John Lennon
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MODERATION NOTICE.Some comments on this thread are in danger of breaching rule 8 of this forum:”Personal abuse, flaming and trolling will not be tolerated.”Please bear this in mind when making future posts.
Which comments?
gnome wrote:TheOldGreyWhistle wrote:This is how ridiculous we look. We need to get a grip. Whoever wrote this MUST have been expelled from the SPGBAs a matter of fact it was Harry Young, together with other members of the North London and Camden branches, who was expelled from the SPGB for defying a Conference motion and persisently acting undemocratically. Now, let’s ask you a question. Can someone be a socialist who flouts democratic decisions? Quite frankly, it is you who needs to get a grip………
So? was he a socialist when he died or not?
The same question can be asked about Karl Kaustky, before 1900 or after 1900 ? ( although Lenin said that it was in 1914 which is not true ) He was one of the biggest Marxist thinkers after Engels, and we cite some of his work despite that he became a collaborator of the ruling class after 1900, and before 1900 Lenin was a midget in front of him.We are not talking Lennon past, we are talking about his present life which shows that did not have a clue about the real definition of socialism, he was more influenced by Hinduism than by socialist conception.In our days there are certain personalities that want to combine Buddhism, Islam and Christianity as part of socialism, and that is not possible either. At the end he discovered that his spiritual teacher was only a crook.Please, do not say again that my arguments were written by an ignorant because I do know what I am talking about and I was a fan of the Beatles when they came on the scene on 1960 and I have conserved their LP for many years, but I do not support their political point of view and I do not think that whatever they said or did will not conduct us to socialism, and also I do not follow leaders or famous artists.I t seem to me that you are new in this thing called socialism. I have been involved in this trend for my than 4 decades and in some part of my own personal history I will not consider myself as a socialist either.
TheOldGreyWhistle wrote:gnome wrote:TheOldGreyWhistle wrote:This is how ridiculous we look. We need to get a grip. Whoever wrote this MUST have been expelled from the SPGBAs a matter of fact it was Harry Young, together with other members of the North London and Camden branches, who was expelled from the SPGB for defying a Conference motion and persisently acting undemocratically. Now, let’s ask you a question. Can someone be a socialist who flouts democratic decisions? Quite frankly, it is you who needs to get a grip………
So? was he a socialist when he died or not?
And why the personal attack? Strange response
I am not new to ‘this thing called socialism’,I joined the SPGB in the 70s. And even if I were, it would not give more weight to your argument. ‘The Beatles’ did not have a collective set of political ideas, three of them were non socialist and John Lennon was a socialist. He did not advocate the following 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c., &c.
admin wrote:MODERATION NOTICE.Some comments on this thread are in danger of breaching rule 8 of this forum:”Personal abuse, flaming and trolling will not be tolerated.”Please bear this in mind when making future posts.Which comments?
TheOldGreyWhistle wrote:Which comments?For clarification. No one has yet breached rule 8, this is just a reminder to keep it comradely.
I think this thread is teetering on the stupid. John Lennon, although I have never met him, seems to me to have lived a fantastic life during which he became a member of the biggest band in the world. His achievements in the world of music and art are legendary and speak for themselves. He is a hero to many and an idiot to others.As for his political views, they changed over different periods of his life it seems, as do many of us. But as none of us here appears to have had the chance to ask him, we’ll never really know for sure. At the end of the day, John Lennon was just a man, same as anyone and whether he was a socialist or considered himself one or not doesn’t really matter to anyone at all, least of all now he has been dead for 30-odd years.Is Imagine a socialist song? No, probably not. Does it chime with our beliefs? Yes in way but it is not a sung manifesto. Does it matter? No.What does concern me is that Google and the rest will direct people here via search engines and they will see a series of bizarre questions and answers, back-biting and general nonsense that do more to put people off socialism and our Party in particular than anything else. Comrades work hard to spread the word and encourage participation and then this kind of drivel undoes that in seconds. THINK BEFORE YOU POST!
The Marxist Internet Archives ( MIA) has included on its archives many personalities of which they call them socialists or Marxists and many of them are not , such as: Nelson Mandela, Salvador Allende, Malcolm X, Edward Bernstein, and so for. They have included Leon Trotsky but they have excluded Joseph Stalin, and what is the difference between Trotsky and Stalin, just the management method of how to control and exploit the working class, the only social class able to establish a new society Like they say in the Caribbean: Those are not breeze that will knock down any coconut from the coconut tree, none of those peoples are not a threat to capital. This my last post on this topic, I have better things to take care in my others forums where I try to educate over the real concept of socialism and to spread the socialist case We have enough with the mud placed on top of socialism by the reactionaries Bolsheviks, by the Leninists and Leninists with others stripes, our main purpose as a party is try to make peoples understand that socialism is something different of what they have learned from right wingers and the left wingers. I am not going to contribute to confuse the working class more than they are at the present time. If some peoples want to believe that Lennon was a socialist and he wrote socialist songs, and that will make them happy, that is okay with me, but , personally I am not going to spread that idea, otherwise, if it is true, I might conclude that the singers and composers of the Cuban Trova ( New Trova ) are classics of Marxismhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nueva_trova
Surely the issue is (or should have been) not whether or not John Lennon was a socialist (clearly he wasn’t) but whether or not his song “Imagine” expressed socialist sentiments. I think it does. Anyway, I’m going to have it played at my funeral.
People who google the party see this party attacking and ridiculing other socialists or people who may be on the verge of becoming socialist. I have done this myself. You can go off and do more important things if you want and bury your head in the sand. But the ‘important things’ you are doing have failed. If John Lennon was alive today he would find the SPGB raking up his secrets and his past and he would run a mile. The SPGB says ‘ignore Imagine, Lennon supported the IRA! THIS is at the roots of the Party’s failure. This is also my last post on this subject
ALB wrote:Anyway, I’m going to have it played at my funeral.We’ll have socialism before then so you’ll have to think of something else
But why this pre-occupation with John Lennon………….and Harry Young? Smacks of hero worship to me.gnome wrote:ALB wrote:Anyway, I’m going to have it played at my funeral.We’ll have socialism before then so you’ll have to think of something else
But why this pre-occupation with John Lennon………….and Harry Young? Smacks of hero worship to me.Why the fascination with Marx? Do you worship him?
gnome wrote:ALB wrote:Anyway, I’m going to have it played at my funeral.We’ll have socialism before then so you’ll have to think of something else
But why this pre-occupation with John Lennon………….and Harry Young? Smacks of hero worship to me.I was using Lennon as an example
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