Bijou Drains
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
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.
Shellenberger promotes industrialization as humanity’s savior.
“While industrialization causes a short-term rise in carbon emissions, in the long term it’s beneficial to the environment as people move to cities, allowing farmland to revert to nature, and as prosperity enables them to switch to cleaner and more compact forms of energy.”
______
Whilst completely disagreeing with the conclusions that Shellenburger reaches, I would think that the development of a Socialist, production for use society would also result in a short term, but necessary increase in environmental damage in some areas. Although a fall similar to the one we have seen in the early days of lockdown, where reduction in travel, etc. occurs, there would be an increase in other areas as we move to less envirnmentally harmful production and transport measures. This would occur because whilst newer and cleaner technology was being built, which would necessarily require the production of greenhouse gases, we would also need for a while to keep some of the older less environmentally friendly production processes running.
As in every aspect of capitalism, the environmental movement has been influenced by the vested interests and financial motivations of Capital. For instance the move towards the replacement of petrol/diesel cars and lorries with electric versions is being driven by the interests of car manufacturers, who conveniently ignore the level of greenhouse gasses which are created in the manufacture of the car in the first place. The Union of Concerned Scientists (USA) reckon that by the end of their lives, petrol-powered cars create almost twice as much global warming pollution than the equivalent electric car and that disposing of both types of vehicles (excluding reusing or recycling their batteries) produces less than a ton each. That said the actual manufacture of a either type of car is responsible for up to about 1/2 of the entire production of greenhouse gases the car will produce. Strange as it is seems therefore it is less harmful to keep old polluting vehicles on the road and trying to mitigate and retro fit them, than trying to replacing them with newer cleaner cars, lorries, buses, etc.
Obviously that logical and coordinated approach to environmental issues cannot be replicated in a market based society where the need for built in obsolecence and replacement is required and where individual financial concerns will always trump the collective requirements of humanity as a whole.
I think this in itself is proof (there is a mass of similar such evidence) that Mises diatribe on the “Socialist Calculation Debate” is built on a false premise. The idea that a Socialist society would not determine how resources could be used rationally, presupposes that captialism actually currently uses resources rationally, a premise which is demonstrably false.
For example global food production per head of global population currently runs at about the 3,000 calories per person. The recommended calorie in take per person is about 2,000 calories for women and 2,500 for men, so a rough average of 2,250 per person. Given the cost of waste, which is bound to happen we still produce enough food for everyone with a 25% over production to take into account waste, yet The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that about 815 million people of the 7.6 billion people in the world, or 10.7%, were suffering from chronic undernourishment and that whilst almost all the hungry people live in lower-middle-income countries, there are 11 million people undernourished in developed countries.
So we can see that on when looking at the main resource we need to produce, there is absolutely no rationality in the way it is distributed, leaving aside the ridiculously inefficient and polluting way food in which food is produced in a capitalist society.
But as the defenders of capitalism would say, never mind we have the important essentials covered. It is clear they would argue that any rational use of resources, any sane society indeed, would ensure that the well known all round good guy, Philip Green has access to a £120,000,000 yacht and no doubt they would argue, the fact that £9,400,000,000 of human resources have been used to build the current 20 most expensive super yachts in the world is a clear demonstration of just how well capitalism rationally distributes resources. (Those of you worrying about the impoverished conditions the super rich have to put up with on their boating holidays will take solace from the fact that the Sinot Aqua, a hydrogen-powered superyacht with an estimated price tag of $644 million is currently under production in the Netherlands, so at least one super rich family will be lifted from the dispicable conditions they currently have to holiday in)
Why do you insist on repeating this rubbish?
I think the poster is probably a “prankster” with too much time on his/her hands due to the current health situation and no friends to play FIFA with.
