ALB
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Very interesting and confirmation of what we would expect to happen when capitalism gets into more difficulty than usual. There’s an article by a US comrade in the February 2010 Socialist Standard on a similar poll, with a similar but not so striking result, done in 2009. It’s here: http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2010/no-1266-february-2010/material-worldamerican-public-opinion-and-s-word
We’ve got “islamo-leftism” here too, originally sponsored by the SWP and now embodied in the Respect Party. Fortunately, this party appears to be going down the drain. These trotskyists bear a heavy responsibility for encouraging “communalist” politics into Britain whereas the socialist policy is to unite workers on a class basis rather than divide them on religious or so-called “ethnic” lines.
It’s well produced but that’s all. Otherwise it’s run of the mill conspiracy theory crap (freemasons, microchips,etc). It’s only saving grace is that the banker is called “Montagu” rather than “Rothschild”.It’s wrong on two main points;1. Although there is a global elite they don’t control what happens in the world. They make certain key decisions and benefit from the way capitalism works but they don’t control it. Nobody does as capitalism is uncontrollable.2. The global elite is not made up just of bankers, not even mainly but of the ultra-rich in other fields too, eg Bill Gates, the oil-rentier sheiks of the Middle East and the Tata family in India. In this year’s Sunday Times Rich List the field of activity of the top two is listed as “steel”, followed by Abramovich and the Duke of Westminister, who are not bankers either.
Here’s another Peter Joseph interview with RT (on 15 September). It’s a good outline of the Zeitgeist case. Interestingly, he comes out as being explicitly against capitalism and at one point even uses the word “democratic” in relation to the “resource-based economy”.We wouldn’t agree with his economic analysis about the debt burden and technological unemployment leading to an economic collapse of capitalism, but to give the man his due he is able to put a good case for a world society without frontiers and without the need for money based on the world’s resources being the common heritage of all.
Here’s their account of what happened. Pity we never got round to organising a presentation there ourselves (as originally intended).
Yes, why not? She’s just been appointed professor of drawing at the Royal Academy so we can write to her there asking about the thinking behind her £50 note design. The letter’s in the post.Let’s hope she doesn’t turn out to be another Sinead O’Connor who in an interview with the NME in 1992 said:
Quote:So the only solution to all the problems in the world — starvation, homelessness, joblessness, etc — is to get rid of money (quoted in the January 1993 Socialist Standard).but who later turned out to have all sorts of weird mystical and religious views.
Thanks. Now we can (and will) use the quote with confidence. I take it it’s from the letter he wrote to the Rev George Bainton on 10 April 1888?The quote appeared in a copy of a letter sent by a member calling himself “Karl Marx II” and writing from Putney to the Morning Leader. The letter was published in the issue of 26 September (if any historian wants to check) but without the part which quoted from Morris.What is interesting is that early Party members should have been aware of what Morris wrote here, which shows a certain continuity from the anti-reformist views of the Socialist League of which Morris was a member from 1884-1890, no doubt via the Social Democratic Federation to which Morris had become reconciled by the time he died in 1896 and from which the Party sprang.
We do get occasional enquiries asking about the “economic calculation argument”. We refer them to this article on this site here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/depth-articles/socialism/why-we-dont-need-moneyAnd also to this article from the June 1993 Socialist Standard (not yet up here, but available elsewhere on the internet here).So, we’ve got anti-ECA material and we do use it.
I already did, but he seems to be advocating violence whereas I would have thought that non-violence would be a better tactic for the Occupy Movement. At one point he criticises those who say that the police are part of the 99%, but don’t we say “All Coppers are Workers” (even if some are also Bastards)?
Christopher Hitchens was a member of the “International Socialists” (IS) from 1966 to 1976. This wasn’t the worst of the Trotskyist groups (after all, they did recognise Russia to be a form of state capitalism). When he joined, IS was even flirting with the non-Leninist views of Rosa Luxemburg. After May 1968 , which Tony Cliff analysed as failing because of a lack of a vanguard party, Cliff decided that his organisation needing “Leninization”. Which happened, culminating in the foundation in 1977 of the SWP as a classic Leninist vanguard party. After ceasing to be a Trotskyist Hitchens seems to have still retained a soft spot for Luxemburg as in this book review dating from June this year. But his support for the US invasion of Iraq ruined his reputation with the ex-Trotskyist left, as that other ex-Trotskyist Tariq Ali explained on the BBC the other day.
There was a comment by a Party member on Hitchens on Richard Dawkins’s site in 2008 here. Not very charitable for an obituary but then by all accounts Hitchens wasn’t in to being charitable.As to King Jong II, what can we say other than that he is being succeeded by his son King Jong III (and that he was guilty of dragging the name of socialism through the mud in support of the dynastic state-capitalist dictatorship in North Korea)?
PaulB wrote:I’ve got a copy of a 2008 volume Law at Work, produced by the Labour Research Department. According to that, the 2003 regulations cover discrimination on grounds of religion and belief, where the definition is ‘any religion, religious belief, or similar philosophical belief’. I take it that political views aren’t covered by this, as they would not count as ‘similar’.That seems precisely to have been the issue: to what extent can a political view be regarded as a “philosophical belief”. It all seems to have started from the case of a man called Nicholson who had a bee in his bonnet about climate change. That the rise in CO2 in the atmosphere has largely been caused by human activity is a fact rather than a belief, but the Tribunal got round this by arguing that the “moral” conclusion that Nicholson derived from this (that he should do everything he could to reduce his and everybody else’s “carbon footprint”) was and so he won his case.Compensation culture lawyers then rushed in and ever since Employment Tribunals have been trying to close the opening. Another rejected case is that of a 9/11 Truther who lost. He was more fortunate than the Trotskyists as his views were denounced only as “absurd” rather than “repugnant”.I don’t think we would want our views to be described as a “philosophical belief” similar to religion, would we (except perhaps to win a court case)? Surely, our case is based on scientific facts not belief.
Three of us braved temperatures of 3-4 degrees to complete the Party’s commitment to have a stall at Occupy St Pauls for the six weeks up till Xmas. We didn’t stay for long but still did the usual leafleting and had the usual discussions. Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn was announced as speaking somewhere but we couldn’t find him. We noticed that the the walls had been cleared of all their posters and that empty tents had been removed. An occupier explained that this had been done as a concession to the church authorities to help restore a sense of normality to the area. Pity really even if some of the posters were barking mad, eg those supporting David Icke, as well as all variety of conspiracy and currency crank theories. A couple of ours were up there too.The civil action by the City authorities to remove the camp is being heard tomorrow at the Royal Courts of Justice. Listen to the news to see what happens.
People Before Profit’s assessment of their result can be found on their site. Also there are various videos of George Hallam’s contributions at hustings meetings. This is something we could do of course and might be a reason for contesting appropriate by-elections again.. The technical quality is not very good except for him on the economic crisis and who he is. The political quality reveals him to be a common or garden reformist, advocating for instance municipal banks to help local businesses and a revival of the old Giro Bank. The good thing is that he doesn’t mention socialism or claim to be a socialist. It’s a pity others such as the TUSC, Militant and the SWP don’t do the same, ie propose their reforms without claiming to be socialists.
