Young Master Smeet
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Quote:Now, why would UK taxpayers be so willing to support these people if they are out of work, and why would a native working class local be so prepared to fight for the newcomer's rights, when they do not share a common history or culture?
Because, they are human beings: that is the common heritage. I have as much in common with a worker in Peru as I do with a worker from Liverpool. That is, the worker in Liverpool is someone I have not met, will never meet, is not related to me, is not related to anyone I know. I have more in common with a Peruvian worker than I ever will with a British capitalist: they are a worker, someone who has nothing but their ability to work in order to live.Unemployment is caused by employers. Put another way, levelsof employment are a dependent variable, based on the amount of capital invested, and nothing to do with the numbers of workers available.We can see this clearly. Imagine if people were willing to work for zero wages, would all available labour be employed? The answer is no: all employments require at least some consumable capital invested. The owners of capital will not invest unless they are going to make a profit from their investment. So, even working for free, people would go unhired.Immigration is a non-issue, capitalists cause unemployment.
Juan Cole has some interesting points to make:http://www.juancole.com/2013/08/bombing-unlikely-effective.htmlNoticeably, without the weak tu quoque or cod-anti-Imperialist positions from the STW types. Tellingly:
Quote:Given the logistical and tactical difficulties of intervening from the air, and given the lack of a UNSC resolution authorizing the use of force, Obama … encouraging the [ opposition] to create a long-term civil resistance instead of going the militarization route. Some struggles have to be fought over a couple of decades, and those typically only succeed if non-violent. [Tunisia's use of nonviolence and its elites' resort to bargaining and compromise are the success story, not the more violent struggles in the region.]It's hard to play the pragmatic/practical card when professional politicians are getting emotive over chemical weapons (which are, of course, abominable).
wiscalatus wrote:Well, isn't this just the same thing though?Employers set low wages and poor conditions BECAUSE the mass immigration allows them to do so.Restrict immigration to reasonable levels and wages will be forced up, due to the under-supply of workers.Surely that would be a good thing?Well, if you use immigration controls to raise wages in one area, the number of available workers doesn't change, so you'll just be condemning workers in 'the other country' to poverty. the point is that solidarity against the employers is in the inetrest of workers as workers, and the fault lies with the employers fair and square so we should have no truck with punishing or excluding our fellows.
Well, it's not immigrants or immigation that lowers wages: it's employers. As socialists we stand in solidarity with our fellow workers, without distinction of nation, race or sex, and see the successful resolution of the class struggle as the only way to address the poverty our class suffers. We can't let the employers divide us and play us off one against the other. If we organise in unions, and politically, we can fight back.
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=O7D9AyU-nLYC&dq=pannekoek+history+astronomy&hl=en&sa=X&ei=PnsYUsqiJaeM0AXV9YFY&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAAThere is a copy of this book in the party library. He does apply cod Hegelian structures, he talks of science as the transformation of quality into quantity (for example, rather than a star being 'bright' it is a measurable figure on the luminosity scale). Not quite Engelsian in saying such dialectics occur in nature, he seems to be implcitly saying the dialectic lies in the scientific process.
I think Alistair Campbell can come to our rescue here. Apparently in government, he banged on about OST: Objective, Strategy, Tactics. For us, it runs like this:Objective: The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.Strategy:That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organize consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic.Tactics: Contest elections, hand out leaflets, sell the Standard. Now, Left unity flounders at the first stp, there is no common objective: socialism can mean anything from regulated markets, to Cuban style autarky, and all are included in left Unity.Even supposing an agreement on object, there is a wide disagreement on strategy, between the street protestors, the undoubted syndicalists and trotskyists and what nots who would object to any parliamentary route at all, and then the Left of Labour types who will be happy with electoral work. Of course, we disagree fundamentally on the question of pursuing reforms (and then you will have to agree among yourselves what reforms to pursue).
jondwhite wrote:I think you're using left in a sense of self-identified lefties who eschew revolution, strange in a topic about the Left Unity project. In the rhetorically "revolutionary" mileu, Occupy has done pretty well, in terms of breadth and depth of support, especially contrasted to non-"revolutionary" lefties, Labour etc.. Occupy Wall Street was also much better at this than Occupy London.Well, Left Unity isn't a revolutionary organisation, is it? The Spirit of 45 wasn't exactly revolutionary.
Quote:YMS: I've got nothing against you approaching the Socialist Platform if you want to. I was just drawing attention to the similarity between your own "means" and those you're wont to sneer at. It's no surprise to me that SPGBers would read the "Socialist Platform", note the similarity in words, and then turn up armed to the teeth with leaflets. It's just amusing to me that everyone's "means" and methods and actions are fair game for the most condescending sneering apart from your own, which is apparently a model of righteousness. Except, as I pointed out, they are in this case indistinguishable.Well, our means are correct, and the right way of doing things, hence why we defend them. It's entirely right for us to suggest that Socialist Platform types would be better off joining us rather than trying to yoke the reformist elements of UL to their platform. I don't see what's opportunist (or deceitful or underhand) about a public open letter pointing that out: we're standing by our guns. If anything, calling them out is a useful test to see if they will stand by theirs, or if they were engaged in submarine manoeuvres.
The nostradamus method appears to be better than the poor argumentation method.
Quote:Sid the Socialist: Building that house without cement will be a failure.Ollie the Occupier: OK, when, and by what standards, and compared with who or what?Sid the Socialist: Eventually, and when compared with our strategy, which is to get everyone to use cement.It is perfectly reasonable to argue that the methods being employed cannot achieve the ends desired, and to argue for the use of workable means. Given we've gathered together to advocate those means, it'd be odd if our approach to others with the same ends was not to argue for our means.
I'm not sure that's true, on a basic empirical level, several hundred thousand at least vote left in election, dwarfing those who engaged in Occupy. I'm not so sure that Occupy eshewed demands, as such, although there was no platform, central demand, it was rife with people who had money crankery up their sleeve.
Stuart,After the dismal failure of Occupy, because it was a formless idea-less movement, left unity based on a like formlessness around a sort of possiblism will go the same way: you don't have to be Nostradamus to see that. The "Socialist Platform" will be asked to subsume themselves to that possiblism, so there's no harm in saying to them that a separate explicitly Socialist Party already exists if they wanted to put the effort in.
It seems there are other useful mathematicians out there:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brams%E2%80%93Taylor_procedureFrom their patent (yeah, I know):
Patent wrote:In both methods, the parties are each given 100 points and then bid on each item using their points. Under the AW method, which is applicable to indivisible items, each party is initially allocated those goods, or wins on those issues, for which it bids the higher number of points. Then the goods or issues are reassigned, or resolved differently, to achieve equality of points based on the quotients of the parties' bids. Under PA, each good or issue is divided according to a ratio based on both parties' bids for that good or issue.Obviously, that sounds like market like behaviour, although it is a game in which the entrants do not bring a pile of money, but play according to the same rules each time. It seems there are a plethora of such methods out there that could be used.
Well, I won't try to define intelligence, largely because in computer terms, I'd suggest it isn't actually very interesting, and ends up being misleading. Intelligence like captures it better, because I would maintain that humans produce intelligence like behaviour, and mistake it for intelligence, much of which, as I said, is a by-blow of our linguistic capacities and our advanced orders of theory of mindhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mindSo, what I'm interested in is robots/computers that not only perform high order calculations, but can recognise real world objects (rapidly) and can make deep searches of vast databases and can not only retrieve data but find relevence and manipulate it to produce new data.Designing, say, an entire new model car, so that it would not just be efficient and cheap to produce, but also attractive to human beings, would be a very high order function.Even a computer that can drive a car safely (they exist at prototype stage now) is intelligence like, because it requires situational awareness of external objects, and some notion of how other drivers are going to react.These sorts of things, rather than an artificial personality (which is what many people, driven by the movies, mistake for AI).
LBird wrote:So,… the human 'designers' produce… and the robots do the donkey work…Sorry, my fault, 'computer designers' = computer based robots, as opposed to physical robots. The idea being that a computer could design a bridge, plan the project, place the requisitions for parts, and co-ordinate the physical robots to build the bridge.As for helping Deep Blue: the computer programmers reprogrammed it between matches, changing it's evaluations. So, it's true to say that it lacked an ability to learn.As I've linked to before, the Robot World Cup is worth watching:http://www.robocup2013.org/The level of computation to find and kick a ball is incredible.
Just to explain to people what the Chinese room is:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
Searle wrote:"Suppose that I'm locked in a room and … that I know no Chinese, either written or spoken". He further supposes that he has a set of rules in English that "enable me to correlate one set of formal symbols with another set of formal symbols," that is, the Chinese characters. These rules allow him to respond, in written Chinese, to questions, also written in Chinese, in such a way that the posers of the questions – who do understand Chinese – are convinced that Searle can actually understand the Chinese conversation too, even though he cannot. Similarly, he argues that if there is a computer program that allows a computer to carry on an intelligent conversation in written Chinese, the computer executing the program would not understand the conversation eitherSo, this is a refutation, more or less, to the Turing test (in which an AI passes if it can convince a human it is a human in conversation). The section on the wikipedia article called "Brain simulation and connectionist replies: redesigning the room" is directly relevent to this discussion. I find Searle interesting, but I find compelling the idea of some neuroscientists that intention in the human mind in retrospective (personally, I think as a result of language and our 'social' mind, in which we feel we are explaining ourselves to our fellows). But I do have some sympathy with the idea that only a physical entity structured like a human brain can actually produce human consciousness/intelligence.
