‘Marxist Societies’ (IMT) report September 2014

[jondwhite]

'Marxist Societies' (IMT) report September 2014

http://marxiststudent.com/planting-the-red-flag-on-campus-part-one/

http://marxiststudent.com/planting-the-red-flag-on-campus-part-two/

http://marxiststudent.com/planting-the-red-flag-on-campus-part-three/

[ALB]

I can't understand how these antediluvian Trots (who are still boring from within the Labour Party) have any appeal to students. Nor why ex-comrade Dan Read passed through themBut I see that they are still plugging an underconsumption theory of crises:

Quote:

Arturo Zoffmann Rodriguez, member of the Oxford Marxist Society, gave the introduction to the topic. (…) He went on to explain the concept of crisis of overproduction, highlighting how capitalism is based on the exploitation of the working class and that the producers cannot consume all the goods that they produce, creating an excess that can be temporarily overcome by capitalism through mechanisms like credit but that eventually leads to prolonged crisis.

SPEW have also inherited this from the same source (Ted Grant) but theirs is not so crude as this.

[jondwhite]

Will there be SPGB student societies?

[alanjjohnstone]

There was a SPGB group based in Aberdeen university during the 70s but fell from EC favour and some were expelled as part of the Libertarian Communist group. They produced a leaflet on the student grant campaign which was deemed reformist, if i recall.This was a more worthwhile contribution on Leninism that i republished on my personal blog http://mailstrom.blogspot.com/2006/12/marx-versus-lenin-what-kind-of.htmlI think if it is possible to register as a student society and access facilities and perhaps funds, if there are a number of students who are SPGBers, they will form a society or discussion group under the ausices of the university or student union rules but i think they will also be a branch too if it has enough members. I would hope that if there were a few members in the same wokplace they too would form some sort of informal group alongside a more official party branch. 

[ALB]

Just looked at the facebook page of their society at Oxford (in the context of our election campaign there) and noticed that

Quote:

Next term some of us at the Oxford Marxist Society will be reading Trotsky's Transitional Programme and other great Marxist classics. Although it's from 1938, the Transitional Programme could have been written today:

Actually it reads as if it was written in 1838, so I sent this comment:

Quote:

"The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat." "The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership." Is that really true, ie that's what lacking is the right leadership? I'd have thought it was rather a lack of socialist consciousness. The answer to which would be "making socialists" rather than offering a programme of reform ("transitional demands") for non-socialist workers to follow.

I still can't believe that there are people who proclaim that "The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership."  Talk about delusions of grandeur

[jondwhite]

Proposing a program that members know is transitional to something else, but non-members do not is precisely the kind of lying that has destroyed people's faith in politics and why anti-politics prospers.

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