ALB

Forum Replies Created

Viewing 15 posts - 10,156 through 10,170 (of 10,266 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • in reply to: Free World Charter #87545
    ALB
    Keymaster

    Yes, we’ve shown the 6-minute video a couple of times at meetings in London to start off a discussion. Agreed the Irish bloke behind it (Colin Turner) has some things in the Charter itself we can’t agree with, but I thought the video itself was basically ok. The FAQ is made up of the sort of questions we get and some of the answers are those we give. I think people will understand by “communism” he means what used to exist in Russia, etc. In which what he says is true.

    in reply to: Individualist anarchism lives ! #87537
    ALB
    Keymaster

    We clashed with Kevin (I’m tempted to call him Kit) Carson ten years ago on the WSM Forum. Here’s an example of his arguments against socialism (which also give some of our counter-arguments):http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/WSM_Forum/message/13851http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/WSM_Forum/message/14041http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/WSM_Forum/message/14090http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/WSM_Forum/message/14279I suppose we could review this new book if we can find a someone to read through pages and pages in praise of the market.

    in reply to: The ‘Occupy’ movement #86449
    ALB
    Keymaster
    alanjjohnstone wrote:
    Confirmed panel participants include:Conservative MP for Wycombe Steve Baker who raised a private member’s bill last year on accounting standards

    Not just that. He supports Austrian economics (ie Baron Von Mises), the Tea Party and Ron Paul. I think he wants to abolish the Bank of England. Which, I suppose, might appeal to some Occupiers.

    alanjjohnstone wrote:
    oops… a bit late for anyone who intended to attend

    It may be Wednesday out East but it’s still Tuesday here.

    in reply to: Boyle on Money and Property #87283
    ALB
    Keymaster

    And here’s what the Socialist Standard said about Mark Boyle and his silly idea of trying to live without money under capitalism:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2010/no-1267-march-2010/cooking-books-2living-without-money

    ALB
    Keymaster

    I see that on Newsnight on Wednesday Jeremy Paxman said that Giles Fraser, the dean (or whatever he was) of St Pauls who had to resign because he welcomed the Occupiers there, was once in the SWP. I wonder if he was a member at the same time as Hitchens. They could have had some interesting debates.

    in reply to: From here to there… #87280
    ALB
    Keymaster

    There’s a difference between saying that it can’t happen and that it’s not going to happen. Sounds like the second because if you accept that socialism could work (as you say your friend does) you must also logically accept, since socialism can only work if people want it to work, that it could be brought into being. Whether it ever will be is another question. The answer to which is basically that it’s not going to happen as long as most people think it’s not going to happen.But I don’t think getting socialism is just a matter of convincing enough people. At the present stage of human social development socialism is, as a matter of objective fact (not mere opinion or desire), the only framework within which the problems currently facing humanity in general and wage and salary workers in particular can be solved. Since humans learn by experience they will sooner or later realise this. All we can do, as a minority of socialists, is to help this happening sooner rather than later by pointing this out at every opportunity.

    in reply to: Link Between Airlines’ Profitability and Accident Rates #87251
    ALB
    Keymaster
    gnome wrote:
    alien1 wrote:
    invasion of the ‘Comment SpamBots’

     Cheers for the alert.  The user responsible has been temporarily blocked and the spam removed.

    There’s still a dozen or so of his crap under General Discussion that has yet to be cleared away.

    in reply to: Organised vengeance called “justice” #87278
    ALB
    Keymaster
    DJP wrote:
    Looked up who it was who came up with the ‘state as monopoly on violence’ idea thinking it was one of the anarchists, but seems that one comes from Weber, the godfather of sociology and enemy of socialism.

    I thought that before that Engels had defined the state as “armed bodies of men” defending private property but on checking can’t find this, only that this is what Lenin and Trotsky said he said. Not that it’s necessarily wrong (just a bit summary) or that Engels wouldn’t have said it. It’s just that he doesn’t seem to have done. At least I couldn’t find it.The early French Marxist Gabriel Deville defined the state in a talk on The State and Socialism in 1895 as:

    Quote:
    the public power of coercion, created and maintained in human societies by their division into classes, and which, having force at its disposal, makes laws and levies taxes.

    Surely this pre-dates Max Weber’s definition of the state as an entity which successfully claims a “monopoly on the legitimate use of violence” (even if this isn’t a bad definition).The Socialist Party inherited Deville’s definition. As, for instance, we said in our pamphlet Questions of the Day (http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/questions-day):

    Quote:
    The State is the public power of coercion. It arose out of the early division of society into classes, and developed with the development of class conflicts. It is the result of the desire to ‘keep order’: order, that is, in the interests of the class that is supreme; order to allow the ruling class to protect its property ownership and exploit the rest of the population. Through the ages the State has been controlled, as a rule, by the class that has been economically the most important. Through its control of the State and its power to levy taxes a class that has outgrown its economic importance can often continue for a time to control social affairs.
    ALB
    Keymaster

    I think you mean Variant Issue 42. They send this to us but I’ve never bothered to look at it myself as it seems to be an arty-farty cultural magazine.  So this on the face of it interesting article is probably just a one-off.Anyway, on your recommendation I’ve ploughed through it — and that’s the word as it’s very heavy going. The theme seems to be that the struggle of workers in the workplace has been (and should be) superseded by the struggle against debt as this is more likely to lead in today’s conditions to the end of “wage-labour, exchange and the state”. Doesn’t make much sense to me but it seems that this is the thesis of a whole school of thought who called themselves “communisers”.

    in reply to: William Morris quote #87225
    ALB
    Keymaster

    Thanks to the services of the Party’s Library Committee I’ve now been able to track down the exact source. It is from the letter Morris wrote to the Rev George Bainton on 10 April 1888 which is reproduced in full in The Letters of William Morris to His Family and Friends edited by Philip Henderson which is in our library.The full quote shows that Morris understood his stuff:

    Quote:
    The fact of the antagonism of classes underlies all our government and causes political parties, who are continually making exhibitions of themselves to the disgust of all sensible men; making party questions out of matters of universal public convenience, and delaying reforms of the most obvious nature long after the whole country has cried out for them. This is I think a necessary result of government—or, if you please, of political government; and what causes that government is, as I have said, the contest of classes which our competitive system forces on us.Under these conditions the business of a statesman is to balance the greed and fears of the proprietary classes against the necessities and demands of the working class. This is a sorry business, and leads to all kinds of trickery and evasion; so that it is more than doubtful whether a statesman can be a moderately honest man.

     

    ALB
    Keymaster

    Anthropolgy has certainly moved on since 1877!  One of the best books seeking to vindicate the idea of social evolution (which for a while some anthropologists denied) from a position sympathetic to Lewis Henry Morgan is The Evolution of Culture by Leslie A White that first came out in 1959.White was an active member of the DeLeonist Socialist Labor Party of America from 1929 to 1946 writing for the Weekly People, etc and remained a member afterwards till 1959 (he died in 1975). For more info on him and his anthropological theories see here and here.

    in reply to: 100% reserve banking #86746
    ALB
    Keymaster
    dogmatic wrote:
    I agree with you on everything except the bold part which has been proven wrong :Okishio’s theorem is a mathematical theorem formulated by Japanese economist Nobuo Okishio. It has had a major impact on debates about Marx’s theory of value. Intuitively, it can be understood as saying that if one capitalist raises his profits by introducing a new technique that cuts his costs, the collective or general rate of profit in society – for all capitalists – goes up.

    But the part in bold did not say that competition forcing capitalist firms to innovate so accumulating capital leads to the overall rate of profit in society going down. It just said that it led to capital accumulation (“economic growth”).Maybe your are jumping to the conclusion that because we regard ourselve as Marxists we’re committed to the view that crises are caused by the rate of profit falling as a result of labour-saving capital accumulation. In the debates on this question we have not taken this position. Admittedly, others in these debates have argued this but not us. We’ve argued that because there are counteracting tendency it is not possible to predict how the rate of profit will move, up or down, in the short or even medium run. See for instance this and this.

    ALB
    Keymaster

    That’s the SWP party not us of course!

    in reply to: Paul Mattick jnr video #87260
    ALB
    Keymaster
    Brian wrote:
    He does however make a distinction between the state sector spending and investement and the private sector spending and investment with only the latter actually being the capitalist economy.

    Yes, that struck me as odd too. At one point he says that because 35% of GDP passes via the State in the US that means only 65% of economic activity there today is actually capitalist. So, he seems to think (as his father did in Marx and Keynes) that capitalism is essentially private, free market capitalism. But then he also says (very eloquently) that capitalism has never existed without the state (which is true) so there seems to be a bit of an inconsistency here. Surely state economic activity is capitalist too?This said, I don’t think we should nit-pick too much since most of the lecture is good, especially where he develops the point that capitalism is not a system geared to meeting paying demand (let alone to real needs) but one geared to making profits and where he explains who really bears the burden of taxation. A whizz-kid on our facebook site says you can listen to him on taxation by going straight to here.A pity he didn’t answer the question on what a modern, non-capitalist society might be like since he does have the same idea of this as us (classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless) but I suppose this was because he was supposed to be giving an academic lecture. Just hope it wasn’t because he didn’t want to appear utopian.

    in reply to: 100% reserve banking #86742
    ALB
    Keymaster

    While we’re talking about banks, here’s a good criticism of the “nationalisation of the banks” put forward by many leftists and why it has nothing to do with socialism (the blogger calls it “communism” while we prefer “socialism” but anyway the two words mean the same).Here’s an extract:

    Quote:
    Communist relations preclude the existence of banks and the exchange value they express. Communist relations constitute the antithesis to bank relations whether private or public. The former are directly visible relations while the later are relations of reification. Consequently commodities cannot exist under communism. Products cannot assume the form of commodities under communist relations. They are just products. Consequently money and banks are superfluous.
Viewing 15 posts - 10,156 through 10,170 (of 10,266 total)