ALB
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Ed wrote:10 shilling notes would be an acceptable price to pay for combustable material. But yeah the notes in the video don't look like euros. Perhaps francs? If we wanted to do something like that then it would probably be best to get some funny money printed that looks real from a distance.
I think at least one of the notes he burned was a green 100 Euro one (worth less than £9). There are also 50, 20, 10 and 5 Euro notes. As the 5 Euro note is only worth about 35p, he could easily afford that. So we could but then it's probably better to leave burning Euro notes to UKIP.Incidentally, the reason he was doing this was to publicise the fact thst various local radio and TV stations had not invited him to participate in debates between candidates they had organised, a problem we have come across too. Mind you, in this particular case there were 21 candidates.
Oh dear. So much for "ethical banking". I wonder what all those Guardian-readers who "moved their money" (to the Co-op Bank) are thinking now. Another quack remedy hits the dust.
gnome wrote:Is this guy for real? He spends most of this short video setting fire to banknotes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gdni9GI-eOQ&list=PLJJCm5PCRM9eiGXwgP7oi_310uSvzhOxe&index=1This is just the sort of Situationist-style stunt that was suggested at the workshop we held. But I think we'd have to call for donations, not use Party funds.
The Nikolai Sukhanov that Laurens Ottter mentions seems to have been a good bloke, though I don't think he would have been a delegate to the 1903 Conference of Russian Social Democrats at which the Bolshevik/Menshevik split took place, if only because at the time he was not a Social Democrat but associated rather with the non-Marxist (Populist) Social Revolutionary party. (And Laurens Otter is notorious for getting his facts wrong). It is true, however, that in 1917 he did become a Menshevik-Internationalist (i.e Menshevik opponent of the First World War) along with Martov. He was one of the victims of Stalin's Show Trials and was executed in 1940.Sukhanov wrote a 7-volume Notes on the Revolution. This was the basis of one of the best, readable accounts in English of the Russian Revolution, Joel Charmichael A Short History of the Russian Revolution that came out in 1964.When Lenin read it he was moved to exclaim:
Quote:You say that civilization is necessary for the building of socialism. Very good. But why could we not first create such prerequisites of civilization in our country by the expulsion of the landowners and the Russian capitalists, and then start moving toward socialism? Where, in what books, have you read that such variations of the customary historical sequence of events are impermissible or impossible?Gotcha, you anti-Marxist!. Since the answer of course is: everywhere in Marx and Engels.
Just discovered that in last June's French general election there was a candidate in Lyon standing on an "abolish money" platform. His party name was "Voter Après-Monnaie" (Vote After-Money). His (Marc Chinal) election blog can be found here It makes interesting reading (for those who can read French) as it shows how similar campaigns by minor parties in France are to here: trying to get press and radio interviews and ensure "equal publicity" for all the candidates (the law on this in France is stricter), distributing leaflets door-to-door (he had 40,000 printed). He doesn't seem to have done too badly in this respect. He got 81 votes or 0.21%. Par for the course at the moment but a sign that the idea of a world without money is spreading spontaneously (i.e nothing to do with us).Also for those who understand French here's his 20-minute vidéo on "What Would An After-Money Civilisation Look Like?". It's mainly devoted to such questions as "what will be the incentive to work?", "who will do the dirty work" and "won't people take too much?" He seems to have come from the ecology movement.
The minor Trot groups are loving this — the prospect of bigger party to entry and fish for recruits in. Here's the point of view of "Socialist Resistance" (the Uk arm of the official official 4th International, I think):http://links.org.au/node/3333It's all going to end in tears of course
It has just been revealed that Government adviser Lord Young has written the following in a report to Cameron:
Quote:It has always been the case that a recession can be a good time to grow a business. This is true for a number of reasons. Competitors who fall by the wayside enable well-run firms to expand and increase market share. Factors of production such as premises and labour can be cheaper and higher quality, meaning that return on investment can be greater.Labour politicians and the TUC are up in arms about this, but Young is merely describing the way capitalism works.Marx made the same point himself when he pointed out that the fall in a slump in wages and the price of other "factors of production" would help restore the rate of profit and so pave the way for a slow recovery.Lord Young is indeed "telling it like it is".
alanjjohnstone wrote:Full review at linkhttp://www.greenleft.org.au/node/54034Not a bad review but there's a better one here on this site.
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-unityThis 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.
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.
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:
Quote: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.
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.
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?
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:
Quote: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".
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:
Quote: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"?
