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Touché, Socialist Punk, but I think I can see where you're coming from. I am of course opposed to secret meetings and have nothing against their proceedings being leaked. Normally I'd be all in favour of this but my objection in this particular case was to the public identification of the alleged rapist. What's your take on this? Should people be free to publish the names of alleged rapists and their victims before anything has been proved? Agreed that the SWP have only themselves to blame for holding their own rape trial.. What on earth did they think they were doing?

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And here's what the Anti-Duhring Brigade thought of the husting. Pictures plus this comment:

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NALLY AT HIS BEST! Steve speaking with passion effortlessly wiped the floor with the Tory, Labour & Liberal candidates at the hustings tonight! The SPGB candidate summed up his party's position and program in one perfect sentence, "There's nothing we can do." Well done comrade. That's a great message to give out to the working class. Marx & Engels and all the working class martyrs would be proud of you (not)

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

The few community pubs in the council estates i know were all about the local tea-leaves flogging stuff, local druggies doing deals, and sad alcoholics drowning their sorrows as the local heavies proved their machoism.

That's what they say the George IV on Brixton Hill was like except that it was also a well-known music venue. Both the Tory and the Trotskyist said they used to frequent it when they were younger.Here's Danny (and the others) on unemployment:http://www.brixtonblog.com/hustings-video-what-would-you-do-about-unemployment-in-brixton-hill/9336Another comment on the hustings message #19  here:

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The SPGB candidate's answer to every question on every issue was the it is necesssary to smash capitalism.The TUSC candidate's answer to every question was to say that he will never vote for any cuts in anything.The UKIP candidate's answer to every question was to hold a referendum to see what local people think.The Lib Dem candidate was useless.The Green candidate was grumpy and stroppy.The Conserative candidate made a few good points but kept digging himself into a hole by saying that Brixton is "an aspiration-free zone" where people don't like to live, and that the schools were rubbish.

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It looks as if we are up against the Anti-Duhring Battalion:http://www.facebook.com/groups/78046560390/Apart from the confirmation that Trotskyists only leaflet and canvass council estates because that's where they think all workers live, they've come up with a couple of good quotes:

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"IT'S BETTER TO VOTE FOR WHAT YOU WANT AND NOT GET IT THAN VOTE FOR WHAT YOU DON'T WANT AND GET IT." Eugene Debs.

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ADDRESS TO THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE BY FREDERICK ENGELS 1850:"Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention!"

We have often used the Debs one, but the Engels one is good  too. They pinched our name, so we'll pinch their quote. It's more appropriate for us anyway since they are not putting the revolutionary position before the electorate, only the view that capitalism can be reformed by taxing the rich to provide jobs and pay for public services.

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I'm not sure we can or should use this particular stick to beat the SWP (there are plenty of others). There may (or may not) have been errors in their own procedures, but  their basic error was to have a procedure to judge and censure their members' personal behaviour. It is this that has led to them having to judge a case of alleged rape. That should never have happened. Such allegations are not matters to be discussed and decided on at a conference. It's my personal view that the person who first published the transcript on the internet acted in a despicable way, recklessly exposing an individual to a serious accusation just to score a political point against the SWP.

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Marx was not the only person influenced by Hegel. There was a school of British philosophy in the 19th century which saw no need to stand Hegel on his head, but were quite satisfied with the way he was — as an idealist philosopher.In an essay on "Oxford and British Idealism" in Oxford Philosophy 2012 Bill Mander writes of this school:

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The chief figure of this school was T. H. Green, who first entered Balliol as a student in 1855, becoming a fellow in 1860. Encouraged by Jowell, he made use of Kantian and Hegelian ideas, which until that point had been regarded as 'dangerous', developing an idealist world view in which God, or as he called it the 'eternal consciousness', was to be thought of as a principle immanent throughout reality and, in particular, gradually manifesting itself in the process of human development, both intellectual and moral.

This mumbo-jumbo seems nearer to Hegel's thought than some other interpretations. He was an idealist and religious philosopher. For him "alienation" began with the "Fall of Man" (when Adam ate the apple) and will end when "Man" is reconciled with "God"  and History comes to an end. Not much for us there, i'd have thought.

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Our candidate delegate is now up on brixtonblog too:http://www.brixtonblog.com/brixton-hill-by-election-danny-lambert-socialist-party-of-great-britain/9198I'm sure comrades will like the photo(s).The Tory and the Trotskyist are up there as well.

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Mike Foster wrote:

I understand that Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness is one of the definitive books,

Lukacs wrote this in 1920 as a super-Leninist, arguing that the vanguard party embodied the "class consciousness" of the working class even if the actual working class weren't class conscious. A recipe for substitutionism if ever there was.

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Brixtonblog is here: http://www.brixtonblog.com/Labour here.Green here.

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There are two separate arguments going on here:(1) Does it make sense to talk of humans having "instincts" in their social behaviour (as opposed to their bodily reactions)?and(2) If we do, is an aversion to "race-mixing" one of them?If the answer to (1) is "no", then (2) falls. But even if (1) were to be the case, then (2) would still have to be proved.

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A photo in a local paper may not tell anyone about what we stand for, but it will help tell people that we are standing and so is/can be publicity for this. Many people just scan a paper and look at the pictures and their captions. So if there are photos of candidates but not ours, even if text of the article explains why not, people would get the impression we're not standing. Of course a blank space instead of a photo would convey the same message, but it is unlikely that the editor would be prepared to go that far to accommodate us.

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Young Master Smeet wrote:

Posts are not being pre=vetted for content, nor are they editted/moderated for content,

Nor are they edited for spelling either.

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Here's the Report of the debate on this issue at the 1989 Conference:

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V17 "That this Conference instructs the EC to ensure that in future no photograph of the candidate appear on the election manifestos"(Glasgow).V16 Amendment to V17:"Delete the last word and replace with 'material'" (W London).V18 "That this Conference instructs the EC to ensure that in future the election manifestos be addressed to 'Fellow Workers' and not to 'Dear Electors'" (Glasgow).V.Vanni (Glasgow), opening on his branch's two resolutions,said Glasgow considered neither saying 'Dear Electors' instead of 'Fellow Workers' nor putting the candidate's photo on the manifesto as being innovative or imaginative.H.Edwards (W London), on his branch's amendment, said the intention was to make the Glasgow resolution on photos more precise. On the other issue of laying down "Fellow Workers" as the only permissable form of address, the branch disagreed with Glasgow.R.Cook (Birmingham) complained about the phrase "instructs the EC to ensure". Why this urge to always have control from the top?S. Coleman (Islington): whether or not the photo should appear was a matter of principle, though not of primary principle. So if the Party voted for it, he would accept it, but the Party had not voted for it and Swansea should have waited for Conference to decide before experimenting on this matter. Why should we always have to say "Fellow Workers"? What was important about what we had to say was the content not the form of words employed. It would be ridiculous to have to use this particular form on all occasions and under all circumstances.B.Johnson (Swansea): the Party can exclude photos from its manifesto but it can't stop the media insisting on a photo to accompany any statement they might want to publish from us. Once again, this was an over-reaction to an experiment and before it had been completed. The Party must be prepared to experiment, allowing flexibility in the light of local conditions.G.Hewlett (Camden): a photo couldn't help put over our case and was in fact quite irrelevant to it.H.Young (non-delegate): the change from "Fellow Workers" to "Dear Electors" was a concession to ignorance and prejudice and was reformist —S.Coleman (Islington): Point of Order! Under Clause 15 of Conference Standing Orders Comrade Young was not entitled to refer to other members as "reformist".S.Easton (EC Member): we didn't have to first approach everybody as "workers" if only because most people wouldn't know what we meant by working class. Nor did photos mean a personalised campaign.E.Goodman (EC Member): the objection was not just to the photo, but also to the personalism represented by the use of 'I'. On the other issue,Glasgow were being too strict in trying to stop innovation. After all, our message was also addressed to capitalists.K.Knight (non-delegate): capitalists could indeed join the socialist party, even in their own interests, as to avoid perishing in a nuclear war. But there was a distinction: we didn't need their support whereas we did need that of the working class, so we must address our appeal to the latter.D.Donnelly (Glasgow),winding up, said the resolutions were not an appeal for things to be controlled from the top, but an instruction to the committee which manages our affairs between Conferences not to use photos. We must control our own literature even if we can't control what the media do.The amendment(V16) to the first Glasgow resolution(V17) was carried 99-39 and the resolution, as amended, was then carried 98-49.The second Glasgowresolution(V18) was lost 69-73

This means that there is an absolute ban on us putting the candidate's photo on the election manifesto or on any other material we produce for an election. But it leaves to the discretion of branches whether or not to supply a photo to the press if requested.So, what we are arguing about here is not whether or not a Conference Resolution has been infringed but about whether or not it is opportune to supply the media with a photo if requested. Scottish branches seem to take a harder line on this than London ones.

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We've got an obituary for Castro on the stocks. It looks as if we should be preparing one for Chavez too. As they both claim to be socialists, and have considerable influence on critics of capitalist society in Latin America and elsewhere, we have some interesting things to say on both.

[ALB]

Tom Rogers wrote:

In practice, the evidence from multi-cultural societies is that one racial group tends to dominate another.  Of course, because you do not recognise 'race' as a valid term at all, to you multi-culturalism is simply the co-existence of different cultural groups, whereas to my mind, multi-culturalism is simply a code word for race-mixing.  You then state, ""Multiculturalism" is the government policy of encouraging historically-evolvd cultural groups to identify with that group and to construct and teach them a concocted history to that end." It follows from what I have just stated that this is also wrong in that multiculturalism is not just 'multi-cultural', it is also multi-racial, with different racial groups existing within the same geo-political space.  All the evidence from where this is tried is that one racial group tends to dominate over the other – South Africa is one example.

This confirms what I suspected — that what you object to is "multiracialism" rather than "multiculturalism"., i.e to "race-mixing", just like the erstwhile rulers of the Old South in the US and of South Africa under apartheid.South Africa is not a good example for you. For a start, the "blank majority" does not dominate over the others. The vast majority of "blacks" in South Africa are dominated by an elite drawn from all the groups you consider to be "races". And the "blacks" do not compose a homogenuous bloc, but are divided into cultural groups with which they identify with more than with the rest of their "race". Finally, what "race" do you place the "Coloureds" in? Or do you think they are a separate "race".Assuming that you still consider yourself to be socialist (perhaps you no longer do; it doesn't sound like it) how do you reconcile your views on "race-mixing" with the fact that socialism will be, in your terms, a "multi-racial" society, probably more so than today? If, as you claim, "races" have difficulty in getting on with each other how will socialism deal with this "problem" supposed by you?

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