ALB
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We plan to distribute the leaflet (rather than the statement) at this meeting in Vauxhall (just down the road from Clapham) on Saturday 23 March. It has already been emailed to various individuals and groups in and around the SWP. Copies have also been sent to all our branches to distribute to similar or SWP routine meetings in their area. You don't have to be a member to distribute it. If anyone wants bulk copies they should contact Head Office on spgb [at] worldsocialism.org
Interesting article in today's Times about "burnable ice" (methane hydrate). I know Ridley is a free-marketeer but he makes some valid points about what governs which energy sources are used under capitalism (and will be as long as it lasts) and how those controlling the various competing sources seek to protect their vested interests.
Quote:The key will be cost.OGW, as Jond has pointed out, I don't think any ex-SWPers who might be attracted by our leaflet will have any problem with rejecting Leninism. They will have been inoculated against it for life. I think any problems with Leninists will come later, when we are bigger, and they try to "enter" us and "bore from within" as they did with the Labour Party and before that with the old ILP. At that time we'll have to find ways of stopping these parasites joining and, if any get through, of booting them out.
alanjjohnstone wrote:Socialists are not clones but there is a kinship…why else was the SLP called political cousinsBefore anyone gets the wrong end of the stick and uses it to prod us, Alan is of course talking about the SLP of America which was in the "impossibilist" tradition (eg no minumum programme of reforms, not anti-electoral), not the Scargill Labour Party. Rest assured, Arthur Scargill, the Leninist-Stalinist, has not suddenly become our political cousin!
He used to be in the Labour Party but now he's in the Green Party I think, but it's still Old Labour stuff that won't work. Capitalism doesn't work like that, eg what happens when his companies with worker representation on the management board and his workers co-ops make a loss nor a profit?
gnome wrote:jondwhite wrote:Some mentioned this on u75. Pretty sure she doesn't know/understand that the only groups to call themselves "Marxist-Leninist" are those that defend Stalin, Mao etc. and not Trotsky.Why don't you put her right?
Scroll down here to see the comment at 4.13pm and the reply from a character in Futurama.
jondwhite wrote:Laurie Penny has written the followinghttp://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/12/swp-rape-implosion-why-i-careI wonder why she calls them "Marxist-Leninist". It wouldn't be how they would describe themselves and she must know that this generally refers to Maoist groups. Anyway "Marxist-Leninist" is an oxymoron. She should just have said "Leninist".
There was a discussion of the Grillo phenomenon on the Week in Westminster on Saturday morning on BBC Radio 4 between a well-known Professor of Political Communication and Douglas Carswell of the Tea Party wing of the Tory party. It starts 14 minutes in here::http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01r4xw7I think we discussed the decline of political parties here once before and whether this was a good or bad thing for us.
One interesting thing to emerge from the debate last night with Federico Pistono of Zeitgeist was that he was a founder member and is still an activist of Grillo's 5 Star Movement. Which means that perhaps it should be seen as more than just a protest movement, at least as far as its activists if not its voters are concerned.Pistono's reason for supporting the Five Star Movement was that it favours direct electronic democracy, which, apparently, is how its members decide its policy and which they advocate should apply to local and national decisions too. I can't read Italian properly, but from his blog and this interview it appears that he criticises Grillo for being a leader (saying that the movement doesn't need one) and outlining a detailed scheme for electronic democracy. Perhaps someone who can read Italian can confirm this.http://it.federicopistono.org/http://www.publicpolicy.it/m5s-lattivista-federico-pistono-grillo-risponde-solo-a-chi-lo-insulta-4114.htmlThe other interesting thing, but which has more to do with Zeitgeist than Grillo, is that Pistono's position here contradicted his main criticism of us, expressed earlier in the debate, because we advocated political action to get to a moneyless world of abundance (whereas he advocated lifestyle changes and decentralised self-sufficient communities as concrete examples for people to follow and as transitional to this) as it meant that he, too, is for political action. Reformist political action, but still political action. The reforms he expects the Five Star Movement to extract (they hold the balance of power) being promotion of open source (free sharing of technological information) and direct democracy. The fact that he favours a "participatory democracy" also differentiates him (favourably) from Peter Joseph's more technocratic approach.Maybe the 5 Star Movement has more in common with the Indignados in Spain than with "rightwing" know-nothing protests we've been assuming.
Since nobody knows where today's SWP Conference is taking place, this is the obvious place to distribute our "Open Letter to the SWP" instead. So, Sunday 23 March in Vauxhall (just down the road from Head Office).
It seems you can't report the opening post in a thread but you can all others. Another thing I've noticed is that you can only report a post as "offensive" whereas you might want to report (ie draw the moderator's attention to) one as "off topic" or breaking some other rule without it necessarily being offensive.
Looks as if the media are already ganging up to put the boot into the SWP to co-incide with their special conference on Sunday:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21706292
TUSC actually won this election, with 60% of the vote:http://vote-2012.proboards.com/post/61075
