WSP(India) Dec 2018 EC minutes

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December 17, 2018 at 2:27 pm #172630
Socialist Party Head Office
Participant
WORLD SOCIALIST PARTY (INDIA)
257 Baghajatin ‘E’ Block (East), Kolkata – 700086
Tel: 2425-0208 (ISD: 091, STD: 033), M: +91 9433253582 
E-mail: wspindia@hotmail.com; Website: http://www.worldsocialistpartyindia.org 

MINUTES OF EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE MEETING NO. 194

Head Office, Sunday, December 2, 2018: Called to order: 7:20 PM 
Present (EC Members): Pradip Singha, Harisadhan Ghosh, Sumitra Mondal, Binay Sarkar 
Absent: None 
Attendee: Prasanta Kumar Mondal (Member), Partha Pratik Mukhopadhyay (Member) 
Election: Chairperson: Sumitra Mondal on motion of Binay Sarkar and Harisadhan Ghosh; Minutes Writer: Pradip Singha 
EC Minutes No. 193 was read and confirmed on motion of Binay Sarkar and Harisadhan Ghosh
Membership Application: Richard Muchemwa from Zimbabwe has sent his Membership Application sans answers to the Questionnaire. General Secretary has asked for his answers for a decision. 
Correspondence: Please note that any comments in square brackets “[]” are comments from the General Secretary. 
Inward:
-The Socialist Party of Canada Secretary’s Report for December 2018 received with thanks. 
– Adam Buick has promptly taken up to send pamphlets for our growing contacts as we asked for via mobile phone calls. We have received with thanks five packets containing:
 1. Marxian Economics – 5 copies 
 2. Marxism and Darwinism – 5 
 3. Socialist Principles Explained – 4 
 4. How The Gods Were Made – 5 
 5. The Right To Be Lazy – 4 
 6. The Russian Revolution Wasn’t a Socialist Revolution – 2 
 7. Centenary Of The Russian Revolution – 3 
 8. Socialism As a Practical Alternative – 5 
 9. Ecology and Socialism – 5 
 10. From Capitalism to Socialism – 5 
 11. How we live and how we might live – 1 
 MSC: That we ask for 10 copies each of the SPGB pamphlets for our increasing contacts.
– Sambhupada Nag email correspondence received with thanks. 
– Tabrez Anwer email correspondence received with thanks
- Academia.edu: We have received 38 emails during 11/11/2018 to 30/11’2018. 
Outbound: Responses as required to incoming correspondence. 
MSC: To receive and file incoming and to endorse outgoing correspondence.
Matters Arising: 
- A bulk packet containing 5 sets of our literatures via Speed Post was posted to Advocate AKM Shihab (Bangladesh). But it is yet to arrive there.
Advancement of the Movement: 
[B. Sarkar, P. Singha and P. Mondal and P. Mukherjee are going on posting and interacting on Facebook timelines. H.S. Ghosh is writing letters and articles to Bengali dailies.] 
Our new pamphlet HISTORY OF UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE (108 pages including cover, price 100) has been offered for orders: please contact us at our Head Office address for copies. 
HISTORY OF ECONOMICS pamphlet is also available (price 50) from the same address. 
At present we are contemplating to publish a Bengali and a Hindi language monthly/quarterly and organize literature stall. 
Association for Protecting Democratic Rights (APDR) organized a workshop (open to all) on “INDIAN CONSTITUTION & HUMAN RIGHTS” on Sunday 2 December 2018, from 11am to 4pm at Baikunthapur F. Primary School, Sonarpur, South 24 Parganas inviting Binay Sarkar as one of four Panelists. Sumitra Mondal, Partha Pratik Mukherjee, Prasanta Mondal, Pradip Singha, Harisadhan Ghosh and Binay Sarkar attended. We distributed printed Notes of Binay Sarkar’s address in both Bengali and English to all 27 participants. The text in English is annexed below. 
Academia.edu
They are now displaying some 76 (together with two pamphlets) papers, 17 drafts and 15 books (actually 15 chapters of a book + three books) and 3 teaching documents uploaded by BS having 107 Followers | 84 Following | 2,359 Total Views up from 2,243 within a month. 
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Over 70 million academics have signed up to Academia.edu, adding 21 million papers. Academia.edu attracts over 45 million unique visitors a month. We see this fast growing global association very useful for uploading and propagating world socialist ideas which are being viewed by many. Our readership is growing. So our comrades should make use of this scope. 
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Facebook: 
The World Socialist Party (India)_Discussion Forum and the website: http://www.worldsocialistpartyindia.org are attracting new contacts. 
Discussion Forum membership stands at 2,157 
Sunday Discussion: Every Sunday in the evening we meet to read and discuss Socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Capitalism, Political Economy, Economics and other selected subjects. 
Literature: Party literature distribution is going on. 
Socialist Standard: Nil 
Unfinished Business: None 
New Business: SPRING SCHOOL & TWENTY FOURTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2018 will be held on Saturday 2nd and Sunday 3rd March 2019 at our Head Office details of which will be scheduled in the January EC. 
Financial Report: 
Collection of Dues:
Financial Report: November 2018: (Rupees)
Income: 1720.00
Expenditure: 480.00

Surplus: 1240.00

Deficit BF: 15240.00
Net Deficit: 14000.00
Membership Subscription & Donation: Included in “Income” above. 
MSC: To accept the financial report and to receive donations with thanks. 
Next EC Meeting: Head Office, Sunday, January 6, 2019, 5.30 PM 
Meeting Adjourned at 8.48 PM. 
Annexure: Notes of B. Sarkar’s address at the APDR Workshop on 2nd December 2018: 
DEMOCRACY NOWADAYS IS COMMUNISM/SOCIALISM
“Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and the cultural development conditioned thereby.” – Marx, CGP, 1875 
“To win the battle of democracy.” – Marx & Engels, Manifesto, 1848
Democracy is the road to socialism. Participation in General Election: 
World Socialist Party (India) Rule 31. “That the body of individual citizens of India as a political party shall bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of India as by laws established, and to the principles of socialism and democracy, and would uphold the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India.” [Sub-section (5) of Section 29A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951) [emphasis added] 
Emancipation of labour – guiding principle of Marx
”That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves, that the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule;” – Provisional Rules of the International Working Men’s Association, 1864 
“the emancipation of labor is neither a local nor a national, but a social problem, embracing all countries in which modern society exists, and depending for its solution on the concurrence, practical and theoretical, of the most advanced countries.” – International Working Men’s Association 1864, General Rules 
“At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!””[emphasis added] ~ Marx, Value, Price and Profit, 1865, CW, Vol. 20, pp. 148-49
1880: Marx on Universal Suffrage and Political Self-organization
“Considering 
That the emancipation of the productive class is that of all human beings without distinction of sex or race;
That the producers can be free only insofar as they are in possession of the means of production; 
That there are only two forms under which the means of production can belong to them:
1. The individual form which has never existed generally and which is being more and more eliminated by the process of industry;
2. The collective form whose material and intellectual elements are being formed by the very development of capitalist society.
Considering 
That this collective appropriation can only be the outcome of the revolutionary action of the productive class – or proletariat – organized in a separate political party.
That such organization must be pursued by all the means, which the proletariat has at its disposal, including universal suffrage, thus transformed from the instrument of trickery, which it has been up till now into an instrument of emancipation.” [Emphasis added]
Written on about May 10, 1880 
Printed according to L’Égalité, No. 24, June 30, 1880, checked with the text of Le Précurseur
First published in Le Précurseur, No. 15, June 19, 1880
Translated from the French 
“Democracy nowadays is communism” – Engels, The Festival of Nations in London written at the end of 1845 
World Socialists strive to seize control of the state politically and democratically, replace the government of people by administration of things, of affairs of life, absorb its useful organs into the levers of administration of affairs of life and scrap the coercive and useless organs into the dust bin of history. This class organ will eventually have no function in a classless society that is socialism. Thus the state will not be abolished but become redundant, defunct, will die out. 
For us, democracy is a participatory principle in social decision-making; it has both a form and content; it pre-supposes equality, and equality pre-supposes communism. Democracy is Communism or Socialism – the same conceptually. Democracy is not a fixation but a relation and a form of organization and action, the content of which is liberty, equality and co-operation. Real liberty, equality and co-operation can be achieved only in socialism; hence, democracy nowadays is socialism. As Engels appraises the matter: 
“For the full representation of labour in Parliament, as well as for the preparation of the abolition of the wages system, organizations will become necessary, not of separate Trades, but of the working class as body. And the sooner this is done the better. …”(Engels, Trades Unions, written on about May 20, 1881, C. W. 24, pp. 386-89) 
Hal Draper: The Death of the State in Marx and Engels (1970)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1970/xx/state.html 
The Death of the State in Marx and Engels … Saint-Simon [17 October 1760 – 19 May 1825] looked forward to the replacement of the government of men by the administration of things.
Elect MPs as mandated socialist delegates to overwhelm the Parliaments and pronounce: Annulment of all property and territorial rights whereby all that is on and in the earth will become the common heritage of the whole humanity. This will help clear away obstacles for the working class movement as a whole and usher the humanity into the realm of freedom towards World Socialism. 
THE WORLD SOCIALIST PARTY (INDIA) 
OBJECT 
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. 
DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES 
1. That society as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of the means of living (i.e., land, factories, railways, etc.) by the capitalist or master class, and the consequent enslavement of the working class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced. 
2. That in society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a class struggle, between those who possess but do not produce, and those who produce but do not possess. 
3. That this antagonism can be abolished only by the emancipation of the working class from the domination of the master class, by the conversion into the common property of society of the means of production and distribution, and their democratic control by the whole people. 
4. That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex. 
5. That this emancipation must be the work of the working class itself. 
6. 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. 
7. That as all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class, the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party. 
8. The World Socialist Party (India), therefore, enters the field of political action determined to wage a war against all other political parties, whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist, and calls upon the members of the working class of this country to muster under its banner to the end that a speedy termination may be wrought to the system which deprives them from the fruits of their labour, and that poverty may give place to comfort, privilege to equality, slavery to freedom. 
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
The Object and Declaration of Principles are basic to our organization. Initiated in 1904 with the inauguration of the Socialist Party of Great Britain these are being adopted as basic to organizations of class-conscious workers in other countries around the world. 

ALL ENQUIRIES AND APPLICATIONS FOR MEMBERSHIP TO…
THE WORLD SOCIALIST PARTY (INDIA)
257 Baghajatin ‘E’ Block (East), Kolkata 700 086,
Tel: 091-33-2425-0208, M: +91 9433253582; Email: wspindia@hotmail.com,Website: http://www.worldsocialistpartyindia.org
BINAY SARKAR 
December 18, 2018 at 12:36 am #172797

Wez
Participant

I’m seeing HTML code here instead of text.

December 18, 2018 at 7:30 am #173043

alanjjohnstone
Keymaster

Yp, it is a flaw with the reinstated website.

Posters when copying and pasting need to return to their message and edit out the code.

I fully understand that with the length of the WSPIndia minutes this would be too time consuming.

I’m sure it will get fixed in due course…too much work has been placed on too few shoulders, so we will have to endure some irritations and inconveniences for a bit longer.
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MINUTES OF EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE MEETING NO. 194

Surplus: 1240.00