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This news item (copied from a link a member has provided on one of our other forums) would seem to be relevant to any discussion on (true)  Leninism and the SWP:http://rt.com/politics/communists-power-lenin-zyuganov-971/

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Alaric wrote:

one of the textbook definition of economics along the lines of "The study of how societies use scarce resources to produce and distribute goods and services".

That's one definition of economics and, clearly, on it, "economics" will have existed since the Stone Age and before and will still exist in socialism. But that's not how Marxian socialists have traditionally defined it. We have seen it as the study, essentially of the production and distribution of goods and services in societies where exchange (trade, buying and selling) is widespread. In these societies forces come into operation which act like natural laws imposing themselves on people and which some economics textbooks teach actually are natural laws. When we criticise "economics" it is its claim to be studying eternal facts of human existence, instead of just what happens at the present, capitalist stage of human social development. On this definition where there are no markets there is nothing to study.But it's silly to argue over definitions. To have a meaningful discussion all those taking part need to agree on definitions. So, let's go with yours. Obviously, then, we can't be against this, as the study of the allocating resources to meet human wants. That will happen in socialism and we are interested in ways of doing this in a non-market way. That is why the article commented favourably on Alvin Roth's work. Others who have won the Nobel Prize for Economics and who have made useful contributions to this are Wassily Leontief (1973, for his work on input-output tables) and Leonid Kantorovich (1975, for his work on linear programming).Actually, in answer to the followers of Ludwig Von Mises who argue that it is impossible to organise production and distribution rationally without prices, markets and money (so that socialism would be impossible) we have done some thinking on how a socialist society would be able to work without these. See:Chapters 4 and 5 of our pamphlet Socialism As A Practical Alternative.The “Economic Calculation” controversy: unravelling of a mythThe Alternative to CapitalismYou are knocking at an open door.

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I don't think we can agree with this Historical Revisionist view of Lenin as merely a Leftwing Social Democrat that Louis whatever-his-name-is puts forward:

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Largely through the efforts of Lars Lih, it has become more and more difficult to ignore the historical record. The publication of his 808 page Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context was like Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the church door in 1517, except in this case it was the door of the Marxist-Leninist church. Unlike Peter Camejo or me, Lih was not interested in building a new left. He was mainly interested in correcting the record. As a serious scholar with a deep command of the Russian language, he was quite capable of defending his thesis, namely that Lenin sought nothing more than to create a party based on the German social democracy in Russia. There was never any intention to build a new kind of party, even during the most furious battles with the Mensheviks who after all (as Lih convincingly makes the case) were simply a faction of the same broad party that Lenin belonged to [emphasis added].

In the years up to WW1 Lenin may have toned down a bit what he had written in What Is To Be Done in 1902, but he returned to it with a vengeance after the Bolshevik coup of November 1917. If not, why did he insist on splitting the Labour Movement outside Russia and building up "Communist" parties as a "new kind of party" based on the top-down principles of "democratic centralisation" he had outlined in his 1902 pamphlet?The SWP in fact has consciously modelled itself, as far as both tactics and organisation are concerned, on the CPGB of the 1920s seeing itself as that party's modern equivalent. That's why the have an undemocratic constitution with an all-powerful Leadership "elected" as a slate and with no chance of being defeated, either in elections to it or over the "orientation" it puts before Conference. and with the power to order the membership to follow its line.These latter-day critics of "democratic centralism" should go the whole hog and throw Lenin out with the bathwater.

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Thanks for that link:http://www.marketdesigner.blogspot.se/2013/01/market-design-for-everyone-from.htmlPeople should have a look at it. We said that Alvin Roth may have deserved a Nobel Prize (if for non-economics) and he returns the compliment by providing a link to our article.Someone else takes up our point of how can you speak of a "market" when price and money are not involved.

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As 1 January was the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln in the US Civil War, the March Socialist Standard will cover this issue. There will also be a review of the Lincoln film.Even the official US government's archive site recognises its limitations in practice:

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President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free." Despite this expansive wording, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. It applied only to states that had seceded from the Union, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy that had already come under Northern control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union military victory.

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There are some people who want to replace a Marxist analysis of women’s liberation with one centred on patriarchy theory

The SWP are dead wrong about Leninism and so-called "democratic centralism", but not about this. We need to be careful about endorsing people who make the above sort of criticism of the SWP. In fact, perhaps the best thing that Chris Harman wrote was his refutation of the above view in his "Engels and the Origin of Human Society".I don't know who Donny Mayo is but this is the sort of criticism we should be backing:

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And in his article on why he is leaving the SWP, “Donny Mayo” (…) claims there is a “global crisis of old-style Trotskyist Leninism” and that the SWP is an example of a “historically outdated model” and that democratic centralism has become an “increasingly cultish mantra”.

Don't know about "has become", though. It always was.

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It's the other way round too. Some of the behaviour of non-humans also has to be learned. You might think that birds can fly by "instinct". Apparently not according to this video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI8yWl3AUOUIf even some birds need to learn to fly it's not surprising that humans, with our brain permitting adaptable behaviour, have to learn to do practically everything. In fact I can't think of any human social behaviour that does not have to be learned. Of course the biologically inherited capacity (such as prehensile thumbs,etc)  to engage in such behaviour has to exist — that's why we can't fly, except by constructing aeroplanes..

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I think Jack Conrad and the Weekly Worker are being excessively pedantic. When the SWP say that "the workers create all the wealth under capitalism" all that they are meaning to say is that the labour that today creates wealth by working on materials that orifinally came from nature is that of the working class. They no more mean to say that workers create the materials that originally came from nature than we do when we refer in Clause 1 of our Declaration of principles to "the working class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced".But let's be pedantic. Conrad is claiming that Marx's statement in the Critique of the Gotha Programme denying that labour is "the source of all wealth" refutes the SWP statement. But does it? Does saying that labour "creates" or "produces" all wealth mean that it is "the source" of all wealth too? I wouldn't have thought so. Labour is not the source of all wealth. It is just that without labour wealth can't be produced, i.e nature can't be transformed.And when Conrad raises the point that peasants and artisans also produce wealth (by their labour) this is the sort of objection that we expect pedants to raise against what we say in our Declaration of Principles:

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when visiting Greece, I enjoy drinking the rough village wines sold along the roadside by small farmers; I buy newspapers from my local British-Muslim newsagent; and I get my shoes repaired by the British-Bengali cobbler over the road. Such little businesses produce use-values and therefore, by definition, wealth too. With such examples in mind, it is surely mistaken to baldly state that “workers create all the wealth under capitalism”.

But even he seems to think he's gone too far here since he adds:

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In theoretical terms, forgetting or passing over petty bourgeois commodity production is a mote, a mere speck of dust, in the eye of the SWP’s ‘Where we stand’ column.

What does he want them to say: that "workers create the great bulk of wealth under capitalism" or us to say "by whose labour most wealth is produced"?And, to end on a really pedantic note, what wealth does his "local British-Muslim newsagent" produce?

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Jonathan Chambers wrote:

Some people, for example, are very averse to risk-taking whilst others display a gung-ho attitude to personal danger.  Is it not possible that such behaviour is due to a genetic predisposition and therefore susceptible to modification?

Yes, perhaps, in fact it probably will have something to do with genes, but these are ways in which one part of their body, their brain, tends to work. As to specific behaviour they are a bit vague. You could say the same sort of bad eyesight. In other words, human genes govern the make-up and functioning of the body, not the way humans behave in society.

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Bartlett's comments echo what Tory MP Douglas Hogg (later Lord Halisham) said in the debate on the Beveridge Report in the House of Commons in 1943 and quoted in our pamphlet Beveridge Re-Organises Poverty:

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Mr. Quintin Hogg, M. P. (Conservative) in the Debate on the Report. He said“Some of my hon. Friends seem to overlook one or two ultimate facts about social reform. The first is that if you do not give people social reform, they are going to give you social revolution….Let anyone consider the possibility of a series of dangerous industrial strikes following the present hostilities, and the effect that it would have on our industrial recovery….” (Parliamentary Debates, 17th February, 1943, Col.1818.)

Our pamphlet went on to make an interesting point against those who think that a growing socialist movement will inevitably be met by repression:

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In passing we would draw attention to the implications of the first part of Mr. Hogg’s remarks. It will be noticed that Mr. Hogg, in face of what he considers to be a threat of social revolution, does not, as has often been suggested to us, advocate such measures as closing down Parliament or rendering socialist organisations illegal, but hopes by offering sufficient bribes in the way of social reform to be able to keep away the evil day.

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Obviously individual humans have different genetic make-ups, otherwise we'd all be clones. But I was talking about the behaviour of humans as a species, not of individual behaviour (clearly somebody prevented by gene therapy from developing some dangerous bodily defect will behave differently than they otherwise would). Nobody has yet suggested what kind of general human behaviour could conceivably be changed by genetic engineering. The Blank Slate is a Red Herring. It's not, despite Steven Pinker, what either Marx or the Cultural Anthropologists assumed..

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Actually, the space engineer Douglas Mallette has made the point that any Mars or Lunar Base would have to be organised on the lines of what the Zeitgeist Movement call a "resource-based economy"or on what we would call on socialist lines, i.e without money and with needs supplied free among other things. As here for instance:

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As an engineer, more specifically a space geek engineer, what TVP [The Venus Project] offered as a solution option made complete sense to me right away. Why? Because what they described as a Resource Based Economy (RBE) is exactly how a Mars or Lunar base would HAVE to operate in order to maintain the lives of the astronauts that lived there.

So perhaps this isn't an off-topic joke after all.

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Editorial committee reply:Even though it has a price uncultivated land has no value as it is not the product of labour. Improvements to land due to the exercise of labour will have value and will affect the price of land, but, economically speaking, these improvements are capital rather than land even if they are incorporated in it. It remains a fact that land, as such, is a pure product of nature and that those who own it are able to extract an income from the rest of society purely and simply because they own it and without having to cultivate or develop it. Of course they can do this, in which case their income will be part monopoly rent and part profit on capital. But it still remains the case that part of their income (or price of the land if they sell it) reflects the fact that they monopolise a part of the Earth's surface which provides them with an income for literally nothing.

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Here's a couple of attempts by OXFAM from the letters column of the Socialist Standard to defend their position:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2003/no-1181-january-2003/lettershttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2003/no-1190-october-2003/letters

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Interesting news item here, revealing both the sort of thing that human genes govern and how culture governs human behaviour:http://www.bris.ac.uk/alspac/news/2013/164.html

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