ALB
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TheOldGreyWhistle wrote:the word ‘support’ seems to be a big problem.
I think that’s right, because of its ambiguity. It can mean anything from “good luck to you” to giving financial and political aid.In 1969 the EC drew up a Policy Statement on Reforms which was later endorsed by Conference. The last part of it read:
Quote:the EC holds that while declaring our sympathy with the exploited in their resistance to the exploiters it is essential, in order to avoid any possibility of misunderstanding, and in the light of the Party’s attitude of not advocating reforms that we should avoid using the word ‘support’ in relation to actions of reformist parties, groups and individuals.In other words, although we do support “the exploited in their resistance to the exploiters” we should not actually say so in case we are misunderstood as offering support in the strong sense !I’m not sure this really solved the dilemma in that the actions referred to in relation to which the word “support” should not be used are those of “reformist, parties, groups and individuals”. This leaves out actions by “groups and individuals”, eg ordinary non-political workers trying to survive under capitalism, who might not fall into the category of reformist.In any event, everyone has always been agreed on the key principle that “we do not advocate reforms”.
Personally I think Hegel is a load of mumbo-jumbo. I’ve started to try and read him 3 or 4 times but gave up each time because his language is virtually incomprehensible. The only book of his I read to the end is his Philosophy of History but that wasn’t actually written by him but by one of his students based on notes they took of his lectures. If I remember rightly it’s idealist even religious nonsense. We don’t have to like Hegel just because that was the intellectual background in Germany at the time Marx and Engels became communists and from which they emerged.As to dialectics, that depends on what you mean. If what is meant is that it is some force working in nature (as Engels sometimes gave the impression), then that’s wrong. If you mean that it is a way of trying to understand phenomenon we experience in nature, that’s another matter.
robbo203 wrote:Nevertheless the SPGB supports trade unionism in principle and I see no reason why it should not support direct action in principle too . Accordingt to Adam it has already declared its support for squatting.That’s not quite what I said. Nor what the quote from the 1969 Socialist Standard did. It said:
Quote:The Socialist Party supports the efforts of workers to improve their housing conditions under capitalism — even by squatting.What this says is that we support the principle of workers struggling to improve their housing (as other) conditions under capitalism and that we consider squatting to be an example of this. Another example would be tenants association, which some members have been and are still active in in the same way that we are in trade unions.You yourself have often made the valid point that there are not just two possible working class activities — reformism and revolution — but three, the third being working class activity to survive under capitalism which is neither one nor the other and which we don’t denounce as reformism. Reformism is political, but these other activities are what might be called “sub-political” (a better term than “ditrect action”, which is often “reformism by blows”). You can’t oppose them without incurring Stuart’s criticism of not being an ordinary decent human being. Anyway, who are we to be judgemental in such matters and tell people not to squat, shoplift, grow their own vegetables, etc. or to do these things, for that matter?Another anecdote: two party members were once on the platform at Clapham North tube station after a meeting at Head Office when they saw somebody getting ready to commit suicide by jumping in front of the train. One comrade rushed to try and stop him. The other comrade said he shouldn’t have as this was reformist. I don’t know if this tale is true but the other comrade was in the old North West London branch.
Yet another news item, in today’s Daily Telegraph, confirming that banks are essentially just intermediaries between savers and borrowers. It’s a report of a talk by a top official of the Bank of England in which he speculates that developments in communications technology might lead to the elimination of banks as “middle men”. Arguing that banks could become “disintermediated”, he said:
Quote:With open access to borrower information, held centrally and virtually, there is no reason why end-savers and end-investors cannot connect directly. The banking middle men may in time become the surplus links in the chain. Where music and publishing have led, finance could follow.No nonsense here about banks surviving because they can create money out of thin air and so don’t need savers.
Another news item for the file (from today’s Times):
Quote:Mr Osborne will begin next week the Government’s so-called credit-easing programme under which the Treasury will underwrite £20 billion of bank borrowing to fund cheaper lending to small businesses.If banks can create money out of thin air why would they need to borrow money to fund loans to small businesses ? I can see why, in this case, they’d like their loans to be underwritten by the government but not why they would need to borrow the money to make the loans. Answer: banks can’t create money to lend out of thin air.
robbo203 wrote:I vaguely recall an old issue of the Socialist Standard (from the bad old says of 70s?) severely attacking forms of direct action such as the squatters movement in the most trenchant terms. In retrospect, such attitudes have no place in a revolutionary socialist party. None at all. I hope and trust things are different todayActually, Robin, your memory (or rather folk myths about the Party in the past) has got it the wrong way round. The article you are referring to appeared in the April 1969 Socialist Standard entitled “Squatters and the Housing Problem” actually said:
Quote:The Socialist Party supports the efforts of workers to improve their housing conditions under capitalism — even by squatting. But socialists also point out that there is no solution`to the housing problem inside capitalism, and even if the agitation of those who support the squatters suceeds for the families they are now trying to help, future generations will still face the same misery and hardship of homelessness. Only in a society in which production is carried on solely to satisfy human wants, without anyone having to worry about where next week’s rent or next month’s mortgage repayment is coming from, will the housing problem find a solution.(my italics)You are right to the extent that some EC and Party members complained about this, but the statement stood.So, it was not a case of the Party saying that socialists did not support squatting and those members who weren’t against it complaining, but of the Party saying it did and those members who were against it (or at least against saying that the Party did) complaining.On the anectodal level, I remember one party member and his partner who were squatting, but not for any revolutionary end, just to save up money to pay for a mortgage. Later on, there were actually a couple of Party squats (well, squats composed of Party members) in London. I wasn’t one of them but the current Party Treasurer was. The mid-60s to the mid-70s were in fact the good old days !
Never come across them myself but are they based in the UK or outside, eg in America or Australia? There must be some leftwing trainspotter on this forum who can place them.
I see they’ve followed Comrade Andy Cox’s example and launched a spoof official petition themselves which the government is obliged to publish on its website. At least I think it’s not to be taken seriously as I don’t think they believe than a “resource-based economy” could be established just in Britain any more than we think socialism could or that HM Government is going to try to do either. Don’t think much of their claim, though, that “the continuing decay and eventual demise of the market/monetary Socio-economic system under which the world operates is a mathematical certainty”. Mathematical certainty !?
stuartw2112 wrote:Relatedly, what do you make of this, specifically the claim that money did not exist in the Soviet Union? http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004736Ah (or should that be aagh) Hillel Ticktin! All his arguments start from the basic premise (shared by Trotsky) that capitalism is essentially private enterprise capitalism and that state intervention is a negation of “capitalism”. This means that for him (as for Trotsky, if not for all trotskyists) “state capitalism” is a contradiction in terms. So, for him, the USSR couldn’t have been capitalist and the notes and coins that circulated there were not money in the sense analysed by Marx. In fact, he seems to be saying that money in Britain, etc isn’t really money either because it is now managed by the state.Apart from that, most of what he claims in the latter part of his article (presumably the transcript of a talk) are facts as wrong. For instance, Marx did not call money lent at interest “fictitious capital”. For him, this was a notional capital sum arrived at by notionally converting a future regular income stream into a sum that if invested would produce the income in question as interest; what accountants and actuaries called “capitalization”. Such sums of money can be bought and sold. Of course such fictitious capital (and a variation of it called “securitization”) did play a part in the financial bubble that collapsed in 2007-8 — when the stream of future income on which they were based didn’t happen the capital sum calculated on the basis of it was reduced to zero. putting some financial institutions in serious trouble.Basically, I don’t think Ticktin needs to be taken seriously here (though he does seem to be the permanent flavour of the month with the Weekly Worker people).
ALB wrote:I’m due to speak at a Zeitgeist event in Cardiff on Sunday where one of the other speakers is from the Eat for Free Project which seems to be into this sort of thing. I’ll report back on what he says.The speaker from Eat for Free Project didn’t turn up, but growing your own food was one of the recommendations made by a ZM lecturer, Vivak Shori, for surviving in the coming period of severe deflation with falling prices, massive unemployment and shortages that he predicted would be coming within the next 2-5 years due to oil supplies running out with no effective substitute in sight and to the debt bubble bursting. A rather more alarming reason for growing your own food. I challenged him to a bet that his predicted deflation wouldn’t happen (to be called in in 2017).
I’m due to speak at a Zeitgeist event in Cardiff on Sunday where one of the other speakers is from the Eat for Free Project which seems to be into this sort of thing. I’ll report back on what he says. Apart from putting the case for world socialism I’ll be concentrating my criticism of course on the currency crank from Positive Money.
Laurens’s “memories” must be failing him once again. All the sources I’ve been able to track down (admittedly only on the internet) give Bevan’s 1952 book as the source of Smillie’s account. If somebody can find an earlier source we’ll print a correction.All the other statements in Laurens’s letter are wrong, except what he says about the IWW not being an anarchist or anti-political organisation.
I know Graeber is against the wages system. We said so in the February Socialist Standard here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2012/no-1290-february-2012/cooking-books-after-revolutionI’m not sure this is enough to say he’s also a sort of Marxist. After all, isn’t he putting forward a quite different theory of the origin and nature on money (as debt) to that of Marx (as a commodity)?
Apparently the link I gave doesn’t work. So here it is:http://www.weebly.com/uploads/6/7/3/6/6736569/chattopadhyay_marx_vs_lenin_countdown.doc
Interesting I agree, but Fred Harrison is a prominent follower of Henry George and his land tax proposal. I heard him speak at a meeting organised by Occupy at the Bank of Ideas a month or so ago. He lost the sympathy of the audience by refusing to condemn “capitalism” (on the grounds that you can’t have production without capital!).Michael Hudson is a radical, non-Marxist economist who in this article “From Marx to Goldman Sachs” makes out Marx to be some sort of crank who sees banks lending imaginary money.I’ve only read some articles by Graeber (not his book, though Hudson probably has) but he seems to be lending credence (or perhaps reflecting) the widespread view today that the problem is not production for profit but lending at interest. And that, therefore, as Hudson concludes, all that is required is action against finance capital rather than capitalism as such (as Graeber is some sort of anarchist I don’t suppose this is his position even if his arguments lend credence to it).
