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alanjjohnstone wrote:

Full review at linkhttp://www.greenleft.org.au/node/54034

Not a bad review but there's a better one here on this site.

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jondwhite wrote:

Workers' Liberty give their verdict and not for the first time, omitting to mention the SPGB, despite mentioning many smaller groupshttp://www.workersliberty.org/story/2013/05/01/how-make-left-unity

This seems to be more a call for Trotskyist Unity than Left Unity, so surely we should be flattered at not being included.In any event, Trotskyist Unity is never going to happen and Left-of-Labour Unity is never going to work either if any of the Trotskyist groups are going to be involved in it. Some of those involved in the Left-of-Labour Unity movement realise this and are saying so. See this (and the comments):http://leftunity.org/what-some-of-the-left-groups-are-saying-about-left-unity/Interesting (but predictable) that SPEW are opposed to Left Unity as it would be a rival to their failing and doomed TUSC project. After all, there can only be one Vanguard and it's not going to be anyone else.

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Socialist Party Head Office wrote:

Leaflet sent to Head Office by Chronos Publications which gives the views of Robert Kurz on why the class struggle is irrelevant and on the need to call for the abolition of work. To break with Capitalism, one must link the demand for simple means of survival (for example, to demand a better income for the unemployed or the upholding of a quality health system for all), to the supersession of work. Only such a project will be able to bring together and radicalise the different forms of struggle against the management of crisis. Only such a project will open a field of possibilities for the future.

I don't know about that. While it is obvious that the trade union struggle is a struggle to try to survive better (or, these days, less worse) within the capitalist system, so would  struggling  for "a better income for the unemployed" and for "upholding a quality (!) health system for all". What they are suggesting here would seem to be aiming rather at a different way to try to survive under capitalism. True, they say that this should be combined with a "call for the abolition of work" (by which they presumably mean the abolition of paid work) which of course won't be possible under capitalism and so implies struggling for a non-capitalist society. But this is no different from what reformists everywhere started out to do: to combine the struggle to survive within capitalism with the struggle to end capitalism, the result of which has always been  to concentrate on the former while relegating the latter to some distant future. If their proposal was followed it would lead to getting support from people who wanted higher unemployment pay and to defend the health service rather than (to them) airy-fairy ideas about "abolishing work".The best way to struggle against capitalism, surely, is to struggle directly for socialism (which would mean the end of the wages system) while recognising that non-socialist workers can, should and will struggle to survive within the system. In other words, to keep the two struggles separate.

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Yesterday Liam Fox, the pompous ass who was forced to resign as Defence Minister over some scandal, told the Daily Telegraph that the Tories should "talk the language of Dog and Duck".  It's nice to see the Tories having to grovel for votes but what is interesting is the reason he gave for appealing to the man in the working-class pub:

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Dr Fox – who was brought up in a council house and is a member of the Blue Collar Tory campaign group – said the Conservatives had to learn to speak the language of ordinary working class voters.  The demographics of Britain in the 21st century – with 58 per cent of people describing themselves as “working class” – meant that the Tories had to appeal this group to win the next general election, due in 2015.

So he, for one, doesn't accept this new seven-class system.

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For years West London branch used to have (pay for) a stall every year at this event sometimes with members from the Midlands. Then a few years ago we were told there was no place for us as "there were too many stalls". We are still not quite sure what happened but it seems that control of the event passed to sympathisers of the Green Party. The last time we were there (which must have been in 2009) we were introduced to Peter Tatchell as the prospective Green Party candidate for Oxford. The next year we went without having a stall and noticed that they no longer sang the Internationale (Billy Bragg version) as on all the other occasions we'd been. The programme this year suggests that a return to its original roots may have happened. It's too late to organise anything this year but maybe we'll try for a stall again next year.

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Just checked and the term Marx uses in that last chapter of Volume III of Capital in the first quote and translated as "primitive communism" is naturwüchsiger Kommunismus which would seem to be better translated  "natural communism" or "nature communism". Any German-speakers out there?

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Actually, the doctrine that humanity originally lived under communistic conditions is not specifically Marxist. If anything, it came from the Christian doctrine that "God gave the world to men in common". John Locke, the theorist of the English "Glorious" bourgeois revolution of 1688, had to devote a whole chapter  of his Two Treatises on Government (the one "Of Property") to trying to explain away how, if this was the case, private property could be justified. He begins the chapter:

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Whether we consider natural reason, which tells us that men, being once born, have a right to their preservation, and consequently to meat and drink and such other things as Nature affords for their subsistence, or "revelation," which gives us an account of those grants God made of the world to Adam, and to Noah and his sons, it is very clear that God, as King David says (Psalm 115:16), "has given the earth to the children of men," given it to mankind in common. But, this being supposed, it seems to some a very great difficulty how any one should ever come to have a property in anything,

I think that the terms "primitive communism" is sometimes referred to in German as "Urcommunismus" (I don't know if Engels did so) which could also be translated as "original communism", i.e. that communism was the original condition of humanity.Of course, whether or not early humans did live under communistic conditions is a matter for empirical research and reasoning based on it, not a matter of theological doctrine. But it as well to be aware of the ideological baggage that comes with the term "primitive communism".

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Interesting reply by presumably a leading exponent of the historical revisionist school that claims  "Lenin wasn't as bad as portrayed both by his supporters (Stalin, Mao) and opponents (eg us)" but was just a militant leftwing Social Democrat.I noticed two things in particular. First, that he claims at one point that Lenin was in favour of fuller freedom of discussion within the Russian Social Democratic party than his Menshevik opponents were, but that was only because at that time the Bolsheviks were a minority within the party. When he got to power he was later (1921) in favour of suppressing "factions" within the Bolshevik party.Second, this:

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Needless to say, Luxemburg misrepresents much of what Lenin himself wrote about and advocated.

Not quite sure what the "needless to say" is supposed to imply. Surely not that Rosa Luxemburg was in the habit of misrepresenting others' views?A final thought. He says that "Leninism" is still relevant in the 21st century, but if Lenin was just an orthodox Marxist as he claims, why would there need to be a separate doctrine called "Leninism"?

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This article by the late John Crump that appeared in an international journal our movement brought out in 1969 is of relevance. It provoked a strong response from our US party which wanted to stick closely to Lewis Henry Morgan's account.Primitive communismMost workers are anti-socialist. They react with distrust or disbelief to the idea of a world community where the means of production will be democratically controlled because they are socially owned. So, in order to break the paralysing grip which capitalism has on working-class consciousness, socialists must be able to demonstrate that Socialism is both an efficient and highly practicable alternative to the capitalist method of organising society. We must be able to offer convincing proof from capitalism itself and also from previous social orders that it is quite within man's powers to run a system based on voluntary work and the free distribution of whatever people need and want.In order to do this the world socialist parties have traditionally leaned heavily on the concept of 'primitive communism' as it was expounded in Engels's The Origin of The Family, Private Property and the State and Morgan's Ancient Society. But if their proposals are to be taken seriously by informed workers, socialists must continually be assimilating the new information which science throws up—even if this entails overhauling comfortable and familiar arguments. Socialists cannot afford not to be constantly re-examining their arguments and sharpening their ideas. Hence this reappraisal of 'primitive communism'.In The Origin of the Family Engels outlined a primitive society ("the lower stage of barbarism") where individual ownership was confined to personal items such as tools and weapons.“Each owned the tools he or she made and used: the men, the weapons and the hunting and fishing tackle, the women, the household goods and utensils. The household was communistic, comprising several, and often many families. Whatever was produced and used in common was common property: the house, the garden, the long boat.“ (1)The evolution of this universal tribal communism towards systems based on private property was linked with the gradual refinement of primitive economies based on hunting and food gathering into agricultural and pastoral societies which permitted greater wealth accumulation. Parallel to this development went another, suggested Engels: the "world-historic defeat of the female sex" (2). In the earliest societies there had been a state of 'promiscuous intercourse'—"so that every woman belonged equally to every man and, similarly, every man to every woman"(3). The pairing family was only reached via a number of intermediary stages (the 'consanguine family' and 'punaluan family') and subsequently itself evolved from a matrilineal institution into a patrilineal one.“Thus, as wealth increased, it, on the one hand, gave the man a more important status in the family than the woman, and, on the other hand, created a stimulus to utilise this strengthened position in order to overthrow the traditional order of inheritance in favour of his children.The reckoning of descent through the female line and the right of inheritance through the mother were hereby overthrown and male lineage and right of inheritance from the father instituted.” (4)As early as the 1890s some scientific workers cast doubts on a number of these hypotheses (5) but the deficiencies in Morgan's theories only really started to be exposed some time later. Field-workers like Malinowski living among primitive peoples such as the Trobriand Islanders unearthed a great mass of detailed information which could not be fitted into the evolutionary patterns suggested by Morgan and Engels.In particular it was shown that many primitive societies diverged considerably from the property norms to which they were supposed to conform. Even among the North American Indians whom Morgan had studied closely this was the case, although it varied a great deal from tribe to tribe. For example, although the Shoshones owned the land and its resources communally, this principle did not extend to eagles' nests which were owned by individuals (6) On the other hand, among tribes like the Algonquins and others on the East Coast there were individual and family holdings of tracts of hunting and fishing land. (7) The Vedda of Ceylon were another primitive hunting people who held their hunting territory family by family. As Lowie has put it: "A man would not hunt even on his brother's land without permission ; and if game ran into an alien region the owner of the soil was entitled to a portion of its flesh." ( Among certain tribes it was even possible to combine attitudes of individual and common ownership towards the same objects. Thus among Arctic peoples, such as the Chuchki, if a whale drifted ashore the meat was shared out among the whole tribe, but the whalebone belonged exclusively to whoever made the first sighting. (9)Pastoral societiesEven more significant than these random examples was the fact that common ownership of the land was not restricted merely to those hunting tribes who were the most primitive, with individual ownership appearing among peoples at a higher economic level. For although the Plains Indians, the Californian Maidu, and the Thompson River Indians were all hunters and all held the land on a tribal basis, pastoral societies such as those of the Masai, Toda, and Hottentot did exactly the same. Other hunting tribes such as the Algonquins and Vedda whom we have already referred to, as well as the Kariera of Australia and various Queensland groups, were certainly more backward than the Masai and Hottentot—and yet broke up the tribal territory into holdings owned exclusively by individuals or small units (10). Basing themselves on evidence such as this, then, most 20th-century anthropologists have written off "such fantastic evolutionary schemes as those of Morgan, Bachofen, or Engels . . .", (11) even though they go too far in rejecting the whole concept of social evolution.But, if the blanket concept of 'primitive communism' existing always and everywhere at sufficiently low cultural levels has been severely weakened, this is nothing compared to the battering which Engels's theories on the family have taken. It is true that most relatively advanced peoples —such as the classical Romans and Chinese, and the pastoral tribes of eastern and southern Africa—live in patrilinear societies, while many more backward peoples (e.g. the Malayan and Indonesian aborigines, and certain American and Australian tribes) are matrilinear (12). But as soon as we start to look any closer than this, the evolutionary theory falls apart. In Australia, for example, there is no evidence at all that matrilineal peoples like the Dieri have a less highly developed culture than the patrilineal tribes such as the Arunta. On the contrary, in North America the tribes with mother sibs have been found to be at a generally higher level than those showing father sibs (13). A typical case are the Navajo of northern Arizona. When sheep were introduced into the southwest of the United States in the 17th century the Navajo became a relatively prosperous pastoral people. Yet "in spite of their thriving flocks, tended by the men, they have remained obstinately matrilineal"(14). So, if we are to be scientific, we must generally accept the verdict of researchers such as Claude Levi-Strauss:“The facts support no reconstruction tending, for example, to assert the historical priority of matrilineal over patrilineal institutions. All that can be said is that fragments of earlierhistorical stages are bound to exist and are found. While it is possible and even likely that the instability inherent in matrilineal institutions often leads to their transformation into patrilineal or bilateral institutions, it can by no means be concluded that, always and everywhere, matrilineal descent represents the primitive form.” (15)None of this should suggest, however, that the work of Morgan on this subject is completely without value today. In fact, what needs to be stressed is that it is those parts of his theories which are most peripheral to the socialist case which have been disproved. The rock bottom of his and Engels's arguments—that for thousands of years over vast areas large groups of men did live communally on a basis of voluntary work and free distribution—has been repeatedly confirmed by subsequent research. In fact, much of the data produced by modern anthropology reinforces this conclusion even more effectively than was possible in the 19th century. Thus Martin Fried has shown that leadership is superfluous with the sort of democratic organisation found in many primitive societies:“There are many societies in which leadership, the organised application of power to concrete situations, is so diffuse as to approach non-existence. The Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert exemplify this. Even hunting parties, the most crucial form of organisation among the Kung, frequently lack formal leadership. As Lorna Marshall says, ‘Often an informal leadership develops out of skill and judgment and the men fall in with the plans and suggestions of the best hunter or reach agreement among themselves somehow.’ In such a situation the forceful compulsion implicit in power is lacking; in its stead is consensus based on authority in the sense of favourable reputation.” (16)and Solomon Asch has indicated the extent to which social solidarity can assert itself in a society without class conflicts :“[Among the Hopi Indians] all individuals must be treated alike; no one must be superior and no one must be inferior. The person who is praised or who praises himself is automatically subject to resentment and to criticism. . . . Most Hopi men refuse to be foremen. . . . The play behaviour of children is equally instructive in this respect. From the same source I learned that the children, young and old, are never interested in keeping score during a game. They will play basket-ball by the hour without knowing who is winning or losing. They continue simply because they delight in the game itself. . . ." (17)Socialists, then, have no need to cling to chapter and verse of The Origin of the Family or to attempt to defend its schematism. In no way do we weaken our arguments by jettisoning theories concerned with the priority of mother-right and so on. Rather, we can afford to be confident —since capitalism is digging the ground from under its feet when it is forced to sponsor scientific research into fields such as anthropology. The mountain of evidence is growing daily that it is the capitalist system itself (and nothing in 'human nature') whichprevents men from living as brothers. Thanks to capitalism, socialists have all the ammunition they need!J.C.(Socialist Party of Great Britain).REFERENCES(1) The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Moscow, n.d. p. 261.(2) Ibid. p. 92.(3) Ibid. p. 48. The evidence now points to such a state being only a myth.(4) Ibid. pp. 90, 91.(5) Structural Anthropology. Claude Levi-Strauss. London, 1968. pp. 32, 51.(6) Man in the Primitive World. Hoebel.1958. p. 435.(7) Ibid. pp. 436-7.( Primitive Society. Lowie. London, 1960. p. 204.(9) Ibid. p. 200.(10) Human Society. Kingsley Davis. New York, 1967. p. 458.(11) A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays. Malinowski. 1944. p. 176.(12) An Introduction to Social Anthropology. Mair. London, 1968. p. 65.(13) Primitive Society, p. 171.(14) Ibid. p. 159.(15) Structural Athropology. p. 7.(16) Anthropology and the Study of Politics by Martin H. Fried in Horizons of Anthropology. Tax. 1965. p. 182.(17) Marxist Economic Theory. Mandel. London, 1968. pp. 31-32.(World Socialism 69) 

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Zeitgeist Peter Joseph's latest video is very good on this. In 30 minutes he says what we've been saying for ages about crime:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeswJY0o2uA

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Alex Woodrow wrote:

Ed and Steve, I completely agree with both of you that we need to use the vote to then have a peaceful, democratic and socialist world.Though this doesn't need to be achieved via representative democracy, this can be achieved by direct democracy having a referendum.

We had a sympathiser in France (who died some years ago now) who used to argue this position, but while a referendum would show that a majority was in favour of socialism, it would not necessarily achieve the other aim of using the ballot box — to win control of political power from the pro-capitalists.  Having said this, the last capitalist government, faced with a majority vote for socialism, would be unlikely to be able to keep going. Also, of course, if socialism was likely to be carried in a referendum, there would already be many socialist local councillors and MPs.

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For the record, the result of the election for a seat on Seaham Town Council can be found here.

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Ed wrote:

Also I thought you wanted more free speech, do you want those on spintcom to be censored?

My understanding of what Steve said is that, though he might not like some of what was being said about him, he was prepared to let the discussion on spintcom take its course without trying to interfere. In that case, let's continue the discussion amongst ourselves there, as the members of any organisation have the right to discuss who joins and who doesn't, hopefully in an objective a way as possible.

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zeitgeistworker wrote:

calling it waffle probably isnt the best way to win them over

Agreed. Hope you read through at least the opening pages of this thread where this point was made.Have you seen the videos of two debates we have had with them:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDMLqH2tjzwhttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/video/discussion-zeitgeist-movementand also read this article on "Zeitgeist and Marxism".Incidentally, since there are comparatively few who call themselves "socialist" who see socialism as necessarily a moneyless as well as a classless and stateless society, what is your view on this?

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Even if all the votes cannot be regarded as positive, conscious votes for socialism (rather than mere anti-Labour votes), past experience of our contesting local elections suggests that up to a quarter of the votes we get may be.  That would suggest that there could be up to 50 or so potential socialists in the area. What we have been doing in London as a follow to local elections is to distribute every few months a "News and Views" leaflet putting the Socialist case on local as well as general issues. These can be found in the files section of spopen (by those who are members of that forum) under Leaflets/Local Lambeth Leaflets,  including the latest currently being distributed (in fact today in Clapham High St).

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