Introduction
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Couldn’t find dedicated space for this, so throwing it here. My name is Headbutt, and I’m brand new.
Looks like a good place to find discussions beyond partisan politics.
Cheers!
Spam
Is that standard greeting for new folk here?
An acronym, perhaps?
Sour People Are Muggles?
Shetland Ponies Are Mini?
Hi Headbutt, welcome along if you are serious about discussing politics. I wouldn’t say that we’re non partisan, in the sense that we are a Socialist Party and our aim is to create a Socialist Society. However we are not ensnared in the usual Left wing capitalsim v right wing capitalism debate you might find familiar on other political discussion forums, so hopefully that is something you might find refreshing.
Introducing the Socialist Party
The Socialist Party advocates a society where production is freed from the artificial constraints of profit and organised for the benefit of all on the basis of material abundance. It does not have policies to ameliorate aspects of the existing social system. It is opposed to all war.
The Socialist Standard is the combative monthly journal of the Socialist Party, published without interruption since 1904. In the 1930s the Socialist Standard explained why capitalism would not collapse of its own accord, in response to widespread claims to the contrary, and continues to hold this view in face of the notion’s recent popularity.
Beveridge’s welfare measures of the 1940s were viewed as a reorganisation of poverty and a necessary ‘expense’ of production, and Keynesian policies designed to overcome slumps an illusion.
Today, the journal exposes as false the view that banks create money out of thin air, and explains why actions to prevent the depredation of the natural world can have limited effect and run counter to the nature of capitalism itself.
Gradualist reformers like the Labour Party believed that capitalism could be transformed through a series of social measures, but have merely become routine managers of the system.
The Bolsheviks had to be content with developing Russian capitalism under a one-party dictatorship. Both failures have given socialism a quite different — and unattractive — meaning: state ownership and control.
As the Socialist Standard pointed out before both courses were followed, the results would more properly be called state capitalism.
The Socialist Party and the World Socialist Movement affirm that capitalism is incapable of meaningful change in the interests of the majority; that the basis of exploitation is the wages/money system.
The Socialist Standard is proud to have kept alive the original idea of what socialism is — a classless, stateless, wageless, moneyless society or, defined positively, a democracy in which free and equal men and women co-operate to produce the things they need to live and enjoy life, to which they have free access in accordance with the principle, ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.’
I confused him with another person who has a similar name and posts spam in this forum
Thanks, friendly folks!
Good to hear the original idea is being kept alive. Not sure if that puts me on same page, but I’m opposed to collectivism being sold out to entitlement capitalists and their cronies, the Progressive Left.
Cheers, and thanks for not banting moi as spam!
Interrupted by life! As I was saying … I’m what some refer to as an old school Commie, in that I’m quite hardline on the ‘work to eat’ premise, and don’t believe any model accommodating preferences is viable without gross inequity and significant limits to dexterity of support. I’m also virulently opposed to the Welfare State (regarding it as a disabling tool of the Progressive elite). That may or may not be an issue hereabouts. Hopefully not!
These two pamphlets cover in much more detail the practicality of ‘Free Access’.
As it will be the work of the immense majority to make the revolution, then there is no reason to suppose they will not make it work.
From Capitalism to Socialism – How We Live and How We Could Live
Socialism as a Practical Alternative
Thanks Matthew. I’m strictly utilitarian, so that second one is of interest – will give it a read over weekend. As for the majority being needed, I do wonder if a majority could happen. My experience is that the least likely to voluntarily alter capitalism-dependent lifestyles (choices, privacy, buying/selling labour, outsourcing fundamentals, etc), are sometimes the loudest ‘socialists’. You wonder where that majority will come from, when even those who claim it can’t contemplate the reality. Perhaps we’d have more luck with those who already live a version of it, but don’t associate it with any politics? The economic pragmatist collectivist, as it were.
You wonder where that majority will come from, when even those who claim it can’t contemplate the reality.
No matter how long it takes, the following still applies.
” The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. We cannot, therefore, co-operate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois.”
(1879 Marx and Engels )
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