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jon brown wrote:

I also do not discount that a socialist society may democratically decide that there should be a death penalty for paedeophiles.

I'm not too sure about this, in fact I'm not sure about it all. I take it you would only be talking about someone who killed as well as sexually assaulted kids. But personally I can't see socialist society restoring a penalty which even most capitalist states have abandoned. More likely that such a very rare person would be restrained by being confined somewhere.

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colinskelly wrote:

A Wolff in Marxian clothing.

I like it. The trouble is that his video When Capitalism Hits the Fan is well presented and even got a favourable reception when it was shown at one of our party meetings in Clapham so he has some standing amongst critics of capitalism (it actually gives an underconsumptionist theory of the crisis which we wouldn't accept but is still good general anti-capitalist material and only mentions his "workers cooperatives" hobby horse in passing).We've been battling against this idea of workers control of the market system for ages, going back to old Solidarity Group (a breakaway Trotskyist group which came to abandon vanguardism) in the 1960s and 197os. I see that somebody has recently reproduced our 1969 article on them on their blog:http://forworkerspower.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/the-solidarity-group-not-so-solid-spgb-1969/So others agree us on this. Anyone know who this blogger is?

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colinskelly wrote:

And the practical outcome? The fruit that has been borne of these 40 years of efforts?  Workers Self Directed Enterprises.  Glorified bloody co-ops.  No thanks.

Yes, that's just what Michael Moore advocates at the end of his film Capitalism: A Love Story and he doesn't feel any need to justify this in "Marxist" terms. In fact he comes to it from a Christian/Catholic view. It's no solution of course and certainly isn't socialism.

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Shouldn't that be "will a police service" rather than " will a police force"  exist? Surely, whatever survives or is adapted wouldn't be a "force" as this implies some sort of repressive function which couldn't exist in socialism.

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Incidentally, Stephen Resnick died this January:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_ResnickWhich makes me wonder whether the picture of him on page 17 of  this month's Socialist Standard is really him or at least when it was taken.

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Here is a list from  our Socialist Standard archive of articles and debates with the "International Socialism Group" which became the SWP in 1977. They deal with the theories of the "IS tradition" (that Russia was state capitalist but only after 1928, the so-called permanent arms economy, their entryism in the Labour Party up until about 1970) amongst other things:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1960s/1964/no-721-september-1964/book-review-russia-marxist-analysishttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1960s/1966/no-744-august-1966/old-myths-refurbishedhttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1960s/1968/no-770-october-1968/book-reviews-western-capitalism-war-theories-imperhttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1960s/1968/no-769-september-1968/confusionhttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1970s/1970/no-790-june-1970/productivity-dealshttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1970s/1970/no-791-july-1970/debate-%E2%80%9Cinternational-socialists%E2%80%9D

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Alexander Reiswich wrote:

As for your denial of ownership – I don't really want to defend property rights here, but I can't help but point out the fallacies in your argument.First of all, ownership is derived from use and the labour that went into acquiring it.

You do realise don't you that this argument can be, and frequently has been, used as an argument for socialism, i.e. the social rather than individual ownership of the means of production and their products on production?Production today is almost entirely social involving ultimately the co-operative labour of workers all over the world. Just think of the the everyday things you use and the food you eat. The only individual act of production today is the example you give of someone picking fruit from a (wild) tree. Hardly typical of production generally. As production is social then, on your principle that property rights derive from labour, so ought the products to be. It is not a line of argument we use, but that's where it leads.This was always the contradiction in the labour theory of individual property — it could be used to justify the exact opposite of what its proponents intended.  Which is why it was abandoned and replaced by the argument that private property in the means of production is justified because that's what the law permits. Which of course is a circular argument.

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So, you are saying that Thatcher was the personification of what capitalism in Britain required in the 1980s: an iron fist to push through policies that weakened the unions (and so workers' ability to resist a worsening of their conditions) and cut social spending both to allow profitability to be restored so that capitalist growth could continue? And that once this had been done her style of government no longer met British capitalism's requirements; which made it possible for "the men in grey suits" to remove her? Sounds plausible, but I'm not sure who "the someone else who would have done be" would have been.

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EP Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class is a classic which is recommended reading. But this doesn't alter the fact that he advances a different theory of class to the one we have tended to use. We say that a/the working class exists whether or not those in it recognise it, something similar to what Marx meant by a "class-in-itself". Thompson seems to start from the assumption that a class only exists if and when its members see themselves as belonging to it.This is not the same as Marx's class-for-itself, i.e when a class is consciously acting in its own interest because Thompson's theory does assume this, merely that people should see themselves as a class. It would be something nearer to what Lenin described as "trade union consciousness" (which included "labour representation" and demands for "labour legislation").His theory gives rise to various problems. For instance, what are those who are objectively members of a class but don't recognise it? A mob? A mass? A what? An important theoretical question given that this is the position of many, perhaps a majority, of members of the working class-in-itself today. I suppose this will come out at the Conference.Having said this, it is an important field of historical study to trace the emergence of "class consciousness" amongst some workers and Thompson's does this very well.

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mcolome1 wrote:

She hated the working class, but , many members of the working class  supported her too

Too true, I'm afraid.

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Looks as if some miners from the North East were at the party in Trafalgar Square today.

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The Ritzy cinema in Brixton last Monday night:Good, but what was meant by "communism"? Actually, since many of those there would have been Leninists, they may have meant by "communism" what we mean by "socialism", i.e a classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless society.  It would be nice to think that this is how those who saw it understood it rather than as something to do with the state capitalism that used to exist in Russia.

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TheOldGreyWhistle wrote:

Thatcher top of the charts when she is dead!

I always suspected that the BBC wouldn't play this and they're not going to. Just listened to the bloke who started the campaign being interviewed and he turns out to be a wimp, defending his action as "British humour" rather than class hatred.

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SocialistPunk wrote:

In the meantime looks like a real socialist takes a back seat to an anarchist book shop.

Just in case someone gets the wrong impression. No Socialist Party money was given to an anarchist bookshop nor was it ever likely to have been given. OK, a couple of people suggested this in the heat of the moment without taking into account that this would not have been possible under the party's rules. As if party moneys could be given to any outside organisation, let alone one that opposes contesting elections.

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Actually, that was one of the points I was going to raise in the introduction to the discussion: how much leeway do politicians have to influence the course if not the direction of events?For instance, in her case, was it really necessary from a military point of view to order the sinking of the Belgrano or was this done to punish Argentina? Again, with the miners strike, was it necessdary to close down all pits that were not making the going rate of profit (rather than just those that weren't making any profit at all) or was this just done on to break the power of the NUM as the leading trade union? The same sort of question could be asked about Blair's decision to back the US invasion of Iraq: France and Germany didn't, so it wasn't strictly necessary for Britain to.I'm not sure how this affects the attitude we should take to steps to try to stop things being worse than they need be.

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