[Bijou Drains]

robbo203 wrote:

Brian wrote:

HollyHead wrote:

 [Remember these rates are ten years old! and also lets bear in mind London cost of living rates]

The present average payment in London (2017) for a full-time Office Manager is £31,789 p.a. and for an office administrator its £20,748 p.a.

  If a self employed full time worker is out of the question for legal reason then why not  just settle for a full time paid employee on a temporary contract renewable annually on a salary of, say, 25K –  a reasonable compromise figure.in relation to the above figures? The  Party can easily afford this at the present time and, if its financial situation were to deteriorate markedly in the future, it is not obliged to renew the contract. Lets be bold and try this as an experiment.  Having someone working full time at HO 5 days a week  with an expanded remit to undertake political work and well as adminstrative duties could very well make a huge difference  and lift the whole mood of the Parrty. I'm tired of this negativism already  and I have only rejoined in the last month or so!  What have we got to lose apart from our ingrained depression?  If the SWP can employ multiple full time staff, why can't the SPGB employ at least one full time office worker? Actually , offering a temporary contract to the person concerned would, if anything, incentivise that person to make a big impact  in order to secure the contract for the following year.

It seems to me that we are saying on the one hand that we are organised and plan to create a world wide social revolution which will possibly be one of the most important events in human history and will involve billions of people on a world wide scale, however on the other hand having a full time employee might just be a bit difficult for us to get our heads around!I have run a small company, mainly employing myself and my Partner, for the last 13 years. I have acted as a consultant to several charities, etc. who have gone down the employment route. I have also helped put together a staff team to provide the care for two family members using the direct payments model, which employed several staff over several years. The process is fairly straightforward. Yes you need to have certain policies and procedures, but I have copies of current approved policies and procedures, etc. and am happy to offer advice, adapt any of the Policies and Procedures I have in current use and I am sure the woman that does all of my wage slips and calculates tax returns for us, would be happy of the work, she charges buttons and it keeps you compliant.There are literally 10s of thousands of small organisations employing staff, I refuse to believe that the process is too complicated for the SPGB. Lots of clubs, organisations, etc. have elected paid officials (Working Men's Clubs, Golf Clubs, Allotment Societies, etc.) so having a one year elected paid worker should be very easy.

[Bijou Drains]

Howay Harley, Hiiny, divvent gan awa awld slavva man. Wuz's aal marras noo

[Bijou Drains]

ALB wrote:

jondwhite wrote:

At the last conference when employing staff was on the agenda, I was told the party employed a member full time presumably as an IT consultant which must date to the 1990s or 2000s. I was shocked to hear this.

It seems that all sorts of urban myths about Head Office are circulating up North!  The Party never employed anybody full time in the 1990s or 2000s. That would have required a Conference resolution and the money, neither of which existed. Even the Head Office Assistant only receives travel and subsistence expenses for being there part-time, for two-and-half days a week

I've also heard a rumour that South London Branch hold satanic masses at HO where they dance around naked whilst flagelating themselves with wet copies of Questions of the Day. There's some pretty weird folk down there in that there London, I tell tha' that for nowt!

[Bijou Drains]

ALB wrote:

Bijou Drains wrote:

I don't get to HO as often as I would like. But the last time I called in apart from ADM, I tried to get hold of information such as a list of members and contacts in the NE region. I was told by the then Head Office Assistance that no central data base for any of that information existed (I think Brian might be able to elaborate on the difficulty in getting hold of info for the current survey).

Well, you were told wrong ! It is easy to get a print-out of members in the North East and also of contacts there by North East post codes (or anywhere else, for that matter). I can do this tomorrow when I'm at HO if you still want it. Won't take 10 minutes. We are not that incompetent !Head Office supplied the Survey Committee with the addresses, as printed labels, of all members and what email addresses we had and could get for members.But to come to the point at issue, I agree that employing or engaging a non-member to do essential admin work is a non-runner for the reasons mentioned by Robbo. On the other hand, employing/engaging a Party member to do the work of General Secretary/Treasurer/Central Organiser is a sensible way forward. Whatever impression some members may have got, there is a coherent strategy. Following a Party Poll on the matter, we are investing the money from legacies surplus to immediate requirements in an investment fund (to get 5% interest instead of 0.5% in a deposit account)  with a view to using the interest towards paying a full or half timer.The only problem that remains is finding a suitable member.

I wasn't having a pop at those comrades that do voluntary work at HO, I was just going off what Keith (forget his second name) told me, apologies if that appeared to be me having a go.As to "having a problem finding a suitable member", ohh err, could that be the first line of the new British Comedy sensation "Carry on up Clapham High Street"

[Bijou Drains]

gnome wrote:

Bijou Drains wrote:

Dave I understand your principled stance on this issue. I have a degree of dissonance about the idea as well. However we in effect pay staff when we hire in someone to fix the boiler, or repair the roof, or any other service we use.

Let me see now.  Over the past seven years we've paid non-members to install a new shopfront and a central heating gas boiler.  Other than that we pay for regular 'servicing' of the photocopiers, fire extinguishers and alarms.  Everything else, be it administrative or maintenance to the property, is undertaken by party members, all for free, zero, zip, zilch.

Quote:

I don't necessarily see this proposal as one which needs to involve "paying comrades to do party work". I think we should get in skilled and qualified paid administration worker to carry out the admin work for the party. I think people underestimate the skills and values of a good admin worker, if we were to hire non party staff to carry out admin duties, this would release volunteer Socialists from the mundane business tasks and allow them to use their activities more fruitfully in putting out the party case. Not only that, we would have those tasks done by a skilled worker who can do these tasks effectively and efficiently

I'm struggling to think of which administrative duties, other than possibly the paying of wages (and I have my doubts about that), the party could safely and securely entrust to non-members.  Would they be let loose on the SS subscription or membership databases, perhaps free to talk to enquirers about socialism, be they callers to the premises or on the phone?  Could they become the General Secretary, Party Treasurer or Central Organiser, maybe serve on the Executive Committee or sub-committees?  Frankly the whole idea is too barmy to contemplate.

I don't get to HO as often as I would like. But the last time I called in apart from ADM, I tried to get hold of information such as a list of members and contacts in the NE region. I was told by the then Head Office Assistance that no central data base for any of that information existed (I think Brian might be able to elaborate on the difficulty in getting hold of info for the current survey). There is one simple example of office administration which is hampering the development of the party.In addition the computer and printing systems from what I saw (and I admit my observations are limited) do not appear to be up to the job of a modern efficeint organisation, The systems for holding personal information do not appear to comply with current data holding practices, returns to the Electoral Commision have been filed late, which may lead to a big fine for the Party. Just a few examples.Perhaps I'm biased, my mother, Cde Mama K, was trained at the same commercial school as Jack Common (who was the model for Karl Marx's brow on the Highgate Cemetary grave and a criminally overlooked writer) and she hammered into her kids the value of good administrative practices in running an organisation.

[Bijou Drains]

gnome wrote:

Bijou Drains wrote:

We can hardly write about the evils of the gig economy and then rely on it ourselves.

But it's OK to rely on "proper employment", eh?  For the party to go down the road of paying comrades to do party work would not only be a retrograde step ideologically but fraught with all manner of difficulties. We can't even, it seems, make elementary returns to the Electoral Commission without landing ourselves in trouble and possible sanctions but here we are contemplating involvement in the paying of wages, national insurance, sickness benefit etc., and all that that necessarily entails.

Dave I understand your principled stance on this issue. I have a degree of dissonance about the idea as well. However we in effect pay staff when we hire in someone to fix the boiler, or repair the roof, or any other service we use.I don't necessarily see this proposal as one which needs to involve "paying comrades to do party work". I think we should get in skilled and qualified paid administration worker to carry out the admin work for the party. I think people underestimate the skills and values of a good admin worker, if we were to hire non party staff to carry out admin duties, this would release volunteer Socialists from the mundane business tasks and allow them to use their activities more fruitfully in putting out the party case. Not only that, we would have those tasks done by a skilled worker who can do these tasks effectively and efficientlyAs to employment of staff, it is a fairly straightforward thing to do, I run a small company with two paid staff (me and my Partner) we pay a payroll service who we tell how much our salaries are and they work out all of the NI, tax, etc. to pay and then we write the cheques out. We pay them £27 a quarter to do it.

[Bijou Drains]

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 whatever

Quote:

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.

[Bijou Drains]

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

[Bijou Drains]

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.

[Bijou Drains]

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#featurephoto71

What joke is that?

[Bijou Drains]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

I guess you never noticed i was quoting the article and not making my own observation, Bob

Don't worry Alan, poor Bowb is a wee bit glakit

[Bijou Drains]

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?

[Bijou Drains]

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?

[Bijou Drains]

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

[Bijou Drains]

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).

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