ALB
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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
Quote:The report also claims that Centrica provides £4.2bn in "total tax payments" including its own payments to HM Revenue and Customs of £1.1bn, national insurance and PAYE contributions from its staff and tax paid by consumers on their bills.This admission by Centrica (which owns British Gas, AA and other businesses) that PAYE deducted from workers' gross wages is really a tax paid by employers is important as there's an ideological battle going on to convince us that we are all "taxpayers" with a common interest. That's why the media always talk about Lloyds and RBS being owned mainly by "the taxpayer" when they mean the government. In the past they never used to talk about British Rail and the National Coal Board being owned by the taxpayer.They still don't talk about the tanks, warplanes and battleships of the armed forces being owned by the taxpayer, which would be just as (il)logical, but then this is government spending they want people to look on favourably. And they never call on the Taxpayers Alliance to give "balance" when they are discussing arms spending as they often do when discussing with trade unionists.Actually of course Lloyds, RBS and the armed forces are owned by "the taxpayers" but the taxpayers are the employing class not us.
I listened to this programme. I don't know if anyone else did. When we got back to them they said that the "socialist" slot had been filled but said we could send an email.They had indicated that a third of the programme would be devoted to whether or not Chavez was a socialist. As it happens, only the last 5 or so more minutes was. Before that, the only mention of the word was by some Venezuelan exile who said Chavez was practising "petrol socialism" by which he meant using oil revenues to bribe the poor to vote for him.The "socialist" slot was filled by Mike Gonzalez of the SWP. It could have been worse (for instance Alan Woods of "Socialist Appeal"), as the SWP does not think that Venezuela is socialist or even on the way to socialism. He avoided a direct question as to whether Chavez was a socialist by saying the Chavism represented a new form of resistance to global capitalism promoting participation from below but faced with a hostile capitalist world. Similar to what he says in this article (which, actually, is not too bad).We sent an email saying:
Quote:I don't think that Chavez could be called a socialist in the proper sense of the term. He was a populist (and popular) nationalist leader who tried to improve the lot of the poor but circumstances meant that he could not go beyond state capitalism and social reforms.Ironic that we should seem to be saying something similar to the SWP. The SWP's more orthodox trotskyist critics would say that it's the other way round and that that's a consequence of holding that Russia was state capitalist.
