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It’s all very well being snooty about X-boxes but the late comrade Ron Cook used to argue that computer games were popular because it gave those who played them a sense of control that was lacking in their everyday life. If he was right, the underlining motivation is the same that will motivate the movement for socialism — except of course that socialism will give people actual control, not just a feeling of control.
I was about to say “fair enough” but unfortunately in the meantime you reverted to type !
But it is true that you don’t need to be able to read to want socialism. All that is required is an understanding that capitalism can’t be made to work in your interest and that socialism is the only way out.
It is also true that, because objectively socialism is the only way out, this will occur to people from their own experience and that they will seek to spread this conclusion.
Today, when we are so few and our task is to win the battle of ideas against those who defend capitalism or see no alternative to it, we socialists need to have a deeper understanding of why capitalism cannot be made to work in the interest of the excluded majority.
Trivial nastiness? No, they are a load of shits. Just as Labour politicians are desperate to get the fruits of office, so the Tories are desperate not to lose them. The only card they have to play is anti-immigrant prejudice and they are playing it for all it’s worth.
As Labour has stolen their clothes to become a Nasty Party too, the Tories have decided to become the Very Nasty Party.
Nor by self-styled aesthetes who enjoy fine books and who think that the rest of the working class are thickos.
Here’s the Uk government (under Borys) condemning Russia for using cluster bombs in Ukraine and declaring:
“The United Kingdom calls upon all those that continue to use such weapons to cease immediately, and calls upon all states that have not yet done so to join the Convention without delay.”
Let’s see if the UK government condemns “any use of cluster munitions by any actor” and calls on the US and Ukraine to“cease immediately” using them. Fat chances of that, exposing their hypocrisy and the Convention on Cluster Munitions as yet another scrap of paper. If they don’t they will be complicit in their use and in “the humanitarian consequences of these weapons, which have had a devastating impact on civilians in many conflict areas.”
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:
