Bijou Drains
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Hi Headbutt, welcome along if you are serious about discussing politics. I wouldn’t say that we’re non partisan, in the sense that we are a Socialist Party and our aim is to create a Socialist Society. However we are not ensnared in the usual Left wing capitalsim v right wing capitalism debate you might find familiar on other political discussion forums, so hopefully that is something you might find refreshing.
Hi Roberto
I think you are referring to a website set up by one of the splinters of the UK Worker’s Revolutionary Party. The WRP were historically a bit of an odd organisation. It appears they got a great deal of finance from General Gaddaffi of Libya back in the 70’s and 80′, they were at that time led and to a large extent groomed by a guy called Gerry Healy. John Lister who was expelled from the WRP in 1974, concluded:
Healy was a crook and a political charlatan, who preserved his position as General Secretary of the WRP by resorting to the most bureaucratic and anti-democratic measures, who stubbornly opposed any campaigning for women’s liberation or gay rights, who habitually subjected women “comrades” to sexual abuse, who sold out the WRP’s formal principles and programme for Middle East oil money and who has done more than anyone to degrade the reputation of Marxism and Trotskyism in Britain.
Although they may have got rid of Healy, they have the same organisational principles that Healy used (and which Lenin and his mates Trotsky and Stalin were complicit in). It says a lot for their level of understnading, that they could be taken in by a crook like Healy.
As with most Trotskyist websites they are full of rhetoric and bluster, but if you look a bit harder, it is very hard to ascertain what they actually stand for. There are no “here are our principles”, “this is what we think”, etc.
They also fail to mention their adherence to “democratic” centralism. If you’re not familiar with it, effectively they are a leadership run organisation, very hierarchical, the leadership put forward a “slate” of leaders ever year, for the members to vote for (funnily enough, the leaders are the same people every year) and the members can vote for or against the leaders. Generally speaking, if you vote against the “slate” you are ostracised and learn never to make that mistake again.
I would say in contrast to this, the World Socialist Movement is a genuinely democratic organisation of like minded comrades, who are united on a set of agreed principles, who organise openly (we have absloutely no secret meetings, all meetings are open to the public). We are democratically formed, a member who joined 70 years ago has one vote, the same as a member who joined yesterday. We have no leaders, because we have no need for followers. If you are close to us, why not join us in and be part of a truly democratic movement, based on genuine socialist principles. I did it and it’s the best thing I ever did!
James
I don’t claim to be au fait with all of the stats, but as I understand the R number, it is effectively the reproductive rate i.e. the general rate at which 1 individual infects more individuals. Therefore less than one, the number of cases is decreasing, more than one, the number of cases is increasing.
However it appears with this virus, as there are a great number of asymptomatic cases, this rate can be quite tricky to judge. (it’s a bit like trying to say how many invisible men are in the room, you don’t know because they’re invisible).
The R rate is an estimate of the rise in the population who have Covid 19. The number of positive tests is likely to be impacted by the number of tests (if you test a random sample of the population you are likely to get more positive tests, than if you test just those who are symptomatic), but that rate will not only go up the more you test, it will also go up by a much higher rate when you are tracking and testing (you have gone from testing symptomatic people, to then testing randomly, to then testing to a bigger cohort of people who have been in direct contact with people who have the virus). This all means that the people being tested have a higher probablility of being positive. The mathematical difficulty is working out how this compares to a previous cohort, who were not tested using the same parameters.
There are other problems with the R rate (although it does appears to be important). The daily rate of infections does not relect the general rate of infection, as it appears that people can be infectious for up to 14 days. So if for instance I was one person who had Covid 19, I might infect one person every 4 days or I might infect 4 people and then self isolate. Other people in the cohort who got the infection on the same day as me might infect people in a different pattern. Which is why it is important to look at the general pattern of infection and why it is looked at in greater retrospect than just what happened on one particular day.
The R rate also becomes less relevant when you get to very low numbers. The 7 day R rate in New Zealand at the moment is, I believe, an astonishing 29. This sounds horrendous, but because they had no cases and now through extensive track and trace, they have managed to identify lots of close contacts to the particular family that had the virus, the number of postive tests is proportionally very high, however, they still only have 29 identified case in the last five days. It’s a bit like when employers say “well we gave you a 15% rise last year” 15%of bollocks all, is less than bollocks all, although the lead figure, 15% sounds very impressive.
The other problem with the Feminism motion (and the fellow traveller one, to be honest) is that to a lot of members it looked like an attempt to look “cool and trendy”. The problem with that is, that if you have to try and look cool, by definition, your not cool, you just look like a twat.
The problem is that by seeing everything through the lens of class – crucial though it is to our understanding of capitalism – you are in effect denying or suppressing those other aspects of the lived reality that many workers experience – like the discrimination that women or black workers experience in their daily lives. This creates a conceptual gap between us and these workers who we want to appeal from our exclusively class-based perspective when really what we want to do is accommodate their concerns and acknowledge the discriminations they are subject to WITHIN this perspective. But we dont really do this or we dont really do it enough.
The argument that you are making, about “accommodating their concerns and acknowledge the discrimination they (sic) are subject to, sounds like Trots who tell us that we stand aside from the class struggle.
Of course we face the lived reality of discrimination and face the consequences of it ourselves. For example where I live there is a very small ethnic minority population who for the most part they are in quite high salaried jobs, so the don’t stop and search based on colour, they stop and search based on postcode or which council estate you live on.
I have been on a first aid course where the trainer thought it was funny when people were doing the introductions to say to me “well at least you’ll know how to deal with gunshot wounds”, when he found out where I was from.
If you live in certain areas up here, speak with a strong Geordie accent, you don’t get the job.
I’ve got an Irish surname and I had a boss who thought it was hilarious, during the time that Sinn Fein were banned from TV, to say “is that you, or is that the voice of an actor” and then in meetings say pointedly how much he enjoyed going for a drink at the Orange Lodge (they have one or two here as well)
How many party members have disabilites and face the daily discrimination that comes with that, how many party members are elderly and face the discrimination associated with that?
I’m not saying for one moment that it is as bad as the race discrimination faced by millions of people, but it does mean that party members know fully well what discrimination feels like.
Yes we do see things through the lens of class, we recognise that we can’t get rid of of the rancid consequences of capitalism (including the discrimination you describe) by any other way than through eliminating class society. We are not like the snake oil salesmen/women of the identity politics movement, futilely trying to equalise poverty. The concern of lots of members is, that with the motion that was passed, we sound like we might be.
“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.
