ALB
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The reference was just to what happened in Brixton. Maybe elsewhere the action was more successful in terms of numbers who turned up. I imagine they expected more to turn up in Brixton. We did and even printed a few more leaflets.The other criticism — for blaming the banks and in particular HSBC for the crisis — remains valid as it is diverting popular discontent away from capitalism as a system on to banks and their top executives. Here is another extract from their leaflet (presumably also distributed in Regent Street, Glasgow, Sheffield, etc):
Quote:Today people all over the country are targeting HSBC – shutting down the UK's biggest bonus-munching, crisis-causing, tax-dodging bank. We are bringing food banks into the big banks. It's time that the tax-dodging fat-cats and the banks that caused the financial crisis were made to pay up, not the public.Popular resentment against banks and bankers may be understandable, but it is still wrong to blame them for causing the crisis. In fact we need to argue against this misdirected resentment and its populist exploitation by UK Uncut and TUSC, one of whose election leaflets and frequently in their paper raises the slogan "We won't pay for the bankers' crisis!" Maybe UK Uncut can be excused to a certain extent because they don't claim to be Marxists.I'm not against us organising propaganda stunts (as discussed in the workshops we held) but they need to be correct politically.
I don't think that the "to each according to their needs" part, i.e free access according to individually determined need, poses a problem as long as it is understood that it can only be free access to what society has decided should be produced (or to what you yourself grow or make). Where this exists, in however distorted a form, under capitalism people eventually adjust to taking or using only what they need, a behaviour pattern that will be re-inforced in socialism when people can be certain that free access will continue. There is a "social" element here, yes, but it's the decision about what should be produced to be made freely available, not the individual decision to assess "need".The first part "from each according to their ability" is the one that doesn't fit it with anarchist-type "individual sovereignity" as it presupposes a degree of organisation that cannot be left to individual choice. Individuals will have to fit in with the work process and commit themselves to being at work at agreed times, i.e. when (or even whether) to work cannot be completely "self-determined". But I would think that the solution will lie along the lines of ensuring that everyone has a job (or jobs) that suits them and being part of a co-operating working community. I don't see anything wrong in principle with a rota system for tasks considered uninteresting to which people would also be committed, but I don't see that coercive measures (such as reduced access to what you need to live) would be any part of the solution.In the end, this sort of discussion is really about what people think "human nature" is: if you think people are "naturally" lazy and unco-operative then you will tend to envisage coercive measures. If you don't then you won't.
Interesting and relevant news item on the BBC yesterday:
Quote:Researchers from Abo Academy University in Finland say that violence in early human communities was driven by personal conflicts rather than large-scale battles.They say their findings suggest that war is not an innate part of human nature, but rather a behaviour that we have adopted more recently.Full story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23340252
Russia could have jumped straight into socialism in 1918 but only if North America and the rest of Europe had jumped at the same time, i.e socialism was immediately possible in 1918 but not just in one country.
Here's Bob Crow of RMT's take on this. The trouble is he only wants to create a Labour Party Mark 2, but why try to recreate a political form that's failed?
Nobody is saying that local communities are not capable of running their own affairs. Of course they are and in socialism will be able to, freed from financial considerations. All we are saying is that they are not capable of producing all they need locally. This is not an insult, eg saying that they are not competant to do this, but a purely factual statement. It's no answer saying that if there isn't a copper mine locally, they could use aluminium because the chances are that there won't be an aluminium mine (or smelter) locally either.What is wrong with local communities adminstering their affairs locally, but getting goods and materials that are not available locally from their region or, in the case of some things, from some world body? To refuse this would be to shoot themselves in the foot, not that I can imagine those in any local community wanting (voting) to do this. I think you'd find yourself outvoted by the other citizens of Wokingham
According to the two comrades who went, this was a very quiet event. They set up stall opposite ULU in Malet Street (having worked out that it was not in Gower St, as I mistakenly said above) at about mid-day and stayed for a couple of hours. The only other non-SWP stall was that of the AWL. They estimated only about 200 people went to the meetings in ULU (there may have been others who went to parallel events at the other venue at the Institute of Education). They gave away leaflets, sold a few pamphlets and returned to their car to find they'd acquired a parking ticket (so rather an expensive propaganda exercise).Not like in the olden days. Not sure if it will be worth bothering next year.
No wonder, Alex, that DJP asks if you're a primitivist (a 'caveman tendency' socialist)! You don't like cars (that was only an example) but what about computers? You can't be saying that each local community should produce its own?The way you have put the case for 'localism' goes beyond what others such as anarchists and Greens who favour a high degree of decentralisation have proposed. None, as far as I know, advocate that local communities should have to survive entirely on their own resources and envisage them either negotiating with other communities to get what they can't produce themselves or federating together to get access to what can't be produced locally. Murray Bookchin and those who think like him envisage more or less self-sufficient 'bioregions' but these would be more the size of a country than a small town or village.If you were to abandon the idea that each local community can produce all its needs you might have a better case as it's patently obvious that that can't work.
Alex Woodrow wrote:We, as human beings, are capable of producing an abundance of resources all in our local communities, hence every local community worldwide can stand on their own two feet.and
Alex Woodrow wrote:Local communities want to live a happy and healthy life by where they have enough resources to survive,These are two different things. Maybe some local communities, standing on their own two feet, might be able to produce enough to survive but at a very primitive level, but I don't think any would be able to produce an abundance of resources.I can see local communities in a socialist world being self-administering but that's not the same as self-sufficient. I can also see local communities organising the provision of various services locally, but the problem is the production of the materials used in providing these services, eg while cars and electrical equipment could be repaired locally (as in fact they are mostly today) they could not be manufactured in every local community (nor could the extraction of the materials to make them).I don't understand why you are insisting that local communities should not get manufactured resources from outside their boundaries or why you think this would undermine their autonomy.. I can't imagine many local communities rejecting this.As I said, self-administration yes, but self-sufficiency just doesn't make sense.
There already was a thread on this, so bringing them together:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/bulgarian-uprising
More publicity for the socialist idea here on the Lambeth Council website:http://www.lambeth.gov.uk/Services/CouncilDemocracy/DemocracyElections/ElectionsVoting/StatementOfPersonsNominatedTulseHillNot only have they accepted a photo of Head Office instead of the candidate but they've also provided a link to one of our blogs which has an easy link to our main website.
As "Marxists" we have always held that the development of capitalism was "historically necessary" before socialism could be established. However, this has not been a unaminous view amongst socialists. Party member Ken Smith in his 1988 book Free is Cheaper argued that capitalism was not a necessary development in history:
Quote:The great contribution of Marx was to put the bourgeois system into its historical context; to show that society evolves just as much as animal and plant species evolve. He liberated it from the static world of Adam Smith, Ricardo, and their modern followers – there are none so blind as those who will not see. He insisted however, that it was contingent but also necessary. We now know that nothing is necessary in the world of experience; there is no amount of experience that will allow us to conclude that any historical event is necessary. Nature is full of blind alleys from the dinosaurs to Neanderthal Man.The bourgeois system, Capitalism, the Market system, call it what you will is not an essential pre-condition of a free-society, of a world where people co-operate freely to produce all they need and then help themselves to the proceeds, be they porridge oats or Porsche cars. Marx's theory argues that the Market economy was a necessary stage to provide the machinery-for-abundance which could be used fully once the ownership of land and everthing on it and under it was restored to the people.But there never was a problem of machinery, either mechanical or social. The human race has been discovering needs and simultaneously satisfying them since time began, from the eyed needle to the flint arrow-head, from printing to the water-mill. To the charge that the Middle Ages didn't develop steam power, we can reply that the nineteenth century did not develop electronics and we ourselves have not developed who knows what?The Market economy is a cul-de-sac leading nowhere. Much of that produced during the past five centuries, structures both physical and social, will be an enormous burden of garbage needing to be removed. Little of it could be used or adapted for a society producing only use-values.This raised some eyebrows of course but Ken was not expelled. In fact we distributed his book, because it's an easy to read case for a society of free access.Immanuel Wallerstein, the theorist of capitalism as a single world-system, took a similar position in his 1983 book Historical Capitalism: that capitalism was a contingent development (happened to develop) but not a necessary one (had to develop). Maybe, but what other form of society could have developed at the end of the feudal period? Wallerstein suggested a society of free and independent producers as in Switzerland once they'd driven out their feudal lords. Gerrard Winstanley obviously thought that a system of communist farms could have developed (and tried to implement this).Who knows? But it's a bit of an academic argument since we are where we are and can't go back to the 16th century and start all over again. Whether contingent or necessary capitalism is here and socialism is now unarguably a historical possibility on a world scale.
