ALB
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I don't think that Hedley was doubting the wisdom of a general strike, but rather the state of preparedness for one. I got the impression that he was pissed off at being dragged across London on a freezing night to speak to 12 people and that this was his way of telling the organisers that they needed to put more work in.Actually, to tell the truth, I would think that, to the extent that austerity and the cuts can be mitigated, the only way that would have any chance of succeeding would be some kind of trade union action (as opposed to heroics by councillors, who are essentially elected civil servants who have to carry out central government policy mainly with central government money and who can be disciplined if they don't). But unfortunately the reality is, as Hedley observed, that not enough workers have the stomach for this.
ALB wrote:Don't know if in view of the weather any or us (or anybody for that matter) will be going to the TUSC meeting in the end,In the end 3 of us did go, helping to bring the total audience up to 12, heard an SWP speaker (Paul Holborow of Anti-Nazi League fame) urge a vote for TUSC and got denounced by the RMT London Regional Organiser, Steve Hedley, as "Mensheviks", apparently because we criticised the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917. We never mentioned this at the meeting, but he knew. At least this shows that we are well known in militant trade union circles. In fact, the other RMT person present told us that the first socialist paper he ever bought was the Socialist Standard.
Don't know if in view of the weather any or us (or anybody for that matter) will be going to the TUSC meeting in the end, but in the meantime someone has put a link to one of the three leaflets we distrubuted in the area:http://i48.tinypic.com/34h9hs3.jpghttp://i48.tinypic.com/auz1g4.jpgIncidentally, the text of this leaflet doesn't seem to be anywhere on our site if some technical bod here can find a place for it.
ALB wrote:And here's what the Anti-Duhring Brigade thought of the husting. Pictures plus this comment:Quote: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)There's a full report on the hustings up now on the Brixtonblog:http://www.brixtonblog.com/brixton-hill-by-election-hustings-round-up/9402It records what Danny actually said:
Quote:Socialist candidate Danny Lambert had a more radical suggestion: “In times of recession public services are the first thing that gets cut. This is the nature of capitalism and it’s time to wake up. We’re in a society that doesn’t work in our interests. There’s nothing we can do about it unless we dump the capitalist system.”And here's what he said about the George IV pub:
Quote:Danny Lambert said the pub’s closure was one of many symptoms of capitalist economics. “If this pub can’t be run at a profit it’ll get closed down and something else will open that can,” he said. “People come a poor second to profit. Until we get shot of capitalism we’ll have this problem over and over again.”imposs1904 wrote:is pretty much a game changer for the SWP. I'd be genuinely surprised if this time next year the SWP resembles the organisation it currently is, the organisation it has been for the last forty plus years. It's the most serious schism in the IS/SWP tradition since the IS Opposition split in the mid-seventies.You could be right that this could be the SWP's equivalent of the effect on the CP of the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, with people whose basic position (university-educated militant Guardian-readers in professional jobs) has long been out of sync with being in a top-down, centralised, Leninist party choosing the occasion to leave. We'll see.
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?
And here's what the Anti-Duhring Brigade thought of the husting. Pictures plus this comment:
Quote: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)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:
Quote: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.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:
Quote:"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.Quote: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.
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.
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:
Quote: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.
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.
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.
Brixtonblog is here: http://www.brixtonblog.com/Labour here.Green here.
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.
