ALB
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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.
Is this because of their views or because they have had payments in from Russia? The banks are shit-scared of being fined for breaking sanctions. Even if the UK authorities let them get away with it the US authorities might not.
Let’s see if Laurence Fox has his closed. In any event, his party can’t accept donations from abroad (nor can we).
That’s not the impression George Orwell had of the ILP of which he was a member for a while. This is what he writes of them in The Road to Wigan Pier:
“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.
One day this summer I was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old men got on to it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink, and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on top of the bus.
The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured ‘Socialists’, as who should say, ‘Red Indians’. He was probably right–the I.L.P. were holding their summer school at Letchworth.”Your old dad must have been the odd one out if he didn’t wear sandals.
So Engels made crude jokes about male homosexuality that might have gone down well in the gentleman’s club he frequented when he worked in Manchester and were probably echoed in working men’s clubs up and down the country.
So what? Does that invalidate his writings on politics, economics and history? At the time — and for many decades after — most people were against it. I am sure Darwin would have been and I dare say Einstein too. Are their scientific findings to be rejected too? It’s a classic ad hominem argument.
Even as late as 1953 C. L. R. James (who I think was associated with News and Letters) in his book on the author of Moby Dick Herman Melville, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, saw homosexuality as a vice of a degenerate ruling class.
Counterfire is a breakaway Trotskyist group from the SWP. If he’s one of them I don’t suppose he’d be interested in us or, for that matter, us in him.
Even so it can’t be a bad thing that sone Trotskyist groups are not taking sides. Trotskyy was of course a Ukrainian by today’s standards. Not that Ukrainian nationalists have claimed him as one of theirs. They prefer Stepan Bandera.
I am afraid I wasn’t allowed to open the link to the article. Maybe because it is a Russian registered site and, here in the “West, many such sites are blocked in case they contain “disinformation”. The way to deal with “disinformation” is to expose it as such not to ban it. But the West wants a monopoly to propagate its own “disinformation”.
What we said about this in 1911.
