robbo203
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This might be of interest to provide a bit of context to the Catalonian issue…
So the far-right Vox party has increased its representation in parliament but at which other parties expense?
Ciudadanos mainly the centre right party whose sears fell from 47 seats to 10. I suspect what happened was a little more complicated though. Probably a large of its supporters voted for the PP which gained seats in this election and some PPs in turn voted for Vox though many of Vox supporters probably came from elsewhere as well. The Catalan Independistas also made gains and of course Vox has overtaken Ciudadanos as the most vociferous opponent of Catalan independence.
So we have a very polarised situation developing with no prospect of a resolution in the future. The parliament is hung if not drawn and quartered more than ever and I fear things could turn nasty with the right on the rise partly thanks to those idiot Catalan nationalists and their pseudo progressive nationalist claptrap
I should mention that in the Spanish parliament to have an absolute majority you need 176 seats. The left bloc currently has 158 seats and the right bloc 152. Its close
It looks like Labour are going to be clobbered in the elections. The Tories are not doing too well either. The libdems and the Brexit Party seem to be the main gainers. It seems to be set for another hung parliament
Ah OK, I didn’t realise that this was an article in the SS written by a member! My apologies I thought it was a book that had just been published
Dave T – is David Alton a Lexiteer? I find it curious that some leftists have rallied to the cause of Brexit even to the point of standing as candidates for the right wing jingoistic Brexit Party of Nigel Farage. I am thinking of people like Claire Fox and George Galloway . Their rationalisations for such blatant opportunism are worse than pathetic in my opinion
Here is some more on Mises’ views on fascism – and Hayek on Pinochet’s Chile
https://www.salon.com/2011/08/30/lind_libertariansim/
Although I see the Adam Smith Institute has critiqued this article here:
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/thinkpieces/do-libertarians-apologise-for-autocracy-2
This is of interest too
This article from the AIER site seems a little more …er.. “scholarly” … than Jeffrey Tucker’s ( “For my own part, I’ve been an anti-Marxist as long as I can remember but never bothered to look carefully at his writings.”) although that’s not saying much
I have written to the Director of the American Institute for Economic Research, the organisation responsible for producing these videos which are doing the rounds on various FB forums, inviting him to contact the SPGB with a view to having a published debate between them and us. We shall what transpires
In the meantime here is a piece on why the AIER is publishing this material. One gets the feeling he knows very little about Marx or Marxism and is trying to cover up this lack of knowledge with suspiciously over-confident and questionable generalisations
Oh Dear! Am I to be served deportation papers and sent back to miserable rain-sodden Blighty any time soon? I ‘effin hope not!
Hi Rudy
I dont think the fact that we are almost certainly not going to see socialism in our lifetimes – or even probably our children’s lifetimes – should be deterrent to joining with other like minded people in the struggle to achieve such a society
To the extent that any of us as individuals can make a difference, we socialists are making an impact , albeit small, on the climate of opinion as it is. In other words, we are having an effect on contemporary society. Our opposition to nationalism for example makes life a little more difficult for the warmongers with the jingoistic support for engage in wars. Similarly our opposition to racism and sexism helps to combat those forces that seek to divide and weaken workers in their class struggle against the capitalists.
Just because we may never live to see socialism does not mean our efforts are wasted. The more of us there are, the more effective those efforts will be. The socialist movement is more than the sum of its parts
Obviously the movement to change society fundamentally must be a collective democratic and conscious effort. However this should not preclude initiatives being made at the microlevel and in a sense we socialists with our current very limited numbers are operating very much in the realm of micro-level as “opinion influencers”, if you like
One the problems with how to change society from capitalism to socialism is that from the perspective of the empirical individual it all seems so absolutely daunting. “What can I do as a mere individual” is a commonly expressed sentiment. Saying there is no such thing as an individual – true only in the sense that we are all social animals – and that we are part of a class is no help in this regard since as we know the vast majority of members of the working class unfortunately have no interest in changing society at the present time. This can have a disempowering and demoralising effect on individual socialists when confronted with the sheer scale of the task at hand
For many years I have been interested in the question of how to adopt a more holistic approach to social transformation which helps to synthetise and integrate individual initiatives, even down to conscious lifestyle choices, with more collectivist forms of struggle (which is essentially what we in Socialist Party are about). People do need to feel empowered in order to carry on. They need to feel they are making some sort of mark or impression on the world and are nudging it , in their own small way, in the direction it needs to be heading
Of course individual initiatives on their own are not going to do the trick, We need a political movement. This is what we have got, however small and ineffectual it may currently be. But this movement itself needs to be more encouraging and positive towards initiatives that help to break down the sense of isolation and disempowerment that individual socialist-minded members of the working class experience when confronted with the stark reality that at the present the overwhelming majority of our fellow workers do not support socialism
