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It didn’t used to be when Ted Knight was around:
https://www.breviarystuff.org.uk/simon-hannah-radical-lambeth-1978-1991/
The election leaflets have arrived from the printers. Only 2000, since although the electorate is 6,400 and the number of separate households with separate letter-boxes about half that, the number of accessible letter-boxes will be less with gated communities on the waterfront and large parts of the rest social housing blocks. We may still be able to get into some of these.
The leaflets have a QR code which will allow us to count how many went that far.
We will begin distributing this weekend.
The Labourites have already started:
https://events.labour.org.uk/event/389747
Their candidate is a lecturer in philosophy at Liverpool university.
Useful reminder that falling “inflation” does not mean falling prices but that prices are rising less rapidly:
“A recent National Institute of Social and Economic Research survey found that only 44 per cent of respondents understood that ‘inflation falling from 10.1 per cent to 6.1 per cent’ would mean prices rising but more slowly. As many as a third thought it meant prices had fallen.”
A reason, no doubt, why people who know from experience that prices are still rising are sceptical when the government claims to be “beating inflation”. But even if the government achieves its stated aim of reducing “inflation” to 2 per cent a year, prices would still be rising.
Tribute to Stephen from one of his contacts in Russia with links to articles by him in English and Russian:
“I come here with one message today – that the next Labour Government will build an economy that works for working people with a New Deal for Working People. And Labour will start by bringing forward an Employment Rights Bill to legislate for this within the first 100 days of entering office. That is a cast-iron commitment.”
The cast-iron commitment of course is to introduce an Employment Rights Bill not to “build an economy that works for working people”. A Labour government can do the first but we can say with cast-iron certainty that they cannot do the second. For the simple reason that that’s not possible.
As Labour supports the capitalist system this is a pledge to make the capitalist economy work for the benefit of wage-working majority and their dependants. But capitalism is a profit-making system that can work only for the profit-taking few. Both the theoretical knowledge of how capitalism works and the experience of over a hundred years of failure of reformist governments to make it work in any other way demonstrate this.
This empty promise that “the next Labour Government will build an economy that works for working people” has been taken down in writing and will be used in evidence against them.
If the suggestion in that Wikipedia entry is that Dietzgen thought there is a “proletarian logic” different from a “bourgeois logic” then that goes against what he wrote elsewhere. For instance
Just re-read his 11th letter on logic which is cited as the source of the Wikipedia claim. It is true that he uses the term “proletarian logic” a couple of times but not in the sense of a logic special to the proletariat. He seems, rather, to mean that the proletariat has inherited science from the past and that it is its duty to defend and continue it.
Also, far from praising Dietzgen, Lenin criticised his “monism” (“that thought is as material event as any other”) as a concession to idealism.
In any event, YMS’s Geordies were not using any kind of logic, proletarian or otherwise.
There an ongoing discussion of this by-election amongst others here:
https://vote-2012.proboards.com/thread/17581/local-council-elections-october-2023
I like this one:
“I remember Daniel Lambert from when he was SPGB candidate in Brixton Hill in 2013. His answer to every question at the hustings meeting was to smash capitalism.”
Here he is doing just that:
https://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2023/03/danny-lambert-video.html?m=1
You beat me to it Robbo. But, oh dear, we have not been treated to such one-sided propaganda for one side in a war since we parted company with True Scotsman.
Incidentally, I don’t claim any originality for a flag being a rag at the end of a pole. It comes from Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary:
“FLAG, n. A colored rag borne above troops and hoisted on forts and ships.”
Here’s a couple more of his perspicacious observations:
“PATRIOT, n. One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.
PATRIOTISM, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.
In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.”“BOUNDARY, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of the other.”
Here’s more on our LibDem opponent:
https://www.lambethlibdems.org.uk/vauxhall-war-by-election-candidate
He talks a lot here about “our community” as if all those living in the ward formed a community with a common interest. But this is an area which physically shows the division of society into two classes. The rich living in luxury high rise flats overlooking the Thames. The poor living in social housing away from the river. The class division couldn’t be more evident.
They seem to be going for the gay vote which is not insignificant in this part of London:
Yes, the best immediate thing that could happen from a working class point of view, is a ceasefire to stop the killings, maimings and destruction of homes and infrastructure. Ok, that would freeze the situation as the existing “line of contact” but at least workers whichever side of it they find themselves on will stop being killed — the absolute priority from a working class point of view. It won’t solve any other working class problem but at least it would stop that. The is no justification for any other position and those who urge the fighting to continue are, as you say, to be condemned in the strongest possible terms.
“Workers Power”, the Trotskyist group that Paul Mason was once in, and him have both pursued the same trajectory. Both have entered the Labour Party and both support the Ukraine state in its war with the Russian state.
Here’s the position of the League for a Fifth (or should that be the Fiftieth?) International:
“ … Russia, under its autocratic leader, Vladimir Putin, is clearly the aggressor and the Ukrainians, who rallied in huge numbers to the defence of their country, have every right to fight back and drive the invader from their country … “
https://fifthinternational.org/content/first-year-ukraine-war
It’s a validly expressed point but certainly not a valid point.
Incidentally, Mason has apparently been having difficulty in getting selected as a Labour candidate. Could it be that he once wrote a book called Postcapitalism and that the Labour leadership don’t want to risk a candidate who envisages going beyond capitalism, both because they are afraid the Tories might use it as a stick against them and because they don’t want to go beyond capitalism?
“Slava Ukraini” has an unsavoury history. During the last world war in Nazi-conquered Poland (which then included western Ukraine) the Ukrainian nationalists were allowed some freedom. When they shouted this slogan they raised their outstretched right hand above their shoulder. No doubt it was what they shouted when they massacred Poles and Jews.
It is better translated as “Gory to Ukraine” which it has only ever brought.
Here are the rags at the end of a pole that Lizzie is prepared to die and kill for and, worse, urge others from afar to die and kill for:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Austrian_flags
The good soldier Svejk had other ideas. Hopefully there are some of the them in the Ukranian and Russian armed forces.
I liked the one for the Austrian navy, an armed tourist cruise ship on the Danube, to ward off attacks by Hungarian or Slovak cruise ships?
Fortunately, Austria is not and cannot be a member of NATO and so cannot supply arms to Ukraine to keep the killing and destruction going. Not that that need stop Lizzie or Paul Mason signing up as a mercenary to fight for the Ukrainian regime and plant its flag on the end of a pole on some bombed out village or town.
Here’s something on one of our opponents — the Green Party candidate, standing for an impossible return to the small-scale capitalism from which the present corporate capitalism evolved while in the meantime trying to impose a green agenda on existing capitalism in place of its built-in priority of profit-making (another impossibility).
A rather high-profile candidate for a local council by-election but no doubt to help raise her profile as the local Greens’ candidate for the parliamentary constituency of Vauxhall in the general election some time next year.
Nominations closed on 4pm yesterday and it’s just us against the usual suspects — Labour, Tory, Liberal, Greens:
The ward is Labour and normally they should win again. The electorate is 6,400 but last May only 27% voted. It will be even less this time as a by-election.
