratically-organised majority in favour of it using democratic methods. In the political conditions that exist today one of the means that can be (and we say should be) used is elections and parliament.Here's an article from a back issue of the Socialist Standard on "Workers' Councils":http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1970s/1971/no-808-december-1971/workers-councilsSee also this article from 1937 and its concluding paragraph:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1930s/1937/no-399-november-1937/socialist-party-and-economic-organisation

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

There will be some however who would challenge a purely materialist explanation of the civil war in Syria, based on a drought  and urban migration. Wasn't the original rising more a "educated, middle class" Arab Spring and rising food prices not a particulr great issue as a yesr or so earlier in Egypt…Smoke and mirrors, perhaps…..Hey , thats the cause…unfixable environmental destruction….not Saudi money and politics.

Actually, he only said that it was a factor, not the factor, but them so did we in the article on "The Civil War in Spain" in the September  Socialist Standard:

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Hanna Batatu writing in the 1981 Middle East Journal is prophetic about the 2011 uprising: ' rural people, driven by economic distress or lack of security, move into the main cities, settle in the outlying districts, enter before long into relations or forge common links with elements of the urban poor, who are themselves often earlier migrants from the countryside, and together they challenge the old established classes'An Associated Press Report of 16 October 2012 identified that the rebels were poor, religiously conservative from the underdeveloped countryside who felt economically marginalised, were against elite merchants and industrialists who dominated Aleppo and allied to the regime. An ex-car mechanic now in the rebel army said: 'those who have money in Aleppo worry about their wealth and interests when we have long lived in poverty'. The report concluded that the uprising was 'as much a revolt of the underclass as a rebellion against the regime's authoritarian grip'.

Of course, all sorts of elements have taken advantage of this to further their interests such as, precisely, Saudi Arabia to further its struggle with Iran for regional hegemony and Western capitalism to overthrow a hostile regime in an oil-rich part of the world.

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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:

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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:

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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 Wittgenstein

I 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

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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 !

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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).

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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".

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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 pan

Maybe, 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.

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"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.

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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 !

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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?

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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/

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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.

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