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We actually had a presence there from 9am to 4pm (not the same comrades all the time of course).  Plenty of Trotskyist and Maoist groups but also some genuine trade unionists. The Green Party were there too, including their MP Caroline Lucas. The only unifying factor seems to be opposition to austerity and vague (and dubious) statements such as "debts can be dropped", "A living wage can begin to combat poverty", "Strong trade unions can help redistribute profit". Regional "People's Assemblies" will be held and "a national day of civil disobedience and direct action" is called for 5 November, a Tuesday, so we'll see what happens then (if anything).Ian Bone's "Peoples Assembly Against Hot Air"  took the form of him and three other anarchists speaking to people outside the hall through a megaphone for 10-15 minutes. There weren't many more of them than us.. As opposed to the Trot's call for the TUC to call a general strike to oppose austerity, they called for people to follow the examples of those in Turkey and Brazil to take to the streets. They forgot to mention the abolition of the wages system, but some of the comrades still went for a drink with them.

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By co-incidence, more amusing stuff from Ministry of Defence files released yesterday:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/last-release-mod-ufo-filesThe MoD seems to have been more patient than I would have been.

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DJP wrote:

FWIW my old philosophy tutor has an interested in conspiracy theories and unwarranted conspiracy theories.Here's an (unfinished) paper by him on the subject:http://www.uea.ac.uk/~j097/CONSP01.htm

I read the whole 40-page paper last night and it's excellent. I trust the others taking part in the discussion here on conspiracy theories will too. It's surely the last word on this digression here.I liked two of his points in particular: (1) that when the conspiracy theorist starts to claim that the documentary and forensic evidence has been faked that's the end of any possible meaningful discussion with them, and (2) that in most cases the alleged conspirators would have been able to achieve the aim attributed to them by easier and less risky methods.I'm not a JFKennedy Assassination Theory buff but I am a Currency Crank one and noticed some of the leaflets distributed by currency cranks during the Occupy St Pauls in 2011 tried to argue that one of the reasons he was assassinated was that he wanted to transfer the power to issue the US currency from the Federal Reserve (central bank) to the Treasury (the government), as many US (and British) currency cranks advocate. See, for instance,http://www.john-f-kennedy.net/thefederalreserve.htmand the refutation here:http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/weberman/jfk.htm  Clearly you can fashion your own Kennedy Assasination Conspiracy Theory to fit in with anything, even something which nobody considered an issue at the time. Presumably you can do this with other events too..

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Yes of course but they were eventually found out and proved from official US government documents (and besides were carried out by the government not by some conspiratorial group). That's the point I was making. Such documents concerning a hypothetical 9/11 inside job, fake moon landings and suppression of evidence for alien landings have not been found and won't be because they won't exist. How else could you prove them except from government documents?

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Ed wrote:

Well of course it's standard for the bourgouisie to rig elections, encourage coup d'etats, assasinate or imprison political opponents. That's not a secret, or a secret state though that's one and the same state apparatus which must be captured. So not really sure what you mean by a secret state or how it would effect an overwhelming socialist majority?

I don't think it's true that in countries like Britain and the USA  elections are rigged by "the bourgeoisie". I've been to many election counts and can't see how "the bourgeoisie" could do this. To do it, they would have to have a  vast secret organisation involving polling clerks, returning officers, some candidates, etc (so vast in fact that it would be impossible to keep it secret). Theories that 9/11 was an inside job or that flying saucers exist but that the government has covered this up also presuppose a secret organisation.Some of our critics argue that there is no point in trying to win control of parliament because "parliament does not control the government and that the apparent government is not the real government". We deal with this argument in the section headed "Conspiracy" in our pamphlet What's Wrong With Using Parliament?:

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But is the government that is chosen by parliament the real government or is this some shadowy committee of capitalists? There is not the slightest evidence for the existence of such a parallel government. The idea that it exists is pure conspiracy theory. If it did exist, it is difficult to see how its existence could be kept secret. The ministers of the government we can all see and know about would mention it in their memoirs. None ever has. There are other problems with this conspiracy theory. How would the members of this supposed secret committee of capitalist puppet-masters be chosen? What mechanisms would they have to settle policy differences between different capitalist groups (since the capitalist class is not a monolith with a single obvious common interest)? There certainly exist capitalist pressure groups, such as the European Round Table of Industrialists, but these endeavour to influence governments, rather than themselves being a kind of power behind the throne. The whole theory is absurd. The fact is that the government is the government we see

The ironic thing is that the USA, the land of conspiracy theories, probably has one of the most open governments (relatively speaking) in the world. After all, where does Chomsky get the information to enter into the mind-numbing detail of his books on US Foreign Policy if not from US government documents? Incidentally, to his credit, Chomsky prominently and publicly rejects 9/11 conspiracy theories and gets called a "left gatekeeper for the conspirators" for his trouble.On the general question of conspiracy theories, the important thing is not to get diverted into refuting them (though choosing one to look into in detail could be a useful exercise in critical thinking) but to work out why some people believe in them and why such theories circulate. I think Chomsky is on the right lines when he suggests that it's a reflection of people's sense of powerlessness in a world they can't understand.

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But wouldn't it have serious consequences for our policy of the working class gaining control of the state machine via the ballot box if, behind the state institutions that everyone can see, there existed some parallel secret state which controlled things and was the real seat of power?

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Oh dear

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Ed wrote:

Gnome is right we shouldn't dismiss something just because it's dubbed a conspiracy theory. All we can do is analyze the evidence we have and draw our own conclusions from it.

On the other hand life is too short to analyse the evidence for and against every conspiracy theory, however silly, unlikely or implausible. If 9/11 was proved to be an inside job then something would change: Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld would go to the electric chair.

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Of course 9/11 was a conspiracy — by fanatical Islamists mainly from Saudi Arabia. And Neil Armstrong did land on the moon in 1969.

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I have now read Thinking About Revolution properly (was not prepared to read 30 pages on a screen) and I see what you mean, Alan, about them going in for conspiraloon ideas as p. 5 says they "believe that the official story about 9/11 is a lie and that overwhelming evidence suggests that 9/11 was an inside job". This rather spoils the pamphlet which otherwise is an easy-to-read manifesto for a democratic revolution to establish a classless, stateless, moneyless society of common ownership and democratic, even if a bit too "anarchist" for us with its emphasis of decentralisation and its rejection of any contesting of elections (as well as its rejection of Marxism)..I liked their definition of a revolutionary which echoes what we have always said: that the most revolutionary, subversive activity in capitalist society today is undermining the ideas that sustain it:

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Another obstacle is the false conception of what it means to be a "revolutionary.'" In the period before the movement reaches critical mass, a revolutionary is a person who spreads revolutionary ideas and helps people gain the confidence and clarity to act upon them where they work and live, not somebody who picks up a gun. Even when the revolutionary movement reaches critical mass, spreading revolutionary ideas remains the most critical activity.The image of a revolutionary that popular American culture offers people is one such as Che Guevara, a man who foolishly thought he could overthrow the U.S.-backed ruling elite of South America with a small band of armed men. When Che was famously captured and executed by CIA-assisted Bolivian soldiers, millions of people concluded that revolutionaries might be brave but they are also crazy and doomed to defeat and engaged in activities that have nothing to do with the lives of ordinary people like us.Contrary to this popular image, however, the most important revolutionary activity is something that people do every day: talk with each other about the things they believe are important.

 

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Why will others be meeting at Embankment tube? That's miles away and there'll be nothing happening there:http://thepeoplesassembly.org.uk/schedule/Any chance of stopping members and sympathisers going there and coming instead (at 11am if they want) to Central Hall, Westminster?

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I think his criticism of Marx was that Marx saw capitalism being replaced by a working class forced to do so by impersonal economic and historical forces rather than by their own free will and choice, i.e that Marx was some sort of economic determinist. He liked Lenin (and Mao) because they emphasised rather "revolutionary will", i.e were by contrast voluntarists (my guess is that he's an ex-Maoist). This doesn't mean that he liked what they achieved. Here's how he concluded his chapter entitled "From Marx to Lenin":

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However great Lenin's achievement, it consolidated the dehumanized view of workers fundamental to the Marxist paradigm, and gave further impetus to the tradition, already well-established in Marxisn, of seeing middle-class intellectuals as the source and guiding force of revolutionary consciousness. It has led to revolutions which are technocratic and dehumanized, and has resulted finally in the widespread discrediting of the idea of revolution itself — until the Marxist paradigm of history is finally overthrown.

This is the sort of criticism of Marx put out by the old Solidarity Group of ex-Trotskyists in the 1960s and 70s when they published translations of articles by "Paul Cardan" (Castoriadis) e.g. History and Revolution: A Revolutionary Critique of Historical Materialism.  But this probably says more about how they were taught to interpret Marx when they were members of their previous political group.I do agree, though, that having a different interpretation of Marx is not entirely beyond the pale as long as you agree on what socialism is and how to get there (but I imagine a branch or the membership applications committee would have a dilemma if an applicant did take up Stratman's position).Also, Stratman argued against using the word "socialism" or "communism" to describe the sort of post-capitalist society aimed at, using instead "revolutionary democracy". Once again, not beyond the pale or the end of the world, as we too have discussed this. Stan Parker pointed out in his review that the words "revolutionary" and "democracy" have been just as much dragged through the mud as "socialism" or "communism".But I think there were (and maybe still are) other, more fundamental differences as over whether a revolutionary party should advocate reforms within capitalism as well as revolution or should itself get involved in campaigns for reforms.Still, it's good to see that "thin red line" of those advocating genuine socialism (whatever they call it) has got wider than it has been for years.

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We did make them available for members and sympathisers to buy and no doubt sold a few but we didn't endorse it as "Party literature". That's how I got my copy.

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You're right. There is some good stuff in the first document on "Thinking About Revolution" and we should try and make contact with them again.I say again because some of us met David Stratman when he was in England in 1996 (I think) to promote his book We Can Strange the World. The Real Meaning of Everyday Life. Steve Coleman was so impressed by him that he agreed that the Party should take copies of his book. Stan Parker and me who had actually read the book knew that the Party would not be able to endorse it (because it was critical of Marx arguing that Marx did lead to Lenin and that there "the Soviet Union and other Communist societies represent not a betrayal of Marxism but its fulfillment"). It was a bit embarrassing as the (free) books arrived but we couldn't distribute them (they may still be in a box somewhere in Head Office).Stan wrote a review of the book that appeared in the September 1996 Socialist Standard. One of the points he made was:

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Stratman talks about a "revolutionary party", yet he is very vague about what a revolutionary democratic world will actually be like, other than that it won't be capitalism. Will it be a world in which the means of wealth production and distribution will be commonly owned and democratically controlled? Will it be a world in which there are no nation states, no armies and police forces, no buying and selling, no money?

It looks as if in the meantime Stratman has come round to answering "yes". See the "Summary of Proposals for a New Society" on page 2 of the document :

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We propose a democratic revolution to sweep away the elite power and class domination that so distort our present world. We propose a new society in which:• All who contribute to society, or who are not obligated to do so because they are children, elderly or otherwise unable to work, have free and equal access to its goods and services, which are shared according to need, not bought and sold. Money is not used. There are no rich and no poor people.• All the things that people use to produce goods, such as factories and mines and large tracts of land, belong to all the people. These things are like the air we breathe and the sunshine that warms us—a common treasure for all of society, not the property of a few.

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Interesting extract from an article in today's Times headed "Don't expect robots to do it all for you — or steal your jobs":

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The demonstration [of some robots at work] was part of a debate at the Work Foundation about robots and enhanced humans, asking the question will they steal our jobs? The answer, it seems, is "not quite". Geoff Mulgan, the chief executive of Nesta, a charity set up to promote innovation, points out that predictions about armies of robots in the workplace have yet to come to pass. Rather, globalisation has left companies chasing cheap labour overseas instead of replacing human beings with automatons. "The public," he says, "is still astounded to discover how little robots do and how feeble they still are."

It seems the public have been misled by talk of a coming "exponential" growth of robotisation. Meanwhile capitalism itself impedes robotisation because firms won't introduce it if getting the work done by humans is cheaper.

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