[jondwhite]

Tim Kilgallon wrote:

I'm intending to go along to their next meeting, if I can, and put the party case. If any other comrades/sympathisers in the North East fancy it, and perhaps a few bevvys afterwards, let me know.

I really appreciate this, but double check it is still going before turning up or risk disappointment!

[jondwhite]

The German Ideology wrote:

Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany.

Sorry if this is nothing to do with it but this is from Marx which I thought was relevant.

[jondwhite]

Bob Andrews wrote:

'Doubling the Party memb…' Do you believe in Father Christmas?

I believe a benevolent guy with a large white beard associated with the colour red has a lot to offer us all whether we're naughty (like Bob) or nice.

[jondwhite]

Doubling the party membership and SS full price print circulation.

[jondwhite]

To clarify, Jo Cox didn't vote for war, but abstained. Angela Eagle is an example of an MP voting for war but calling for gentler politics.Jo Cox's partner Brendan Cox is delivering Channel 4's alternative Christmas message.

[jondwhite]

How about this for our animation enthusiasts?or thishttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chants_for_Socialists

[jondwhite]

Because more people listen to music than to us and if music can be political as in this explicit example why do some take a fundamentalist approach to it as unsocialist. The party even has its own song if I recall correctly. Also it's prominence in the news and the high profile of Xmas no 1 is an unconventional novel opportunity to challenge the notion we should pay tribute to those voting for war while they are also calling for gentler politics.

[jondwhite]

That would be an echo chamber.

[jondwhite]

Sorry but it wasn't just Engels in his seminal pamphlet, as well as the Socialist Standard, but also Marx was quite clear;

The German Ideology wrote:

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence 

 So you might like visions of Fourier, Owen, Morris (written as fiction), Buckminster Fuller, Jacques Fresco, TZM, Novara or Elon Musk – but being utopian isn't a defence against accusations of utopianism. As for people being interested in the practicality of ideas, I would hazard a guess that membership (and SS readership) declined during the production for use committee's fruitless existence.

[jondwhite]

mcolome1 wrote:

jondwhite wrote:

I don't think reformists deserve that fate.

Therefore, the coup of the Bolshevik, and others guerrillas coup, thy are  not reformist movement. You like to throw rocks on the windows of the SPGB, but when it comes to your windows everything is correct. It sounds like sectarianism. If she knew what socialism is, Why did she follow or fall in the sociall pressures of others peoples around her ? 

Osama Jafar raised Luxemburg not me;

Osama Jafar wrote:

the only movement that was possible to achieve actual changes was that of Rosa luxemburg – and still all women social movements have that chance.

If saying reformists don't deserve to die is 'sectarian' then I am 'sectarian'.

[jondwhite]

Do you know anything about Red Warrior?

[jondwhite]

Far from 'a few simplistic formulaic generalities about socialism.' Engels observes;

Socialism, Utopian and Scientific wrote:

And as each one’s special kind of absolute truth, reason, and justice is again conditioned by his subjective understanding, his conditions of existence, the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual training, there is no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they shall be mutually exclusive of one another. Hence, from this nothing could come but a kind of eclectic, average Socialism, which, as a matter of fact, has up to the present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in France and England. Hence, a mish-mash allowing of the most manifold shades of opinion: a mish-mash of such critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future society by the founders of different sects, as excite a minimum of opposition; a mish-mash which is the more easily brewed the more definite sharp edges of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook.To make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis.

Actually the party did come across as credible with the pamphlets I mentioned, Socialism and Religion sold out and went through multiple reprints. These were also far from 'a few simplistic formulaic generalities about socialism.'

[jondwhite]

Here's a passage from Socialist Standard December 1915

Socialist Standard December 1915 wrote:

The key to the future was obtained not by imagination but by science … [Socialism] was only Utopian so long as the class-war was in its rudimentary stages… Utopianism, i.e. the deliberate attempt to plan beforehand a social ideal, while it became obsolete, nevertheless persisted in a new form. Instead of being part of an honest criticism of society it became a phase of capitalist politics To try and project a detailed castle in the air as ‘the ideal State’ is… nothing more than wandering round in a circle, for their ‘details’ are all derived from the capitalist system itself, and can, therefore, never get them out of it, and the Socialist Party of Great Britain is following the only scientific course in opposing their endeavour to get the workers to indulge in such peregrinations. We are not keen on drawing pictures of the future. Shall slaves imagine freedom they have never known? We are concerned with the vital present – the oppression of our class and our struggle to end it 

 There are many party pamphlets that are much better than SaaPA including; The Manifesto of the Socialist Party, Is Labour Government the Way to Socialism, Nationalisation or Socialism, War and the Working Class, Socialism, Why Capitalism will not collapse, Socialism and Religion, Russia 1917-1967.Non party pamphlets would likely generate even more interest including The Communist Manifesto, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific or particularly any by William Morris.However, the original proposal in 2015 to branch for the whiteboard animation stated it was to accompany one of the better existing talks.

[jondwhite]

I don't think reformists deserve that fate.

[jondwhite]

The more views on this the better, but I personally disagree with 'Socialism as a Practical Alternative'. It might lend itself to painting a picture, but it is largely schematic conjecture, the kind of which Marx might have called cook-shops of the future.

Quote:

Local food production might require tractors. Regional manufacture would produce and assemble the component parts of tractors for distribution to local communities. These would be required in a definite number and therefore a definite number of required component parts would also be known.Again, the tractor-producing plant would communicate these requirements to its own suppliers. Eventually this would extend to world production units which would be mining and processing the raw materials, such as metals, required for tractor production. This could be a self-adjusting system of production for use. It would operate with the communication of needs expressed as required quantities of materials and goods, at the local, regional and world levels.

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