ALB
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What’s wrong with these people? Maximilian Rubel used to argue that the leaders of the nuclear-armed states must be psychopaths to even contemplate using them.
Most states have banned the use of cluster bombs, including leading NATO states like Britain, Germany and France because of the consequences especially on children after a war is over. but not the US (nor, for that matter Russia). Now the US is to supply them to the desperate politicians in charge of the Ukraine state who nobody knows what they will do if threatened with defeat.
The first socialist leaflets were distributed door-to-door yesterday in Yiewsley in the south of the constituency. This was also a chance to pick up discarded leaflets from the candidates (Labour, Tory, SDP and Rejoin the EU, but there are 13 other candidates).
After stating that “since the Conservatives came to power in 2010, real wages have fallen so far that we are now worse off by £1373 a year”, the Labour candidate Danny Beales, stated that “Labour has a plan to put money into the pockets of local people”.
Who (if you believed them) wouldn’t vote for someone who promised that? Actually, when you analyse what’s being promised, it’s not so much putting money into people’s pockets as not taking it out.
“A Labour government”, the promise reads, “would bring your energy bills down by £1400”. Which, if carried out, would just take people back to the position they were in when the Tories came to power 13 years ago.
The whole Labour campaign nationally is based on blaming the Tory government rather than capitalism. According to Labour, the fall in real wages is all down to Tory “mismanagement” as if a government is in a position to control the way the capitalist economy works.
We are being asked to believe that, if there had been a Labour government, this wouldn’t have happened. But experience shows that no government can control the way capitalism works. All they can do is react to whatever the vagaries of the capitalist economy throw at them, and that reaction is limited by the need to accept that capitalism is a profit-driven system and so to give priority to profits over everything else, including people’s standard of living.
As the leaflet we are distributing puts it, IT’S NOT THE TORIES OR LABOUR THAT’S THE PROBLEM. IT’S CAPITALISM.
I suppose you could argue that parliamentary parties are vanguard parties in that they are a minority that seeks to lead the workers. But then we would need a new word to distinguish the structure of a reformist parliamentary party and a Leninist party, even though both are manipulative to get and obtain political power.
Anyway, here’s the Socialist Standard’s obituary of Kautsky:
But what do we think of burning religious books?
Tempting as feeling a bit of Schadenfreude might be at religions getting a bit of their own medicine, of course we can’t really approve of this either.
This is what I have been able to find, from David McLellan’s Karl Marx.His Life and Thought.
Before he moved to Paris in October 1843 Marx was of course familiar with the idea of communism, but it was only after he moved there that he came into personal contact with “communists” and concluded that “the proletariat” would be the agent to establish a communist society.
“The second of Marx’s articles in the Deutsch-franzsösishe Jahrbücher was written after his arrival in Paris : it revealed the immense impact on him by his discovery there of the class to whose emancipatiom he was to devote the rest of his life. Paris, the cultural capital of Europe had a large population of German immigrant workers – 10,000. Some had come to perfect the techniques of their various trades; some simply because they could find no work in Germany. Marx was immediately impressed:
‘When communist artisans form associations, education and propaganda are their first aims. But the very act of associating creates a new need – the need for society – and what appeared to be a means has become an end. The most striking results of this practical development are to be seen when French socialist workers meet together. Smoking, eating and drinking are no longer simply means of bringing peope together. Company, association, entertainment which also has society as its aim, are sufficient for them; the brotherhood of man is no empty phrase but a reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their toil-worn bodies.’
Marx attended the meetings of most of the French workers’ associations, but was naturally closer to the Germans – particularly to the League of the Just, the most radical of thé German secret societies and artisans whose aim was to introduce a ‘social republic’ in Germany. He knew intimately both its leaders : Ewerbeck, a doctor, and Maurer who had been a member of Ruge’s short-lived phalanstery: he did not actually join any of the societies.” (McLellanpp., 86-7)
[The source of the quote from Marx can be found here: Marx and Engels, CW4 [1844]: 313.]
“Marx’s sudden espousal of the proletarian cause [at the end of 1843] can be directly attributed (as can that of other early Germany communists such as Weitling and Hess) to his first-hand contacts with socialist intellectuals in France. Instead of editing a paper for the Rhineland bourgeoisie or sitting in his study in Kreuznach, he was now at the heart of socialist thought and action. He was living in the same house as Germain Maurer, one of the leaders of the League of the Just whose meetings he frequented. From October 1843 Marx was breathing a socialist tmosphere. It is not surprising that his surroundings made a swift impact on him.” (McLennan, p.97)
Central branch no longer meets on Discord but on Jit-si.
Meets 1st Sunday, 10.00 GMT + 1 online at
meet.jit.si/CentralBranchSPGB
The next meeting is this Sunday 9 July at whatever time GMT + 1 is wherever you are if you are free (or awake).
Yes, while Proudhon can’t be called an anarcho-capitalist he could be called an anarcho-simple-commodity-productionist.
The article you are looking for appeared in the November 2002 issue on the centenary of the publication of Lenin’s What is to be done?.
Here is the context of the passage. To back up his view that, left to themselves, the working class could only develop a trade union consciousness Lenin quoted from an article Kautsky had written in 1900 in which he stated:
“socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without and not something that arose within it spontaneously”.
The Socialist Standard commented:
“Kautsky, however, had got his history wrong. Marx certainly added to socialist theory and made a major contribution to its elaboration, but he did not invent it and then bring it to the workers. It was rather the other way round. Marx learned his socialist ideas from the communist workers he met when he lived in Paris in 1843 and 1844. They taught him both what communism – an already existing current – was and the view that it should be achieved by the political action of the “proletariat”, a view derived from the experience of the most radical plebeian elements during the French bourgeois revolution.”
The evidence for this follows in a separate post.
Apparently Farage was booted out of Coutts because his savings (with them) fell below £3 million. Poor him. He always was a member of the capitalist class anyway. Not that he did the majority of them a favour by helping to bring about Brexit. He himself thinks that they are paying him back for this. There’s a pretext for a Brexiteer conspiracy theory here. What with Boris being driven out of parliament and the downfall of Crispin Odey, one of the dodgy financiers who funded the Vote No campaign:
But he wasn’t as I pointed out before and you accepted. That he was “gung-ho” for the war was a slander put about by Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks. Trotsky, on the other hand, was gung-ho for the Russian invasion of Poland of 1919 and was actually one of the commanders of the Russian army.
”And since “homo” means man, and not men and women”
Are you sure about that? The Smaller Latin-English Dictionary gives the first meaning of “homo” as “human being” and “vir” as the word for a male person (as in “virile” in English).
Laurence Fox is a candidate in the coming by-election in Uxbridge on 20 July. Making a song and dance about withdrawing his money from Barclays could be a publicity stunt to help his election campaign.
I don’t know who thought it up but “homophobia” is an absurd word. Both its parts are wrong or misleading.
If “homo” comes from Greek, like “phobia”, it means “same”. So “homophobia” would mean “fear of the same”, the exact opposite of what it is intended to mean.
If “homo” comes from the Latin it means “human”. So “homophobia” would mean “fear of other humans”. Some people do suffer from this but psychiatrists call it “anthropophobia”.
“Phobia” means “fear” in Greek but psychiatrists use it to mean an irrational or obsessive fear of something, as in “acrophobia” (fear of open spaces) or “arachnophobia” (fear of spiders).
So “phobia” is not the right ending as those who don’t like or want to discriminate against those who engage in homosexual behaviour don’t (at least most of them don’t) have a morbid fear of them. The same applies to “Islamophobia”, “Germanphonia”, “transphobia”, etc.
But, as linguistic conservatives on this forum are always being reminded, language changes and words whatever their etymology come to mean how they are used. So we are lumbered with “homophobia” to describe dislike of homosexuals (or is it dislike of homosexual behaviour by anybody?).
In any case, whatever it is called, it is something to be opposed and instances called out, as today generally is the case in Europe and parts of the USA where what consenting adults do is up to them. As it should be.
So Farange has had his account with Coutts closed. But how did he get to open one there in the first place?
“To open an account all UK clients and expats are required to save £3m+ or borrow (such as through a mortgage) or invest more than £1m with Coutts.”
Over £3 million in savings. Not bad for a populist ranter.
Weren’t some of the funds of the NUM “sequestrated” during the miners’ strike to pay the state the fines that the courts had imposed? Straightforward “confiscation” has been much more common (and of course that is what the working class will do to the physical assets of the capitalist class once they win control of political power).
For the moment I think they have only frozen Russian financial assets. Sequestrating or confiscating them would be tricky legally and might set precedents they don’t want.
One of these would be to undermine the role of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency used to settle international payments. In fact even freezing Russia’s assets may have done this, as other states may now be less inclined to hold their financial reserves in dollars if they can avoid this in case this should happen to them.
