Socialist Party Head Office
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Socialist Party Head Office
ParticipantThe Internet Dept have added another 50 or so articles to the Socialist Standard archive here on the Party website:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/archiveTo see what there are use the "Latest Additions" near the top on the right. Many are on Scotland but there are also some pre-WW2 and pre-WW1 articles.
Socialist Party Head Office
ParticipantLetter received by editorial committee:Have to disagree with you when you say that the value of land is not the product of labour.Primitive farmers cultivated the tops of hills when the soil was thin and any tree cover easily removed: but soon thereafter, farming moved to the more fertile valleys where forestry had to be cleared, wet soils drained, either heavy clays broken up with the addition of lighter soils, or thin sands and chalks given fertilitv by the adding oi manure, compost or clays.Then, particularly in Roman times or in the USA during the 1920s & 30s massively extensive farming without care, came in where no effort was made to keep the land fertlle, and large areas of previously fertile land became semi-desert. Much the same is now happening in Brazil.Strangely enough the last time I had to argue this, was with one of my fellow anarchists, who had argued that Marxist economics were wrong because labour had no effect on the value of land.Laurens Otter
Socialist Party Head Office
ParticipantLetter received by Editorial Committee:Outrage was expressed at the beginning of December over the New York Post decision to print a front page photo of a man pushed into an oncoming subway train and subsequently killed. December 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard saw fit to print a photograph of a number of dead bodies (War, Weapons and Water) and January 2013 printed what looks like a dead body (Oh! What a Lovely Centenary). We know capitalism can be barbaric but a propaganda journal for socialism should principally appeal to reason not emotion. It is time to adopt picture policies of sensitivity rather than sensationalism.DJW
Socialist Party Head Office
ParticipantLetter received by editorial committee:As you write in your July 2012 editorial money can and does buy scientists.Along with Catholic priests, scientists are the most wicked people on earth; without integrity and very evil minded.James Haggerty, Glasgow.
Socialist Party Head Office
ParticipantLetter received by editorial committee:Dear EditorsIn reference to recent articles in the Socialist Standard of December and January, Voice from the Back contains two puzzling statements:“The daily press in Britain is fond of creating the myth that workers are gradually improving their economic position in society” (December) and “Newspapers are fond of depicting a Britain with a steadily improved standard of living” (January).Both these statements were followed by quotations from capitalist newspapers which contradict the Voice from the Back observations.Therefore would it not be accurate to state that newspapers (and politicians) would like to state that working class incomes are gradually or steadily improving but that reality prevents them doing so?Frank SimkinsP. S. All members, surely, are seeking the whole truth and nothing but the truth, as far as humanly possible.
November 16, 2012 at 10:49 am in reply to: Book Reviews: ‘Dot.compradors: Power and Policy in the Development of the Indian Software Industry,’ & ‘Just War’ #91032Socialist Party Head Office
ParticipantThe publishers of the Howard Zinn book on Just War have provided a link on their site to our review:http://www.chartaartbooks.it/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=18&Itemid=35&lang=en_US
October 15, 2012 at 4:36 pm in reply to: “Marching for a future that works!” London – 20 October 2012 #88899Socialist Party Head Office
ParticipantCan anybody get to this meeting tomorrow at 6pm to discuss alternatives to the TUC's Future that (is Supposed to) Work?http://libcom.org/forums/announcements/no-future-future-works-two-critiques-tuc-london-16-october-06102012#newIf they can, if they pass by Head Office first they can pick up some of our leaflets on this to hand out.The CutsCafe is on the south side of Blackfriars Bridge.
Socialist Party Head Office
Participantgnome wrote:And for all those like northern light on this forum………….http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/membership-applicationThose who have previously been members and now wish to rejoin need not complete a fresh questionnaire. All applications to be made online, to the nearest branch or to Head Office, 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UNPhone: 0207 622 3811 Email: <spgb@worldsocialism.org>Former members who left in disagreement will of course need to confirm that they are no longer have that/those disagreement/s.
Socialist Party Head Office
ParticipantEmail comment received from a member not on this forum:It was pretty awful, probably nothing especially BBC about it as such, just a reflection of dominant mindsets generally really. I'd imagine Paul Mason would have done a better job simply because he's studied it more. What was especially poor was the claim Marx didn't really have an alternative to capitalism (it was fair enough to say he didn't have a blueprint, but that's not the same thing of course). There was also no critical examination of Marx and the so-called 'Communist' countries, the link between the two being taken pretty much for granted, with a couple of very minor caveats. Bizarrely, she also put forward the workers 'can't buy back' theory of crises at great length, though in fairness explaining Marxian economics in less than an hour for the uninitiated isn't the easiest of tasks! It got 5 out of 10 at best though. The level of scholarship wasn't great – she repeatedly claimed without any evidence that Marx thought capitalism would collapse, but I honestly don't think she understood what she meant by this claim herself (conflating collapse with the abolition of capitalism). At root, you needed a relevant academic with some presenting skills to do that job, but she's a presenter with a bit of economics knowledge. And if some of it was written for her anyway, then the writers were just as bad!
October 1, 2012 at 9:02 am in reply to: “Marching for a future that works!” London – 20 October 2012 #88897Socialist Party Head Office
ParticipantThe TUC is organising this big march in London on Saturday 20 October. For some details see here: http://afuturethatworks.org/ Naturally the Party will be covering this. We have in fact ordered 15,000 leaflets the text of which can be found in the October Socialist Standard here: http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2012/no-1298-october-2012/future-works The marchers will be assembling on the Embankment between 11am and 1.30pm before setting off for a rally in Hyde Park. As the Embankment is on a direct tube line from Head Office (52 Clapham High St, SW4 7UN, nearest tube, Clapham North, on the Northern Line) we are advising those wishing to leaflet in the morning to come to Head Office to pick up supplies of leaflets and Socialist Standards. There will be someone there from 10am, and probably before as some comrades will be staying there on the Friday night. There will be a Party stall in Hyde Park (Marble Arch) from 2pm on, where those planning to come in the afternoon can pick up leaflets. The TUC rally is expected to finish about 4pm. Then back to Head Office for something to eat and the Workshop on how we can use the current dissatisfaction with capitalism to advance the cause of socialism from 6.30.Anybody, whether a member or not, wanting leaflets beforehand should contact us at: spgb@worldsocialism.org or by writing to 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN
Socialist Party Head Office
ParticipantA reader has drawn our attention to an article “Marx at 193” that appeared in the London Review of Books by John Lancester on 5 April and asked for our comments. Among other things Lanchester claims that Marx never used the word “capitalism”:
Quote:Marx doesn’t use the word ‘capitalism’. The term never occurs in the finished first part of Das Kapital. (I checked this by doing a word search and found it three times, every time an apparent mistranslation or loose use of the German plural Kapitals – in German he never talks of Kapitalismus.)Socialist Party Head Office
ParticipantReply received from David Graeber:Dear editors:You may be surprised to know I have read Capital, and am familiar with the concept of primitive/original accumulation. I might suggest it is the reviewer, rather, who might wish to expand his reading list, since he is evidently unfamiliar with that strain of the Marxian tradition that has most informed my analysis of such matters: the “autonomist” or “post-workerist” strain that runs through Tronti to Cleaver to the Midnight Notes collective, Federici, Caffentzis, and de Angelis (a very different one from the more familiar Negri strain). In that tradition, “primitive accumulation” is not treated as a one-time thing that somehow teleologically prepared the way for capitalism, but rather as part of an ongoing process of the enclosure of different sorts of commons (and the creation of various forms of capitalist commons, like, currently, the US military) that has marked capitalism’s history from beginning to – hopefully its rapidly approaching – end. I actually cite my sources here in a footnote the reviewer seems to have missed. In fact he doesn’t seem to notice that my entire analysis of post-war economic cycles is based in this tradition.What I was mainly trying to address in the section on capitalism is a question that to my knowledge no Marxist analysis has really been able to resolve: why, if capitalism is a system based on factories and free wage labor, did most of the financial institutions that we associate with it – stocks, bonds, futures trading, semi-private central banking systems, and so on – actually arise in the 17th century, long before either factories or (any significant amount of) free wage labor made an appearance. The whole idea of “merchant capitalism” which is supposed to characterize the period from roughly 1500 to 1750 (or even 1800 in most of Europe) has always been a puzzle. If capitalism is a system based on wage labor, then it wasn’t capitalism at all. But if so most bourgeois revolutions happened before capitalism had even appeared! If merchant capitalism is capitalism, then capitalism does not have to be based on wage labor, and certainly not free wage labor, at all. Claiming that merchant capitalism was capitalism because European elites were somehow trying to create a system that didn’t exist and there is no evidence they were even capable of imagining, seems absurd. The obvious answer is that capitalism is not in fact necessarily based on free wage labor contracts. Marx was, as I note in the book, effectively saying “well, let’s take a best case scenario, and imagine workers are in no sense constrained; I can show the system would still lead to impoverishment and self-destruction.” He wasn’t saying that the assumptions of the political economists were empirically true. He was just allowing them for the sake of argument. As I note many seem to have forgotten the “as if” quality of his analysis.I find it genuinely odd that I get so many reviews that accuse me of ignorance of even the basic ABCs of Marxism, while at the same time, systematically ignore everything I actually say about Marx! Granted, the book is meant for a wide audience, and therefore avoids scholarly debates of all sorts, Marxist or otherwise. But it’s all there in the footnotes. And I do talk about Marx in the text.As for the reviewer’s final claims that we are primarily wage slaves not debt peons: how does he know this? Because the secret to our 21st century situation lies in the correct interpretation of 19th century texts? That’s silly. Systems change. I mean, it might be true, but it’s a matter to be empirically established. A far larger percentage of Wall Street’s profits is now derived from the financial sector than from industry or commerce – that is, from the exploitation of wage laborers. Where does that profit really come from? It would be very interesting to know what percent of the average (say) American’s income is now directly expropriated by the FIRE [Finance, Insurance, Real Estate] sector, compared to what might be said to be extracted indirectly, through the wage. But the research simply hasn’t been done. Nor will it be if we can’t open up our minds a little and treat Marx’s legacy as a living tradition. It’s possible that the system is already starting to turn into something else. Or maybe it isn’t. Let’s figure it out rather than just shouting doctrine at one another.
Socialist Party Head Office
ParticipantNothing like turning up early to be sure of being at the head of the queue. GT
Socialist Party Head Office
ParticipantA reader has emailed this question:
Quote:In the review of ‘Policing The Crisis’,the reviewer claims that, ” Marx once described ‘anarchy’ as the ultimate aim of the proletarian movement…” Do you have a citation for this statement?Socialist Party Head Office
ParticipantHere’s a report of the meeting. As can be seen, it was recorded.
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