Bijou Drains
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“Or how about “is it possible to be a socialist and sexist”? Perhaps that was the point of the resolution.”
The fact that you have to say perhaps, means that even you are in doubt about what the motion was intended to do and if the intention was that, it was a flawed way of doing it.
In my view what exacerbated the situation even further was the stance taken by some proposers of the motion at conference. Instead of holding their hands up and admitting that it had been badly worded, they doubled down and rather than trying to understand the misgivings of fellow comrades started to try an instruct members about various terms used to describe feminism!
Perhaps it would have been better for the Lancaster Branch to admit they’d dropped a bollock and explain exactly what they meant in the clearest possible terms, this should have been quite easy for them, after all apparently they’ve read an A level Sociology text book
Robbs, leaving aside the disagreement between yourself and Marcos, you still haven’t really addressed the point that I made about the Feminism motion.
If, as seems to be the unanamous opinion of everyone in the Party, the party has always stood for gender equality, and that Feminism can be defined in those terms, and further that was the meaning intended by the resolution, what was the point of the resolution.
If the point was merely to clarify what the party’s position is, can we expect further resolutions to conference stating the bleedin’ obvious, like it “is possible for a Socialist to be a Democrat”, “it is possible for a Socialist to believe in Common Owneership”, “it is possible for a Socialist to belive that the sun rises in the East”, “it is possible for Socialist to believe that the bears shit in the forest”, “it is possible for socialists to believe that the Pope has got a pointy fucking hat”
Because of the nature of the resolution, is there any surprise that some members have asked the question “why have they put forward a motion such as that?”
Going a little further if that was the meaning placed on feminism (and I’m not saying it wasn’t the meaning placed on it by Lancaster Branch), why did the resolution not say “it is impossible to be a Socialist and NOT be a feminist”.
As stated by Adam, the continued use of terms such as Patriarchy (again I accept this is a term open to different interpretations) only serves to muddy the already muddy waters.
“deleted or transferred” is what you said, so in a similar way to the “badly worded” resolution at conference, your badly worded contribution to the thread has been misinterpreted. It’s easy to put right badly worded contributions on here, however those proposing things to conference should think through the consequences of their actions. The resolution was like a political version of the old legal question “Mr Smith, do you still beat your wife” we were damned if we supported it and damned if we didn’t.
Ironically you have misinterpreted my contributions as “jumping to his defence”. All I have pointed out is that the original resolution was clumsy and allowed this attack on the party to be made. How many times have we held other parties to account on their publications, resolutions, etc. only to be told we were misinterpreting things? This pointless resolution has needlessly opened us up to that allegation and caused disputes int he Party that didn’t need to be there, to what specific purpose?
Robbo
The problem is that because of the badly worded resolution that was put forward we now leave ourselves open to the accusation that we are reformist. Without a clear definition of words like “feminism” and “fellow Travellers” we have placed ourselves in the position of being attacked as reformists.We have a long, long history of being opposed to sexism, why do we need to state it in such a badly worded resolution.
Also as you have stated Marcos is not now a member of the Party, so he is in a position to put forward opposition based on his view of what we mean by feminism. You may need to rethink saying that his comment should have been “deleted”. Are you suggesting that we should delete criticism of our Party from the Forum, just because we don’t agree with it? L Bird has made many criticisms of the party over the years, but no suggestion has been made that he should have his contributions censored on the basis that he disagrees with what we are saying, why take this measure with Marcos?
Similarly when you say he had made remarks which “call into question the socialist integrity of many good comrades in this Party and which is something I find infuriating and disgraceful as I am sure any other comrade would, whatever side of the feminism debate he or she may be on…” Are you saying that we shouldn’t be open to question by Non Party members? Or even that the Socialist Integrity of all members of the party is beyond question. (Or is it just those who voted for this resolution whose integrity is beyond question?).
Coming back to the point I made earlier. If your interpretation on the resolution was that we were against sexism and that this has been the Party’s position since the year dot, then the question still needs to be asked, why was this resolution put up in the first place?
I don’t think that given the fact that if the resolution was to be interpreted as you say, it would have been a pointless exercise, it is not unreasonable for some people, within the party and outside the party, the question the motivation of the members who proposed this motion. After all, we are all open to question, and I wasn’t aware of any party practice which states that we all must follow the party line no matter what, surely we are not going to end up like the “democratic” centralists.
Re Item 3a
I think we ought to be very careful how we deal with the whole issue of voluntary donations. As I understand it donations of over £500 must come from UK based individuals, The Brexit Party got into a bit of a mess with this. I am obviously being optimistic about donations, but if we had a limit to donations of £500 or another way of showing that donations came from within the UK, it might help.
The problem the Brexit Party had was that there were multiple payments below the £500 mark and no way of showing how or where they had come from so there could have been multiple donations.
” which is not the usual indigenous type of declaring independence for a specific area, but the usurpation of the previously shared territory of Palestine for a specific religious group of indigenous and incoming Jewish settlers.”
I would argue that most nationalism has the usurpation of territory at the base of it somewhere. US nationalism? Australian Nationalism? New Zealand Nationalism? anybody. If you go back far enough, Turkish nationalism, Arabic Nationalism, Scottish Nationalism (wither the poor old Picts, defeated by the lowland Saxons of North Northumbria).
Allegedly (if you believe the bible) the Jewish People originally kicked the Canaanites off the “promised land”, although to be fair god had promised a little bit more to Abraham –
“To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates – the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaite, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites.”
As for religion, most invaders use religion as part of the reason for invasion (Spanish in South America, British in Africa, etc.)
As we oppose Nationalism, by default we oppose Scottish Nationalism, Irish Nationalism, and every other form of nationalism. Nationalism divides the working class.
“we wouldn’t (I hope) say that we were anti-Scottish independence or anti-Catalan independence.”
Independence and Nationalism are however, two separate things Lew has conflated them, we wouldn’t oppose independence nor would we support it. It’s a capitalist reform, that won’t help the working class, the same as a one or two state solution wouldn’t help the working class of Israel or Palestine.
Surely we are anti Zionism (The Ideology if Jewish Nationalism) in the same way as we oppose Pan Arabism (one of the Ideologies of Arab Nationalism), in the same way we oppose all other Nationalism related to the artificial concept of “nationhood”
There must have been some degree of folk memory of this, as I remember being told stories about Irish and Scots being taken as slaves by “the English” by my father, when I was a child in the 1960s.
His family came from Mayo in the West of Ireland and the story I was told was that families were taken over to America as endentured workers (I think endentured labourers could be endentured for up to 2 years) but they often slipped away and there was a underground system to get them back to Ireland, which they frequently did. The advantage the Irish and the Scots had was that when they slipped away they were indistinguishable from the free population many of who were Irish and Scottish. The story I was told, was that it was for this reason that the plantation owners switched over to using black slaves, because runaways could be easily identified.
There is a similar tale of the clearances of the Border Reivers by King James 1st and 6th. Many of the wild border families were expelled over to Ireland during the plantation of Ireland, the Grahams and the Armstrongs were banished to Fermanagh, but within twenty years, 80% of them were back on the border and became the basis of the Moss Troopers.
The other part of my family were Northumbrian miners and my sister did the family tree and when you look at their census records they moved about quite a bit between pit villages that could be as far apart as forty miles. This didn’t seem to make any sense until you looked at pit ownership and the villages they were moved to and from all served pits owned by the same pit owner, so when one pit opened people were removed from their housing and told to relocate to the new pit, which sort of fits in with Alan’s information about Scottish miners.
No doubt the African Slaves had a far worse time of it than the Irish or Scots, but getting into a debate about the level of hideousness our respective ancestors experienced doesn’t disguise the fact that they all had a pretty hideous time. There’s hardly a village in Northumberland or Durham that does not have a monument to a pit disaster somewhere.
Identity Politics is being used to divide workers against each other, when in actual fact all of capitalism is built on theft, murder, deportation, etc. etc. All the equality campaigners strive for is a levelling out of the playing field, not changing the game and it becomes another reform measure to divert the energy and anger of the working class away from the real issue, capitalism, without causing any real disturbance to the system itself.
With regards to the Chocktaw, a piece of news I picked up from the Irish Media shows that human nature isn’t about greed and aquisitiveness:
https://ireland.gerlindeonline.com/kindred-spirits-the-choctaw-monument-in-midleton-co-cork/
Hi Alan
I can’t disagree with your logic, however I was trying to point out some of the merits of James’ argument.
With regards to the book by Mr Johnston, I would guess in the absence of an e at the end he is not related to you and that he found out during his reasearch that most of the Johnston/Johnstones are from villainous, mischief making, Reiver stock. My sister has done our family tree and I was happy to find out that I come from a long line of social scum.
In defence of James’ suggestion, what he is saying is with regards to those MPs whose continuing family fortunes have been made on slavery and slavery comepensation, not those who have ancestors who were slavers.
Surely we would be making the point that the despite the claim that we live in a meritcracy, and that those who have reached the upper echelons of society have done so on their merit. The fact is that the whole system is built on the inheritance of wealth, wealth which was created by land enclosures, slaveery, wage slavery, theft and violence.
It’s like the self made man/woman myth. The self made man Trump, got $30-40 million from his father, Elon Musk’s father owned an emerald mine, and even Mike Ashley started his business off with a £10,000 family loan (£32,500 in 2020) to start his buiness off, way beyond the family resources of the vast majority.
I don’t know if Marxism will ever recover from the savaging the great intellectual Elon Musk has handed out. (Irony Alert)
I am at a loss as to why Karl Mark should speak with what appears to be a cod version of the accent of a black slave?
To be fair to the British Police they seem to be have an equal opportunities approach to supression and brutality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liddle_Towers
http://www.users.ic24.net/~terrynorm/Justice/civil_liberties.htm
I’ve noticed that a big theme on the right at the moment is to call everything Marxist. There is even an article that has been dredged up from the Spectator from about 10 years ago where Boris Johnson referred to the banning of fox hunting as a being part of a “Marxian agenda” (perhaps BoJo should have researched Engels’ view on that particular “pastime”).
For someone who the pro capitalists claimed to have buried so many times, the ghost of old Karl certainly seems to still fill their very bones with dread and horror.
The spectre that once haunted Europe appears to have travelled a little further.
