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jondwhite wrote:Was Lenin influenced by Nechayev?
I don’t think so, but he was influenced by the same wing of the general non-Marxist anti-Tsarist revolutionary movement, i.e. those who favoured anti-Tsarist revolutionaries organising as an elite and highly-disciplined vanguard of professional revolutionaries. This is pointed out at the end of this review from the July 1970 Socialist Standard of Lenin’s notorious un-Marxist work What Is To Be Done?That reminds me: 80 or so articles from the 1970s have now been added to the Archives section on this site.
Just listened to this programme on peer-to-peer lending on BBC Radio 4. It can be heard again here and on the radio tomorrow at 9pm and next Wednesday at 3pm.It’s about cutting out banks as intermediaries and people lending directly to borrowers. No nonsense in the programme about banks being able to lend without having the money themselves. It seems that in fact you can get a better rate here as both a lender and a borrower than banks offer. But this wouldn’t be the case if banks could create money to lend out of thin air while peer-to-peer websites and call centres have to pay interest to lenders.
SocialistPunk wrote:Hello to everyone, just joined.I’ve been watching this forum on and off for a few months and thought, why not get in there.I used to be a member of the SPGB North East branch going back a few years.Welcome. This is a coincidence. I don’t know if you are still in the North East but there is still a branch their with 16 members on the books. But it can’t be said to be thriving. And at the moment we are trying to revive it on the basis of the new model we have adopted of a regional branch (meeting in a regional centre on the Saturday or Sunday during the day rather than in a town on a weekday evening). This has worked in other parts of the country. We need all the help anyone can offer to get something going again in the North East where we’ve put in a lot of work over the years contesting Westminster, European and local elections.
SocialistPunk wrote:I agree that the party approach needs updating, and that far too much time is devoted to fruitless argument with left wing groups.I’m not sure we do as much of that as we did at one time. But it’s still true that most of those who have joined for the first time in recent years have still come from the “left” (Labour, Communist, Militant) though a couple have come from the Liberals and even one from UKIP (don’t know what that means).
It’s now on the Socialist Standard Archives section here (along with other new stuff from the 1970s):http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1970s/1971/no-807-november-1971/right-be-lazy
We beat them to it, by 40 years ! Here’s the editorial from the November 1971 Socialist Standard, also handed out as a leaflet at the TUC in Brighton in September 1972:
Quote:The Right to be LazyIn the course of the French revolution of 1848 the workers of Paris went into the streets to demand “The Right to Work”. Ever since, whenever unemployment has grown, trade unionists have demanded the same “right”. In fact the Clydeside shipworkers are supposed to be asserting it at this very momentBut what is this high-sounding Right to Work? To the average trade unionist it is probably the “right” to have a job and the pay packet that goes with it. It would, in other words, be more accurately called “The Right to Employment” or “The Right to Work for Wages”It should not be necessary to argue that under capitalism no such right exists, nor could it. Capitalism is based on the ownership of means of production by a minority. The rest have no alternative but to sell their ability to work — when they can — to one or other of these employers. But the employers are not philanthropists. They do not employ people in order to give these employees a living. They only employ people when they have calculated that they themselves can make a profit from selling the goods the workers produce.Production, and therefore employment, is determined under capitalism by the profit motive. The rule “no profit, no production” is the guiding economic principle. If those who own the means of production calculate — as many have done recently — that they cannot make a profit by selling the goods their factories could turn out, then they will run those factories below full capacity or even close them down altogether. The result is the mounting redundancies and growing unemployment we are now experiencing.This is the normal way capitalism works and is one reason why the Right to Work is a completely unrealistic demand. It amounts to demanding that employers abandon the profit motive and operate their system on some other principle. But they could not do this even if they wanted to, since what they can do is limited by the working of capitalism’s market forces. Nor could they be forced to do it even by the most militant trade union or political action. If pressed too far, they would merely shut up shop. The stark fact is that capitalism creates, and needs to create, rising unemployment from time to time.So, our average trade unionist may now be thinking, are you saying that in order to get the Right to Work we must get rid of capitalism and establish Socialism? No, we are not! We are not in favour of the Right to Work in the first place. Remember the Right to Work is merely a fancy way of referring to the Right of Employment, the Right to Work for Wages. In our view, this is demanding the Right To Be Exploited. It involves accepting capitalism and its wages system. The employer/employee relationship is based on exploitation since, if the employer is to make a profit, the wages he pays his employees must be less than the value of what they produce. The system of employment for wages shows that human brain and muscle power has become a mere commodity, to be bought and sold like some object. It signifies that those who actually produce the wealth of society are excluded from ownership and control of the means of production and so have no choice but to operate them for the employers on the employers’ terms — and at the employers’ convenience. The wage packet is in fact a badge of slavery.No, Socialists don’t want the Right to Work. It would be more accurate to say that we want its opposite, the Right To Be Lazy. This isn’t as way-out as might seem. Just think of developments in technology over the past hundred or so years, developments which are still going on, and you will see that the bulk of the hard grind of production is now done, and could be done even more, by machines. Automation could now relieve human beings of the burden of boring toil. Nobody need do a job he doesn’t like doing. The set working day could be reduced to two or three hours, freeing men to engage in the activities of their choice, including even producing useful things.Of course, this will never happen as long as the means of production are the property of a minority. It could only happen in a society where the factories, farms and other places where wealth is produced are commonly owned by all the people. There would then be no employers, nor wage-earners. Instead everybody would be an equal member of a free community organised to produce an abundance of good-quality consumer goods for people to take freely according to their needs.Actually, so long as it is enjoyable, work is a natural human activity, not to say need. In this sense to talk of the Right To Be Lazy can be misleading. But although men will always work, there is no reason for it take the form of boring toil. It could and should be interesting and so become like some of today’s leisure-time activities — done for the fun of it.To convert work from boring toil to creative activity is now possible. The ethic of hard work — necessary perhaps in the past to build up the means of production to the point where they can now turn out abundance — is outdated, and worse: it helps to keep capitalism going. No five words better sum up the Socialist’s emphatic rejection of the dogma that boring toil must be the lot of mankind than the slogan “The Right To Be Lazy”. Speed the day when trade unionists begin to demonstrate for this rather than some spurious Right to Work.Just came across this, from our website here, while looking for something else:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/depth-articles/society-and-culture/imagine-john-lennonI see it’s also on the World Socialist Movement site:http://www.worldsocialism.org/articles/imagine_by_john_lennon.phpDoes that make it “the Party Case”? !
Interesting one. Our “official” position is that the left/right political division is false and that therefore the words ‘leftwing’ and ‘rightwing’ only serve to give it credibility. So we don’t use them — in theory. In practice, however, we do, ironically because they are in general use and we’re just following how other people use them to make ourselves understood on their terms. It’s the same with the term “middle class”. We say it doesn’t exist but we still use it, at least in conversation.
DJP wrote:I suggest you contact the general secretary to get your email address added to the list.He was only appointed less than 2 weeks ago at the Skype EC meeting of 4 August! In view of the super-efficiency of the Assistant Secretary I imagine he’s already been added to the list.
TheOldGreyWhistle wrote:So why cant you find an excuse for Lennon’ support for the IRA?Actually, the article, after setting out Marx’s defence of his position, ends up saying we still think he was wrong:
Quote:But whatever Marx and Engels supported, we in the Socialist Party of Great Britain and the World Socialist Party of Ireland do not agree that Socialists should support, or should have supported, Irish Nationalism any more than they should support nationalism anywhere else.Basically, I’m on your side. I don’t think that the fact that Lennon supported the IRA detracts from the socialist sentiments expressed in “Imagine” or should stop us using it to spread socialist ideas.
TheOldGreyWhistle wrote:Karl Marx supported Irish independence but I am sure we would find some defense.You’re right. We did, actually. It’s just been added to the Socialist Standard archive here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1970s/1972/no-820-december-1972/marx-and-engels-ireland
They should choose a better name than “minimalism” then. If we say to people they’ll have to “minimise” their consumption in socialism we’ll get even less far than we do now. I agree, though, that the concept of “ownership” will come to be replaced by that of “use”.
Surely the issue is (or should have been) not whether or not John Lennon was a socialist (clearly he wasn’t) but whether or not his song “Imagine” expressed socialist sentiments. I think it does. Anyway, I’m going to have it played at my funeral.
jondwhite wrote:The practical suggestions here of flags/banners, poster/placards are great and well worth us doing.This question of flags and banners needs more thought. What is the idea? That we take part in the “march” with them? As it’s a trade union event I don’t see any objection in principle, but is it practical and the best use of our resources? This would mean that the 20 or so members and sympathisers likely to turn up would have to group together (which past experience suggests won’t be easy to bring about) and stay together, isolated from the other participants except those immediately next to us (who could well be some Trot or Maoist group). In other words, not do what we usually do at these events: scatter ourselves along the route to hand out leaflets.We will have a stall in Hyde Park so a few flags and banners could be displayed there, but then there’s the question of the wording (and the colour: using red doesn’t find unanimity amongst members), presumably they’d say something like “Abolish the Wages System” and/or “From according to their ability, to each according to their needs”?
She was better singing that than “Abide with me” at the opening ceremony. Maybe “Imagine” will become the new Olympic hymn. That really would be a “legacy” of the Games but I don’t think “Imagine No Religion” will go down too well in Saudi Arabia, the USA, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, etc, etc. I don’t suppose it was shown on Saudi TV but I wonder what they thought about it in America where being an atheist is worse than being a communist.
