Bijou Drains
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Brian wrote:robbo203 wrote:It seems to me that the most basic principle that should inform this whole re-organisation exercise is that the Party should adapt itself to the membership, not the membership to the Party. We have got to break down this basic dichotomy (which lies at the heart of the Party's current malaise) between an overworked minority and an effectively disenfranchised and alienated majority by taking seriosusly the need to bring about what Brian (G) aptly calls a much more networked collaborative form of orgainisation. Equally importantly, we need to radically rededine and enlarge or diversity the very concept of Party work itself , to open up many more channels of activity through which presently isolated and inactive members – the majority – as well as sympathisers (who are after potential future members)v can meaningfully comtribute. In short we need a much more HOLISTIC sense of what Party activity should be about.
The adhoc committee is taking a holistic approach to the whole exercise of adapting the party structure to the whole membership. The dichotomy has arisen due to the party structure being based on the trade union model which is designed to participate in the economic class struggle and not the political class struggle. This trade union structure works fine so long has the membership are concentrated in an urban setting and the branch networking is focused on the political activity taking place within that setting. However, this structure starts to breakdown once the membership become dispersed over a wider geographical area and recruitment of new members takes place online and not at the branch level. Which effectively means the party structure and its activity is presently misaligned with the class struggle on the political front. With this in mind, we deliberately designed the survey/questionnaire so it redefines "party activity" and to bring this 'activity' in alignment with a members geographical location, skills and experience so they become part of a networked collaborative/collective outcome. The reason for this emphasis on outcome is that the responses are indicating – as we suspected – members are not that much concerned on the party organisation and structure as such. But becoming involved in the class struggle as part of a team so to make a difference.In short, the result of the survey/questionnaire should identify and pinpoint where the disconnects are occurring and more importantly if they are occurring through isolation and lack of support.
Quote:Furthermore, as far as the central bureaucratic functions of the Party is concerned I think we now urgently need at least one, if not two, fulltime paid Party offical at Head Office with a much expanded brief to, amongst other things, support efforts to encourage much wider participation by the membership as a whole. Its high time we did this and the Party has more than ample funds to finance this. Its ridiculous that it has not already been done. The Head office should be open five days a week without fail to send out the nessage that the SPGB means business. It should be transformed into a fulltime throbbing centre of activity – a meeting centre, a social centre, a bookshop, a centre for socialist reseach and so on and so forth – not a cold vacant building that remains closed to the public except on a wet thusday or whateverQuote:Yes in my opinion this change in party activity will necessitate taking on two full time paid officials, albeit with a much expanded remit/brief. But not necessarily working from HO for the structure will need to support the internal administration and external field activity. And the membership have to be persuaded this radical change in direction is an essential requirement. There will obviously need to be changes in the decision making process so there's no conflict of interest. And we can make the issue of "employment" easier by drawing up a consultancy self-employment contract.
Quote:You know, my deep worry is this whole exercise will end up simply as a fudge, as mere window dressing. The SPGB cannot afford to carry on like this, comrades. We have to shake off this complacency and seriously address what is wrong with Party.Quote:This exercise will only end up "as mere window dressing" if the membership decline to address the points raised by the adhoc committee.
[/quote]The consultancy, self employment route may not be as straightforward as you think. HMRC rules have changed recently and the model you seem to be proposing might be counted as employment. That in itself is not a reason not to go with full time paid staff, it's just that we may need to do it on an employed basis. To me this is not an issue. I think proper employment is a better route. We can hardly write about the evils of the gig economy and then rely on it ourselves.
twc wrote:The claimI followed up on your reference to Anthony C Sutton’s book The Federal Reserve Conspiracy which claims that the pirate Jean Laffite was “an agent of American banking interests [who] financed the Communist Manifesto”. I had never come across this claim before.Incidentally, the Collected Works of Marx and Engels don’t mention Jean Lafitte, but they do mention an unrelated banker, “Jacques Laffitte”, the French prime minister who gloated after the July Revolution of 1830—the one immortalised in visual art by Delacroix painting Liberty leading the people—“Now we, the bankers, will govern” [Engels].The Journal of Jean LaffiteThe Sam Houston Library in Liberty, Texas, holds the “Journal of Jean Lafitte”, supposedly written by the pirate in 1845–50, though from internal evidence written later.The Laffite Journal was claimed to have been passed down from the pirate as a “family heirloom”. The library obtained it indirectly from the pirate’s great grandson, a certain (or perhaps, uncertain) John Laflin.Given that most historians agree that the pirate Jean Laffite was killed and buried at sea in 1823, any account of his European activities in 1845–50 must be considered to be as imaginary as his buried treasure.Suspicion was heightened when it was learned that the presumed great grandson John Laflin had changed his name to “Lafitte” by delayed birth certificate.This invited accusations, fairly or unfairly, over John Laflin’s involvement in the counterfeiting of letters presented as being written by Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson and Davey Crockett.The book Great Forgers and Famous Fakes: The Manuscript Forgers of America and How They Duped the Experts by Charles Hamilton devotes considerable space to exposing John Laflin’s letter forgeries.The upshot is that Wikipedia sums up the consensus that “most historians now believe the Lafitte Journal to be a forgery.”Forgery or HagiographyThis might have been the end of the story had not the Laffite Society of Galveston published an article Who Wrote the Journal of Jean Laffite: The Privateer-Patriot's Own Story by Reginald Wilson https://journals.tdl.org/laffitesc/index.php/laffitesc/article/download/247/230.Wilson gives grounds for identifying the Journal’s author as Jean Laffite’s son, Antoine, who lived with his father on the Galveston commune (1818–20) before his father torched it and turned to piracy.Antoine never saw his father again, for Jean Laffite died an unmourned pirate at sea, three years later.Wilson concludes that Antoine wrote the forgery sometime after 1860 (in his twilight years) adopting his father’s name in an act of filial piety to set the bent family record as straight as he could—with an eye to redeeming his father’s and his family’s reputation in the eyes of his descendants.If so, the Laffite Journal is not a modern forgery concocted by the great grandson.Lafitte’s son Antoine had travelled to Europe and mixed in socialist circles, and so was able to embellish his story with the fantastic claim that his father—though buried at sea a quarter of a century earlier—actually met Marx and Engels in 1848, and bankrolled the Communist Manifesto.Clever CounterfeitOn the other hand, a French article Barataria: the Strange History of Jean Laffite, Pirate by Louis-Jean Calvert https://journals.tdl.org/laffitesc/index.php/laffitesc/article/viewFile/201/184 makes the alternative case that the Lafitte Journal is the modern forgery of John Laflin “in search of acceptance and confirmation of an assumed identity for almost thirty years”.The Journal contains too many checkable errors to have been penned by Jean Laffite himself.What to make of bankrolling of the Communist Manifesto?And so the Lafitte Journal turns out, on generous estimation, to be at best untrustworthy or, considered ungenerously, to be barefaced fiction. In either case, it merits no great reliance being placed on its substantive claim.Of course, even in the improbable event of the Committee of the Communist League having accepted Lafitte’s generous financial offer to bankroll the Communist Manifesto, it remained obviously unswayed politically by whatever authoritarian views Laffite may or may not have tried to impose.And we know that unfolding events prove that the League was neither compromised nor duped, as claimed, by US banking interests.Perhaps future scholarly work will clarify the dubious matter further.Nevertheless, the incomparable Communist Manifesto continues to utterly transcend the tawdry commercial world of US bankers and the mercenary privateering of adventurer Jean Laffite.Bravo
ALB wrote:Bitcoins do have a use-value (that of being a means of payment, a store of value, and for speculation). If bitcoin transactions are going down (but are they?) this would be a fall in their use rather than their use-value. That their price is going up reflects demand for them (for these uses, mainly speculation it seems). They don't have a "value" in the Marxian sense since they are not products of labour. Having said that, it does take a lot of time and energy for computers to "mine" them.Surely they are products of labour, the computer needs to be set up by human labour power to do the mining and the mining itself consumes electrical power, created by human labour power.Same thing applies to actual money, I suppose. Apparently the new plastic tenners cost 10p each to make.
ALB wrote:Apparently they're planning to make money out of the 200th anniversary of Marx's birth next year:https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/grave-of-karl-marx-gets-a-new-lease-of-life-r67mm9kzpPity the Cuban exiles didn't suceed in blowing up the monstrosity erected by the Communist Party and the Russian government on his grave in 1956. The state-capitalist dictators of Russia and their supporters in Britain had no right to do that.It is true that Herbert Spencer, the 19th century anarcho-capitalist philosopher, is buried opposite him, hence the joke about Marx and Spencer being buried next to each other:https://highgatecemetery.org/visit/cemetery/east#featurephoto71What joke is that?
alanjjohnstone wrote:I guess you never noticed i was quoting the article and not making my own observation, BobDon't worry Alan, poor Bowb is a wee bit glakit
jondwhite wrote:BTF is 6pm. SPGB is 7:30pm.Sounds like we've got a bit of a pub crawl situation developing, anybody know any decent night clubs?
Bit of a shame, with all of the economic knowledge in the Party, we didn’t buy £500 worth of bit coins for the party back in 2010. Would be worth about £500,000,000.00, by my calculations. Does any comrade have a workable proposal for a time machine?
gnome wrote:Bijou Drains wrote:I do think that head office is a necessary evil, however I agree with Brian G's point that actually if you were going to pick a place to have it in today's environment, Clapham High Street would be fairly low on the list of possible venues. I also think the idea of letting Head Office as shop premises, would probably generate an ample income which could then be used to rent a more suitable place with better transport links and which could be accessed more easily by ALL members (If there was a surplus we could even consider a small rented northern sub office).Really? Head Office is situated on one of the busiest trunk roads in and out of London, the A3. It is served by the Underground (Northern line) at Clapham North station which is only four minutes walk away and Clapham High Street station on the Overground circular line which is even nearer and both within easy reach (3 to 4 miles) of destinations in Central London including main line rail stations. In addition there are six separate bus routes including one that runs 24 hours.I'd be interested to hear of an alternative location more easily accessible which the party could readily afford.
Birmingham
Brian wrote:alanjjohnstone wrote:BrianJ, as someone who talks about positive responses you lapses into negativism in response to the other Brian's post.BrianG's contribution did not explicitly offer specific changes bit some are implicit in the consequences. "how do you propose to support all of these suggestions. Members are currently unwilling to step forward and fill the posts of HOO, Gen Sec and Treasurer." you askedIsn't shedding ourselves of the burden of a HO releasing human resources? We keep appealing for and returning to the issue of HO Organisers and keeping the premises open. Isn't transforming into more a web-based party structure, decentralising the Party in the process, lessening the work-load of a few members and spreading and dispersing the load. It may be unpalatable for other members but BrianG did present a way forward.It seems the assumption being made here is based on the false premise that HO is a burden on our activity and further reached the equally false conclusion that due to advances in digital technology most of the administrative tasks now being carried out at HO can now be done at a touch of a button, albeit remotely? Not so, and even if it was the case its a negative fallacy to think it logically follows it would lessen the workload. For instance, since the introduction of emails the workload of the General Secretary has actually increased with members and the public demanding and getting a faster means of communication. Which means the volume of hardcopy has decreased but the volume of digital has increased.If HO is in actual fact a burden its a necessary burden seeing that despite the advances in digital communication and technology society is still heavily dependent on the use of communicating hardcopy to those who are uninclined to go digital.
I do think that head office is a necessary evil, however I agree with Brian G's point that actually if you were going to pick a place to have it in today's environment, Clapham High Street would be fairly low on the list of possible venues. I also think the idea of letting Head Office as shop premises, would probably generate an ample income which could then be used to rent a more suitable place with better transport links and which could be accessed more easily by ALL members (If there was a surplus we could even consider a small rented northern sub office).
ALB wrote:Did I hear right. Is he going to marry Miss Marple?He’s not getting married to Miss Marple, silly begger. He’s getting married to Angela Merkle.
During the Big Strike, they had some strange ideas which seemed at times to be close the the Union of Democratic Mineworkers. In the North East the were given the title the Ray Chadburn Party.. Their paper "the next step" was nick named "the Last Stop"We debated them in Newcastle at the Tyneside Cinema in June '87, with Steve Coleman representing the Party. From recollection I recall feeling embarrased for the poor sucker put up by the RCP.The debate is on the wikipedia site and is referenced as tape no 6 in the tapes library. If a link was available it would be great to see if my recollections are correct.
gnome wrote:Just as an update, there have been about 45,000 impressions (number of times the ad has been displayed), 420 views (watching 30 secs is counted as a view), and 41 earned views (another video on our Youtube Channel being watched by someone who has viewed the ad).The average cost-per-view is at £0.05, with about £20 spent so far. There is a small increase in traffic to the site, as per Analytics, but nothing to confirm that it's a direct result of the spend.Although the results aren't huge at the moment it is promising, considering the very small cost.
alanjjohnstone wrote:Tim, i may well be a pessimist (i prefer to consider it realism) but i am also a very patient person…I've waited this long so i can wait a bit longer to see how things develop, as i recommended in a previous post. We can learn from our mistakes…but we have to know what have been the mistakes to rectify them.I was only pulling your leg, Alan. I know you are anything but the stereotypical East of Scotland, Calvinist ifluenced, doom monger I paint you as. I expect all of those years watching Hearts/Hibs/Feranti Thistle (delete as appropriate) have left you a cheery arsed delight to be with
gnome wrote:Sorry to bring all you far-flung 'advisers' back to reality but none of you seemingly has any idea about the difficulties the party is presently facing. The handful (literally) of comrades, some, no doubt, "aging (sic) and stagnant", who are currently undertaking the administration of the party had a mammoth task identifying the email addresses of existing members (we only presently have around 220 valid email addresses) let alone contemplate including those who have left "going back say, 10 years". Those without email addresses will have had their survey sent to them by post.It was the membership of the SPGB which overwhelmingly passed, at its 2017 Conference, a motion to conduct a survey of its membership with the Executive Committee empowered to agree the precise terms of reference. Ex-members were (rightly) not included and neither were Companion Parties. Once the findings of the survey have been collated, others will have access to it, as has already been stated, and will be welcome to comment on it should they choose.Hi GnomeI wasn't having a pop, I meant stagnant in terms of size. As I have suggested previously perhaps working in a way that allows regional members to take on more of the task currently being undertaken by members in the South East would be a way forward. I had put my name forward for the EC last year, but consideration of the time involved in travelling back and forward to London once a month (which would probably require an over night stop on occasions, made me realise that at this point in my life (with work and family commitments) that this would not be possible. This does not mean that I, and very probably others in the regional branches and central branch, would not be willing to take on tasks for the party if possible.It is clear that if it is a mammoth task even to identify email addresses of party members, etc. that the administrative side of the party is in a bit of disarray. This is not a criticism of the members who have taken on these tasks, they have striven to complete them, however it seems obvious to me that we need professional admin help. I know that in my area getting hold of a admin specialist on a self employed basis to carry out these tasks would not be difficult. This would then release party members from the admin tasks, which a professionally qualified worker would do more effectively and efficiently than a lay person could do, and allow party members energies to be used more usefully to carry out the task of spreading socialist ideas, which only socialists can do.
