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We've been sent this at Head Office:http://www.bopsecrets.org/recent/occupy-looking-back.htmIt seems to be a level-headed analysis of the Occupy movement (in America). Especially revealing is the answer to the first question which confirms that the movement has slid towards "localist activism" (which seems to apply even more so to the movement in London) rather than evolving towards a more global understanding of capitalism and the limits of what can be done within it (as once seemed a possibility, at least in theory).A comrade recommended No Local. Why Small-Scale Alternatives Won't Change The World by Greg Sharzer. The first couple of chapters are good and what we need to recommend to the currently dominant tendency within Occupy. (The other chapters are no good as Sharzer is unfortunately some sort of Trotskyist who thinks that eventually workers, ie for him factory workers and those who live on housing estates, will have to take up arms to get rid of capitalism, a position where Occupy is far in advance of him and his ilk, as can be seen from the analysis above by the Bureau of Public Secrets).

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I hadn't realised that I was providing a link to a site where you probably have to pay the second time you look at it. Anyway, here's how I found the statistics. I went here:http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/factbook-2011-en/03/03/01/index.html;jsessionid=3lr9owoj37ivj.delta?contentType=/ns/Chapter,/ns/StatisticalPublication&itemId=/content/chapter/factbook-2011-24-en&containerItemId=/content/serial/18147364&accessItemIds=&mimeType=text/htmland clicked on "Indicator in PDF" in the top right hand corner. The document is entitled "Labour Productivity Levels" and the source is given as OECD Factbook  2011-2012 Economic, Environmental and Social Statistics.Hope this link works (long enough) this time. If not, here's how productivity is defined:

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Labour productivity is measured as GDP per hour worked.

and from wikipedia on the OECD's definition of productivity:

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Labour productivity is equal to the ratio between a volume measure of output (gross domestic product or gross value added) and a measure of input use (the total number of hours worked or total employment). (Freeman 2008,5)labour productivity = volume measure of output / measure of input useThe volume measure of output reflects the goods and services produced by the workforce. Numerator of the ratio of labour productivity, the volume measure of output is measured either by gross domestic product (GDP) or gross value added (GVA). Although these two different measures can both be used as output measures, there is normally a strong correlation between the two. (Freeman 2008,5)The measure of input use reflects the time, effort and skills of the workforce. Denominator of the ratio of labour productivity, the input measure is the most important factor that influences the measure of labour productivity. Labour input is measured either by the total number of hours worked of all persons employed or total employment (head count). (Freeman 2008,5) )

Obviously, Marx could not have used figures for this since these statistics were not available in his day. The nearest he came to this is what TWC refers to, i.e. GDP/total wages paid. The OECD has produced some statistics on this too (see: http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/employment/oecd-employment-outlook-2012/labour-losing-to-capital-what-explains-the-declining-labour-share_empl_outlook-2012-4-en 0Actually, what they measure is total labour income/national income as a percentage. What the figures show is that between the early 90s and the late 2000s the average labour share in all OECD countries fell from 66.1% to less than 62%. Or TWC's "social productivity" (national income/total wages) rose during this period from 1.51 to 1.62 which is not a very rapid rise over 20 years. By coincidence, there'll be a short article on this in the December Socialist Standard

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Thanks. I've found it. It's message #21 from you here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/events-and-announcements/marx-bbc2?page=1

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Full Complaint: As a Marxist and a member of the oldest Marxist party in the UK I found the program was absolute rubbish. Why did you not consult the oldest Marxist party? The program wrongly claimed Marx didn't really have an alternative to capitalism (it was fair enough to say he didn't have a blueprint, but that's not the same thing of course). There was also no critical examination of Marx and the so-called 'Communist' countries, the link between the two being taken pretty much for granted, with a couple of very minor caveats. Bizarrely, she also put forward the workers 'can't buy back' theory of crises at great length, though in fairness explaining Marxian economics in less than an hour for the uninitiated isn't the easiest of tasks! It got 5 out of 10 at best though. The level of scholarship wasn't great – she repeatedly claimed without any evidence that Marx thought capitalism would collapse, but I honestly don't think she understood what she meant by this claim herself (conflating collapse with the abolition of capitalism). Marx NEVER claimed capitalism would collapse.

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It looks as if a "write-in" vote is becoming more and more acceptable:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/nov/16/police-commissioner-spoilt-ballot-papersThis, surely, must have been the best election result ever in Britain with both record abstentions and record write-in votes.Glad to see that the best result was obtained at one polling station in my home town of Newport where nobody turned out to vote for the pro-capitalist non-entities on offer.

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Actually, nobody among the 20 members and 10 non-members at the meeting revealed themselves to be one of the "state-capitalist brethren". It was a very good and facinating talk and was recorded (but might not be of good enough quality since we pressed the wrong buttons on the recorder). The only quibble would be that the speaker sometimes used the word "socialst" in a way we wouldn't but we all knew what he meant.As for Donny Gluckstein of the SWP. He argues that the Second World War was both an inter-imperialist conflic for a redivision of the world and a people's war against fascism and so ends up supporting it:

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The Second World War was different in essence from, for example, WWI or the Vietnam war. In its volatile combination of disparate elements it was unique, not only in the sheer scale of its wanton violence against civilians, but as a war worth fighting to end the scourge of fascism and Nazism. ( http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/conferences/annual9/submit/a-peoples-history-of-the-second-world-war.-resistance-versus-empire )

This is not the view of James Heartfield who like us sees the war as an inter-imperialist conflict not worth the shedding of a single drop of working class blood. His book vindicates the position we took up at the time.

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Whoever drafted that reply did know something about Marx and discussions about his views. I wonder who it was. But can you also post the letter you wrote them?Incidentally, Flanders herself has not replied to our "official" letter.

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Here's a more accurate description of the origins of the Labour Party, from the 1905 Manifesto of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, here on this site:

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The Labour Representation Committee came into existence chiefly, as far as the rank and file of the trade unions were concerned owing to the Taff Vale and Quinn v Leatham decisions, and as far as the trade union officials were concerned, because they saw a chance of Parliamentary jobs. At the first meeting of the L.R.C. Mr. John Burns opposed putting the movement on a working-class basis. Mr. James Sexton, of the Liverpool dockers, said that the Socialist resolution was magnificent but not war – not conductive to Parliamentary jobs, he meant – and he would vote for it anywhere but there. This position is characteristic of most alleged Socialists in Britain – they would vote for Socialism anywhere but where a vote would help it. Mr. Steadman said they should elect those who had borne the heat and burden of the day – i.e., men of the Steadman stamp. At Newcastle Mr. John Ward stated that they wanted to get their feet on the floor of the House of Commons and would not be particular how they did it. Mr. J. Keir Hardie said they did not want Toryism, Liberalism, or Socialism, only Labourism. Wonderful to narrate, this is the same Keir Hardie who sits as a delegate on the International Socialist Bureau.The L.R.C. constitution states that they should not support the Liberal or the Tory Party, but for every seat that has hitherto been contested the candidate put forward by the L.R.C. has been a Liberal-Labour hack, so much so that Mr. John Morley stated he would welcome them into the House of Commons, as they would always be found voting as Liberals. Last year Messrs. W. Crooks, D. Shackleton, and A. Henderson supported Mr. Benn, Liberal candidate for Devonport, and Mr. Bell, ex-chairman of the L.R.C, got his seat in the House of Commons by an arrangement with the Liberal party. Mr. D. Shackleton is a defender of child labour, and Mr. Henderson is an opponent of the legal reduction of the hours of labour. After all their cry of independence and after all their falling out with Mr. Burns, who told them they were selling themselves for two hundred dirty pieces of gold, they selected as Chairman of their Parliamentary group the same Mr. John Burns, the defender of Asquith (the murderer of miners at Featherstone), thus choosing as their leader one of the most bitter enemies of the working-class. The Labour Representation Committee is not the party of the workers.

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At the risk of re-igniting this boring subject that's been flogged to death, I can't help recording the views expressed in a speech on Wednesday by the new Archbishop of Canterbury (as reported in the Times yesterday);

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Religion has moved from being regarded as a matter of truth and authority to being seen as a "leisure activity" with grave possible consequences for society, the future Archbishop of Canterbury said last night …. he said that the change from "religion as truth" to "religion as lifestyle" was well documented…. Recalling his previous career with an oil company, Bishop Welby said: "One of my better memories of the oil industry was my boss saying at one point, when he asked what I was doing one weekend and I said I was going on a church weekend, 'Ah, fascinating, the different hobbies people have in this company.'"

I would say this is a good development that Archbishop Canute won't be able to turn back. In other words, the battle against "religion as truth" has been won.

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I don't think Hardy was arguing that productivity didn't increase in the intermediate stages of production. He was talking about the average productivity of a whole economy which is calculated by dividing total output (as measured by money) by total man-hours. Here's another article of his on the subject:http://www.marxists.org/archive/hardcastle/risingprices.htmThis brings in the depreciation of the currency which explains why prices have risen when, with increased productivity and so less labour input per unit, they should have fallen. Once you take out currency inflation the price of most products has fallen and continues to fall (this is particularly the case with electronic products). But not all. As Hardy pointed out here, there are certain products (coal, oil and other mined products) where the labour content has risen because of more difficult geological conditions encountered as more is extracted. Also, there is the cost of training and maintaining labour-power (education, training, health) which is comparatively labour intensive and costly. There is also the waste of the labour that under capitalism has necessarily to be expended on arms and on the whole business of buying and selling, money counting and shuffling.I think all these factors explain the relatively slow increase in average productivity under capitalism. At the moment average productivity in a country like the UK has fallen because output has but the total number of man-hours worked has fallen less.Note Hardy's estimate here that, with the elimination of capitalism, production could be doubled in a comparatively short period of time with the same total labour force, i.e. a 100% increase in productivity.Anyway, what do you mean by "social productivity" as contrasted with the sort of productivity that Hardy and in fact government statisticians and bourgeois economists talk about? For a definition of (labour) productivity and recent figures for various countries see here.

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Thanks, Brian,. I see that James Phillips was billed on the advertising for the meeting as representing the Venus Project as well as Zeitgeist. That would explain why the meeting seemed to be a regression to the time when Zeitgeist was linked to the Venus Project of establishing a circular city in the Amazonian jungle financed by the UN or some friendly capitalist. I thought TZM had abandoned this silly idea. In any event, the report of the meeting will give you and Socialist Punk a clue as to where to put the accent in your discussions with them on Monday.

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Two members did attend the Zeitgeist meeting in London on Tuesday, but haven't yet got round to reporting what happened and what they thought beyond saying that "funny money" and decision-making by technocrats came up.

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Just read the one on the SDF. It's crap.

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Ozymandias wrote:

I have never read an article in the Standard concerning regional accents and how they have impacted on the class divide.

Maybe because the accent divide does not correspond to the class divide. In the 19th century capitalists spoke with a regional accent. So, apparently, did the aristocracy. Here, for instance, is what the Dictionary of National Biography says via wikipedia about the 15th Earl of Derby (1826-1893) who was an MP and Cabinet Minister:

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He lived much in his own county, spoke, like his father, with a Lancashire accent

His father, the 14th Earl, was three times Prime Minister  in Victorian times. So the 14th Mr Wilson was not the first Prime Minister to speak with a northern accent.I'm not quite sure why we're discussing accents in a thread on Zeitgeist since, being in the Technocracy tradition, they probably think we should all speak like Stephen Hawking.

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twc wrote:

In actual human production, we only need to swamp costly human labour by cheap robotic labour to approximate humanless production — to approximate a valueless condition of capitalist production.Valueless capitalist production would, of course, be catastrophic for capitalism and for the capitalist class, as a capitalist production process only generates value through human labour and not through robotic labour, which [if truly humanless] is valueless in Marxian terms.(…)If social labour at all stages of capitalist production ever becomes predominantly robotic, then consumer products become predominantly valueless. In a competitive capitalist economy — one which through competition enforces strict value production — the prices of consumer goods would plummet.

You are right. Marx did speculate about this in a passage in the Grundrisse where he says, after discussing the deplacement of direct labour by machines in production:

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As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis.  http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm )

Incidentally, this is (I think) the only passage where Marx uses the word breakdown ( "zusammen") in relation to capitalism. What he is saying is that if capitalism continued long enough it would eventually reach a stage where, thanks to mechanization, an individual product would have so little labour (indirect as well as direct) embodied in it that its value, and so its price, would be virtually zero. At which point the change-over to production to give away or take freely would become a necessity for the survival of society.I don't think that Marx thought that this stage would ever actually be reached, but was merely extrapolating trends discernable under capitalism to their logical conclusion (a bit like he did too with his mathematical demonstration that eventually the rate of profit must fall). Capitalism is nowhere near this stage now over 150 years since Marx wrote and, despite robotics, is still (very) far away from it. Hopefully, the workers will have put an end to capitalism long before it reached this theoretical breakdown point. Marx must have thought so too. Otherwise why was he active as a socialist in his day?Basically, then, we are still living in the stage of capitalism described by Hardy not the end-days of capitalism as extrapolated by Marx in the passage above.

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Ozymandias wrote:

Does the party have one single stance on this?

I'm not sure about a single stance, but this classic article from 1965 by Comrade Hardy put exaggerated claims (either way) about automation into perspective. The same applies to robotics:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1960s/1965/no-725-january-1965/automation-perspectiveComrade Hardy had already made the same point in an article dating from 1934:http://www.marxists.org/archive/hardcastle/production_productivity.htmAs he pointed out, productivity (which automation, computerisation, robotics, etc increases) only increases relatively slowly, at between 1 and 2% a year. This is because what needs to be taken into account is not the labour saved at the final stage of the production of some product but the labour saved on producing the product from start to finish. This is just Marxian economics and an application of the labour theory of value..It has also been borne out by the facts about what happened since 1934 and 1964. None of the dire threats or promises predicted at the time and mentioned in the articles materialised.Just read the claim made in 1934 that "that mechanical progress has gone so far in the direction of increasing output per head that we are within measurable distance of 'one immense robot factory, employing no workmen at all'". And the "forecast" made in 1964 that "'before the end of the century,' in every industrial country, certainly in the West, most of the essential work will be performed by about 20 per cent of the people – chiefly the most intelligent".I suspect that the same will be seen in 50 years about what some are saying today about robotics — unless of course socialism has been established by then.

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