alanjjohnstone
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You can relay to Steve that end of April our blogs SOYMB, Socialist Courier and my own personal blog, Mailstrom, all recently posted various versions of the Internationale, taken from You Tube. There were many more to choose from.A jazzy up-tempo interpretation http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2012/04/internationale-swing-version.htmlAcoustic guitars http://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2012/04/international-sung-by-alistair-hulett.htmlBilly Bragg with his much re-written lyrics http://mailstrom.blogspot.com/2012/04/international-by-billy-bragg.html A founding party member wrote a party anthem in 1910 , how the music went i have no idea, but the words to the song are herehttp://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2011/11/you-toilers-of-world-arise.html(as i keep trying to impress, our blog is a rich source of material on practically every subject) But all very well having a song, but do we have the singers with decent voices and who can carry a tune, asks , tone deaf me?
This another thought provoking interview of Chomsky but i cannot resist highlighting something he says that Danny in the election video pointed out similarly. Great minds think alike!!…(oops, that word great again) LF: Have you ever had a taste of a non market system — had a flash of optimism –– on this is how we could live? NC: A functioning family for example… Anyways, the full article is at :http://www.alternet.org/economy/155281/noam_chomsky_on_america%27s_economic_suicide/?page=entire
i read on earlier blog that the ballot paper “only contains the names and emblems of the parties”Once more, a reason for us to acquire a recognisable party logo to have to place upon the ballot
Yes, it is industrial action of sorts and something they have done previously to exert pressure upon the government. Over 20,000 held a protest march in 2008.http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7203839.stm Whether they actually ever go on strike again as they did in 1919, well I doubt it. Back then the government showed just how ruthless it could be in sacking striking police and I am in no doubt they would again. What the Party wrote in 1919 about the police strikes.http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2008/01/last-time-police-went-on-strike.html Also worth a read Socialist Standard article from 1971http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2010/01/all-coppers-are-workers.html#comment-form
Perhaps what you say may have value if you consider the SPGB as the vehicle that the working class will take to socialism. I am however of the opinion that the socialist party that will assume political power and establish socialism is yet to be created. So for the time being i consider the SPGB to be educational and propagandist, with just the occasional foray into the parliamentary election arena, dipping the toe in to test the water. I am sure some members will vehemently disagree with me, possessing the optimism of the founder members of the Party that the SPGB will perform the role of revolutionary party. I am more pessimistic. Consequently with placing lesser responsibility and importance upon the SPGB, we can compensate by being more choosy in our membership requirements, and be more picky. I have met some workers who are socialists in all regards who possess an overly romantic attachment to their country of birth. i likewise decline to make concessions to their nationalism in regards to membership of our organisation. My attitude on religious applicants would, if pressed, be the one recently jettisoned by the US military on its members sexuality — don’t ask, don’t tell. If a member does subsequently make an issue of their religious beliefs, then we should have the means to expel him/her if they deign not to resign. As an aside, i once encountered a party member who argued with me that ley-lines and standing stones had some form of energy. Should i have demanded his expulsion on the grounds of irrationality? Should the claims of New Age mysticism now be part of the knowledge test?..”do you think crystals, homeopathy, and water-dousing reflect the material scientific world, comrade-to-be?” And what about those who hold conspiracy theories? Is thinking that the Twin-Towers was an inside job or that Lee Harvey Oswald was not a lone gunman suffice for rejection in an application for membership? But i do digress…lol If we make our case clear and concise and honest as we possibly possible applicants will be fully aware of our attitude and their personal beliefs need not bring them or us into conflict and are free to seek out alternative groups or organisations that share our aspirations but not our party rules. The person who believed in God and voted for the SPGB understood our position and knew we never ever tried to mislead or misinform him simply for a membership due.
Hmmm?? Am i the only one who still posts links and thinks we should still be discussing and learning from the Occupy Movement? Never much comment or observations from others after i leave my messages. Anyways here is another useful article from the excellent if eclectic and occasionally estoteric webside Alternet http://www.alternet.org/occupywallst/155227/the_99_movement_has_something_for_everyone_–_but_is_it_occupy/?page=entire Occupy was selected as 2011 word of the year. The article describes a development within the Occupy Movement to usurp 99% into another brand-name but this time to co-opt the protests into mainstream Democratic Party politics particularly by MoveOn, a top-down organisation without a democratic structure that allows the members to vote on who the leadership will be or how decisions are made, let alone have serious input into the positions. Bill Dobbs of Occupy Wall Street, said that “Groups like MoveOn can walk into any Occupy movement and engage in the discussions, but we can’t participate in their strategy discussions.” [once again the example of our open WSM democracy demonstrates how different we are to other political organisations in that we invite participation in debate but reserve actual decision-making for the Party for party-members only, in a very visible and transparent process and can be used in our interaction with Occupy] “The 99% Movement employs the ideas and language of Occupy Wall Street towards ends diametrically opposed to it: support for Democratic Party candidates up to and including President Obama. Protesting corporations but not the politicians who work hand in hand with them is a crafty way to redirect Occupy’s energy away from the Democratic Party, which is as much an object of Occupy Wall Street’s ire as the Republicans… For Occupy, the danger of being sucked into the Democratic Party as its purpose becomes supporting a party that is in the pocket of Wall Street, instead of ending the tyranny of Wall Street.” But perhaps some members and sympathisers now consider it too late for the WSM to even ever so slightly influence the Occupy Movement, and that maybe Occupy itself has become passe.
You could have sent the socialist with religious belief in God, Robin’s and WIC contact details. We haven’t evoked the hostility clause against him or that organisation , have we?
Worth a read. Interview with geographer and social theorist David Harvey, professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and one of the 20 most cited humanities scholars of all time. http://www.salon.com/2012/04/28/urban_revolution_is_coming/singleton/ Q. A term that keeps coming up in stories about OWS is the “precariat” (workers involved in either freelance or non-unionized labor). Why are they important to radical movements?A. I’m not too fond of the term “precariat.” It’s always been the case that the people who produce and reproduce urban life look at their condition as being insecure, a lot of it is temporary labor, and have been different from factory workers. The left, historically, has always looked to the trade unions and the factory workers to engage its political base in the age of political change. The left has never thought of the people who are producing and reproducing urban life as being significant. This is where I think the Paris Commune comes in, because if you actually look at who made the Paris Commune, it wasn’t the factory workers. It was artisan workers, and a lot of the labor in Paris at that time was precarious.What you have right now, with the disappearance of many factories, is that you don’t have an industrial working class of the same size and significance that existed in the 1960s and ’70s. So the question becomes, what is the political base of the left? And my argument is to make it all the people who produce and reproduce urban life. Most of those people are precarious, they’re often moving around, they’re not easily organized, hard to unionize, and they’re a shifting population, but nevertheless they have tremendous potential political power….. Q.You say, “The revolution in our times has to be urban.” Why is the left so resistant to that idea? A. I think this is part of the struggle over how you interpret the Paris Commune. Some people say it was an urban social movement and therefore was not a class movement. This comes back to the Marxist/leftist view that the only people who can create a revolutionary movement are factory workers. Well, if you don’t have any factories around, you can’t have a revolution. This is ridiculous.I’m arguing that we have to look at the urban as a class phenomenon. After all, if finance capital is producing the city these days, and it builds the condominiums and it builds the offices, it is producing the city. If we want to resist the way they are doing it, then we have to wage a class struggle, in effect, against their power. I’m very concerned with asking a question like, How do we organize a whole city? The city is where our political future lies on the left. Q. How can public spaces be transformed into more accessible places?A. I look at it in simple terms – there’s a lot of public space in New York City, but there’s very little public space in which you can engage in common activity. Athenian democracy had the agora. Where can we go in New York City, where we can have an agora, and really talk. And this is what the assemblies were trying to define, what the people in Zuccotti Park were trying to do. They made a space where we can have a political dialogue. So we need to take public space… and turn it into a political commons, where real decisions are going to be made, where we can decide if it’s a good idea to have another building project, another bunch of condominiums. Q. Do you think there’s been a growing resistance movement to some of these free-market urban policies?A. What is striking is that if you had a map of protests worldwide which are against aspects of what’s going wrong under capitalism, you would see a huge mass of protests. The difficulty is that a lot of it is fragmented. For example, today we are talking about student debt and all the protests around that. Tomorrow people might be out resisting foreclosures; somebody else might be organizing a protest about the closure of a hospital, or a protest about what’s going on in public education. The difficulty right now is to find some sort of way to connect all of them. There are some attempts to create alliances, like The Right to the City Alliance, and the Excluded Workers Congress, so increasingly people are thinking about how to pull it all together. But it’s in the early stages. If it does all get together, you will find a huge mass of people who are interested in changing the system, root and branch, because this is not satisfying anybody’s real needs or desires. Q. Occupy Wall Street seems to be a coalescence of some of the issues you mentioned, but it still lacks a cohesive message. Why has the left always been so resistant to the idea of leadership, of hierarchy?I think the left has always had a problem, a fetishism of organization, a belief that one kind of organization is sufficient for a particular project. This was true of the communist project, where they followed a democratic-centralist model that they didn’t deviate from at all. And that model had some strengths and certain weaknesses. What we now see are many elements on the left who resist any form of hierarchy. They insist that everything has to be horizontal and openly democratic. Actually it’s not, in practice.In effect Occupy Wall Street was operating as a vanguard movement [a political party at the forefront of a movement]. They’ll deny it, but they were. They were talking for the 99 percent and they were not the 99 percent. They were talking to the 99 percent. There has to be a lot more flexibility on the left in terms of building different organizational structures. I was very impressed by the model of El Alto in Bolivia, where there was a mix of horizontal and hierarchical structures that came together to create a very powerful political organization. I think that the sooner we get away from certain rules of discussion, the better.The current rules of discussion that are currently in vogue are very good for small groups, because you can have an assembly. But if you want to create an assembly that includes the entire population of New York City, you can’t. You have to then think about whether there will be regional assemblies, or a mega-assembly. In fact, Occupy Wall Street does have a coordinating committee. They’re just very nervous about actually taking leadership and organizing.I think the successful movements always have a mix of horizontality and hierarchy. The most impressive one I’ve come across were the Chilean student movements, where one of the leaders was a young communist woman [Camila Vallejo], who is fully open to being as horizontal as possible, rather than having a central committee decide things. But at the same time, when leadership is called for, it should be exercised. If we start to think in these terms, we’ll have a more flexible system of organization on the left. There are groups within Occupy that are trying to get people within the Democratic Party to sign support for Occupy’s demands, and if not, they’re going to run candidates against them. There’s a wing doing that sort of thing, but they’re not the majority at all. Q. At the end of your book, you don’t provide many answers, but you wish to open a dialogue for how to get out of this gross economic inequality and the multiple crises of capitalism. Do you see this coming out of Occupy?A. It could possibly. If the union movement moves toward more geographical forms of organization, and not just based around workplaces, then the alliances between urban social movements and unions would be much, much stronger. What’s interesting is that there’s quite a good history of those types of collaborations that have been quite successful. I think that if you could just plant that seed, a huge change could be possible. If Occupy Wall Street can see their way to more collaboration with the union movement, then there will be a great deal of political action possible. My book is a groundwork for exploring all of these possibilities, and not dismissing anything, because we don’t know what the successful form of organization will be. But there’s a huge space at this moment for political activism.FULL INTERVIEW AT LINKWe in the WSM have promoted the idea of Athenian democracy as participatory. i think when Harvey talks about hierarchy it is perhaps a difficulty with language and terminology. We recognise delegated decision making and obligations of democratic responsibility and maybe that is what he is referring to. We also have said single issues should be united as component parts of a general struggle under the one aspirational umbrella of the socialist movement. We also hope that the trade union movement transcend their work-place struggles and strive for a change in society and not just working conditions. Not really sure where he stands in regard to the rural working class with this emphasis on the city, after all places like India and China are predominantly country-side, village, small town populations. America, too. And has the work-place really disappeared as a centre of organisation? He may be discussing the democratic features of what type of society he is working towards but he shouldn’t over-look the actual production of the goods we need to useand how that should be organised. Which brings us back to the fact that the city can only be seen as part of a regional geography and part of the world global society
We have always high-lighted the positve part of the Occupy Movement, the leader-less democracy of it. But WSM has always qualified this by explaining that the Occupy Movement cannot reject formal decision making structures that permits majority concensus and that this would soon become an issue. Our voice was a whisper and for some of us even that cautionary criticism was over-stepping it, but Red Pepper describe the exact problem at Occupy Oakland that we warned well in advance about.http://www.redpepper.org.uk/occupy-oakland-whose-streets-our-streets/ “Without democratically elected leadership or collective accountability processes, small groups have taken the banner of Occupy Oakland in erratic directions. The most glaring example has been the weekly ‘Fuck the Police’ marches, which announce that ‘if you identify as peaceful and are likely to interfere with the actions of your fellow protesters in any way, you may not want to attend this march.’ The inevitable property destruction and police confrontation have not built power for Occupy Oakland. Indeed, these actions have only justified the state repression in the minds of many, alienating the working and middle-class masses that are the key to Occupy’s future.” Yes, i too dislike the use of the words leadership and middle-class but after all it is Red Pepper but i think the essence of the fundamental point is clear enough. What we should be doing is countering the false conclusion made from Occupy’s faults by the likes Red Pepper, such that:” Occupy Oakland and its sister groups must abandon their initial claims to be a movement without leaders and demands.” And to do so means presenting democratic proposals and alternatives which incorporate our own criticism and shared by many others but doesn’t endorse Red Pepper’s solution which is to jettison of the no leaders principle and adopt reformist platforms. Even though our influence is negligible, our ideas are vast and i think it is time not for ad hoc articles or leaflets but the publication of an in depth revolutionary socialist manifesto aimed specifially for an online internet distribution campaign to actually get a hearing and offer the Occupy movement arguments to use against the reformists and re-buff the vanguards. Is this an elitist thing to do? To have the audacity of a couple of hundred impossiblists to set ourselves up as advisers to hundreds of thousands of activists on what to do. I don’t believe it is arrogant. It is the educational propaganda role that we all fully subscribe to and the tactic of class conscious socialists that don’t lead but “pushes forward all others” as the Communist Manifesto declares. The WSM does have “the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement” So why should we remain silent? We are already being proved right in our analysis.
Of related interest.http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/04/201242181822834480.html “… nuclear officials started to tell the people that their concerns were irrational and unscientific… the chairperson of the Atomic Energy Commission explained that there was no reason to worry since the probability of a nuclear accident in India was “one in infinity”…the nuclear programme contributes only 2.6 per cent of India’s total electricity output…Nuclear electricity in India is significantly more expensive than from non-nuclear alternatives, especially coal-based thermal stations, because of the high capital costs of nuclear reactor… Nuclear power cannot really be justified on the grounds of environmental sustainability, largely due to its production of radioactive wastes that stay hazardous for millenia, and the risk of catastrophic nuclear accidents that can never be ruled out. Finally, from the point of view of social equity, nuclear power is an inefficient way to deliver energy to the hundreds of millions of people living in villages spread out over a vast countryside……For these reasons, many of which are common across countries, and especially after Fukushima, there has been a marked decrease in public support for nuclear power. While some government like those in the United States and China have stayed the course, others in Venezuela, Switzerland and Germany have heeded democratic opinion and moved away from atomic energy. In this evolving dynamic, the protest in Koodankulam demonstrates the power of an organised non-violent mass movement. For six months, the people of the region physically stopped the construction of a nuclear plant, while resisting a barrage of governmental propaganda. Whether or not the government is finally able to force the construction of this particular reactor, this enduring movement is likely to serve as an inspiration for environmental groups throughout the world.”
I think I agree with Janet and err or on the side of caution but I accept your counter argument , DJP. Of course we recognise that fossil fuel energy is polluting and hazardous to health. SOYMB has posted on dirty air and estimated fatalities from it. 3.6 million premature deaths world wide a year. In 2008, 4,000 people died in London from air pollution and 30,000 died across the whole of the UK, and overall for everybody seven or eight months off a Britons’ life expectancy. I think my view is that the public are debating nuclear energy and we are at a political point that its further future development can be halted. Whereas with fossil fuels we have a tremendous mess to clean up, with stopping nuclear energy now we can stop the mess getting worse before it gets too big also. Our emphasis should always be about sustainable, environmental friendly energy production. If nuclear reactors are needed it is only because capitalism needs them.
A related article is this one on the Arab Spring and how it has been thwarted. http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/13/whatever-happened-to-the-arab-spring/ It too ends in a stirring conclusion. “Only through a coordinated cross-border struggle for peace and economic justice can the workers and other popular masses bring the worldwide production of goods and provision of services to a standstill, and restructure the status quo for a better world—a world in which the products of human labor and the bounties of Nature could benefit all.”
Again, i am not sure which thread to post this, since i went for the Chomsky one last occasion, i’ll post here on this occasion.http://www.alternet.org/occupywallst/155116/noam_chomsky_on_america%27s_declining_empire%2C_occupy_and_the_arab_spring/?page=entire “Occupy came along at a time which was ripe, and the strategy I thought was brilliant. If I had been asked I wouldn’t have advised it. I never thought it was going to work. Fortunately I was wrong. It worked very well.” answers Chomsky Earlier he explained “I think there’s just been a steady buildup of concern, anger and frustration. You can see it in polls. Hatred of institutions and distrust is all over the country, and it’s been rising for a long time.” This could have been and actually was tapped into by more than just the left. The Tea Party and the Right did so but i think they quickly lost credibility because of that ideological identification with Republicans. (Ron Paul libertarian supporters were i think the only non-left to overlap and interact with the Occupy movement and with a measure of success) Chomsky says “The Occupy movement managed to capture the mood and crystalize it. That’s the way popular movements take off…Things happen that draw in others and all of a sudden you get a popular movement. Same thing happened in the anti-war movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, or the global justice movement.” In the interview, he gives no inkling to how these “things” really develop, and much of the debate here is to try and understand this rise of consciousness. But he does refer to the tactical approach that proved fruitful to its growth. But one means should never ever become a template for every possible future situation or circumstance. I think over history we have witnessed new, innovative methods of struggle being employed by workers, but they sometimes create adherents who make them into a matter of principled model rather ad hoc impromptu adaptations often of older forms of resistance, and these improved methods are eventually discarded when the conditions change. I look forward to reading Chomsky’s book and hearing others views upon it.
As you say, DJP, this does lead to confusion. The comments at this report of the Keen/Krugman debate exemplifies the problem. http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2012/04/21/just-banking-presentation/comment-page-1/#comments Comments by Lyonwiss describes what you say.”If you listen carefully to “Money as Debt” by Paul Grignon or read Hawtrey (Currency and Credit) or Schumpeter (Theory of Economic Development) or Holmes (Operational constraint…), they do not confuse credit with cash (only real form of money M0). For example, a bank deposit is debt (or credit to depositors) , NOT money. That’s why a bank can lend without money, which it typically does not have much of, nor does it create (not cash or notes), any time (@ Koonyeow April 21, 2012 at 9:44 pm). Much of the debate (too much) comes from an abuse of language (confusing debt with money). Leverage and endogenous credit creation are the issues, not money, for which government normally has control…..I think one of the confusions is the words money and deposit. For a private sector worker like me, money usually means the notes and coins you have plus your deposit with (usually) a commercial bank. Generally (but not verified by me yet), notes and coins are created by central banks. Deposits on the other hand come into existence in two ways:1. You hand over your notes or coins to your commercial bank. Your notes or coins decrease but your deposit increases; 2. The commercial bank makes a loan to you. Your deposit increases (and so does your debt). However, no notes or coins are created is this process.When you wrote banks can create money from nothing, the more technical statement is commercial banks can create deposits from nothing if there is no reserve requirement.”
Despite being written by the ISO (the American version of the SWP but now split) this long piece from 2004 and the Bush/Kerry election is actually quite good and much of it still applies today. It challenges Chomsky’s case for voting for the lesser evil. http://www.internationalsocialist.org/pdfs/democrats_lesserevilism.pdf Its conclusion, I think, echos our own position:- “…The task of socialists should be to break illusions in the capitalist system and its politicians—not to strengthen those illusions. It follows that the first task of socialists in the U.S. today is to reject any support for Democratic candidates, no matter how “left-liberal” their rhetoric sounds. But once socialists reject the Democratic Party, they must pose a clear socialist alternative.”
