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Another letter from us published in yesterday’s Weekly Worker. It’s the second one down.
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1534/letters/
To be fair, despite being Leninists, they do open their letters page to all-comers.
Missed this second reference to us in last week’s Weekly Worker:
“However, the danger is that the negative dialectic induces the TAS comrades, in attempting to avoid the danger of insufficient political/moral distance from Stalinists, to take the position of the Socialist Party of Great Britain – nothing happens now except propaganda for socialism, until billions agree – then you can introduce full communism on a world scale.”
In this article:
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1533/unity-in-three-parts/
Clearly the WW people are trying to press home their perceived advantage in being able to accuse the other side with SPGBism.
Here are details of our TUSC opponent and his reformist programme. Just a far-fetched proposal that the council defy the government on spending which, when it gets nowhere (except to the councillors being surcharged and the government sending in a commissioner to run the council), SPEW hope will lead those who fall for it to turn to them for leadership in a bid to overthrow the capitalist state (and establish a state capitalist regime). In other words, a typical manipulative Trotskyist “transitional demand”. Or perhaps he is naive enough to believe that what he proposes is realistic.
https://whocanivotefor.co.uk/person/119341/marco-tesei
Here’s is the information the same site provides on our candidate:
More leaflets distributed today in Herne Hill and Loughborough Junction. More Green Party window posters spotted. Also, the SWP, in the form of Stand Up to Racism, has made an intervention in the election, putting a leaflet through letter boxes in Railton Road saying “Reform UK is a racist party. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party is a danger to us all. Don’t vote for it”. Which is more than Reform UK is doing. Not their territory really.
Some 1200 leaflets have been distributed door to door so far in Herne Hill & Loughborough Junction ward. We only ordered 3000 but it looks as if this might not be enough to cover the whole ward.
Apart from us, only Labour and Greens have been leafletting.
Pictures spotted in an advice centre on Railton Road of CLR James (the Trotskyist from Trinidad who came to see Russia as state capitalist) and also of the much more famous Winifred Atwell. Railton Road between Effra Parade and Chaucher Road is literally where 1981 Brixton Riots stated and is (just) in the ward. The people living there now have been leafleted.
The Brixton Riots and Winifred Atwell – The Amazing Honky Tonk Woman
https://www.guidetags.com/mindmaps/explore/3049-brixton-riots-railton-road
Half a dozen Green Party window posters also spotted; which confirms that they are making a big effort to win here (where they once had councillors). They may well given the situation the Labour Party is in.
Not that the Greens would have fared any better had they been the government. The only difference would have been that they would have been forced by “economic headwinds” to do bigger U-turns since their promises to reform capitalism for the better are more extravagant than Labour’s.
The fact is that no government can make capitalism work to benefit the majority. All governments that try are bound to fail. That’s why socialism, as the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, is the only way out.
Here is the wording of the leaflet for the two electoral divisions we are contesting in Folkestone. 20,000 have been printed, 15,000 for distributed by a commercial firm and 5,000 by members.
Human Needs or Profit first?
We live in an economic system, capitalism, that ensures nothing gets built or created unless someone, somewhere expects to make a handsome profit. Human needs come very much second.
That is why Folkestone’s stunning harbour is going to be submerged in ugly blocks of concrete and glass. They are built, not for the needs of local people, but to make a profit for the developers and the owners of the land. No surprise there. That is how capitalism works.
All around us everything crumbles, from schools to libraries and social services, even as the vast wealth of a tiny minority continues to increase. And this will go on so long as we keep voting for political parties which think this absurd and cruel system can be reformed.
The Socialist Party of Great Britain has for the last 120 years advocated a quite different society built on the common, democratic ownership of the planet and its resources. A society in which every one of us gets to participate in decisions like the building of new houses, the planting of crops, how we get our energy. A truly human society where sustainable decisions are made based on human needs and the need to maintain a healthy planet.
At current levels of science and technology the earth can easily provide an abundance of resources for everyone to live a happy and fulfilled life. Then there will be no need to artificially ration the necessities of life with money. We will contribute our physical and mental labour freely and take freely from the common store.
That will need a world revolution. And every revolution starts somewhere. Why not Folkestone?
If you agree VOTE SOCIALIST.
Promoted by Robert Cox on behalf of Andy Thomas and Max Hess, all at 74 Linden Crescent, Folkestone CT19 5SB
I remember we discussed hisideas on the old WSM Forum on Yahoo. I checked and we did — in fact you did! Here’s what you posted on 19 December 2011:
“Theoretically speaking, it is quite true that capitalism cannot simply be equated with a “market economy” per se. It is more than just a market economy. For a start. it entails the separation of the producers – the workers – from the means of production and, consequently, the economic necessity on their part to sell their working abilities to those who own the means of production – the capitalist class. In other words capitalism is also a system of generalised wage labour and the competitve accumulation of capital in the hands of the minority owning class.
In practice, however, there is absolutely no way at all in which you can eliminate capitalism in today’s world and somehow retain a market economy. None at all. Individuals like Alex who think this is possible are completely deluding themsleves. This is the position espoused by Mutualists (or “free market anti capitalists” as they style themselves) like Kevin Carsons but it is quite hopeless. You too are quite mistaken if you think it is feasible and might be “slightly better than the present system”. It wont even be that!
The absurdity of the claim that you can have a free market economy without capitalism and all that capitalism entails has been more than amply demonstrated by Alex’s complete inability to make any kind of cogent response to the probing questions asked of him. He says the property rights of billionaires would be respected but such billionaires are a “by product of the state”. He makes no attempt to explain how this is the case. Presumably he means by this that state taxes the rest of society and hands the money over to these chosen few. Billionaires, it would seem, dont pay taxes – only the rest of us do. Yeah, right.
In his fantasy world of a stateless market economy the capitalists will simply disappear when the state is no longer there to support them. We will just stop working for them or buying the products that their companies produce. How you are going to persuade the majority of workers to do this who currently work for these companies and depend on them for their livelihood, he does not say. How you are going to persuade all those people who depend on the state (apart form the billionaires who get their billions from the state!) to get rid of the state, he does not say either – people on unemployment benefit, sick benefit, state pensions and so on. If charity is the answer why isnt it working right now? State welfare has certainly not eliminated poverty so why hasn’t charity stepped in to complete the task? Presumably we are all going to turn ourselves into small budding entrepeneurs and outcompete big business. Never mind that small businesses are also in competition wi
th each other and are collapsing in records numbers while the increasing concentration of capital in the hands of a few giant corporations continues apace. Ive heard a lot of tosh in my time but this surely has got to take the biscuit. It shows no understanding of how a market economy actually operates at allThe lesson is prertty clear. If you want to get rid of the state you have to get rid of the property relationships that go with it. You cannot try to to get rid of one and expect to keep the other intact.
Even if by magic a supposedly stateless free market economy were to materialise, it would be hell on earth. If you think Somali, (sometimes touted as an anarcho capitalist society because of the absence of a central government ) with its ferociously feuding warlords is bad enough, this would be much much worse. It would be a recipe for a large scale mafia type takeover of society. The state would not actually disappear as such but break up into a multitude of little mini-states each organised around some immensely rich and powerful mogul with his or her own private army. (Indeed this is yet another reason why the capitalists need their state – in the interest of self regulation) . Corruption and waste would spread like wildfire. Think of the bureaucracy that such an anti-economical system would engender. You wouldnt be able to cross the street and over someone’s stretch of pavement without having to pay a poll charge. Utter madness.
Within months, if not sooner, such a free market society will succumb to mass famine and internecine warfare. The populace will be clamouring for the return of a centralised state to restore law and order. Only the socialists – the real anti-statists – will be left to oppose such an idea by advocating as they have always done, the abolition of private ownership of the means of production that necessitates such a state.”
Other participants in the discussion were the dreaded late Dave McDonagh and the equally dreaded but still extant Bob Howes who I see is a regular contributor to our Facebook page,
Who says SPEW is not a reformist outfit?
Scroll down to what their candidate in a local by-election in North London yesterday told a local community news site what he stood for:
St Ann’s by-election candidates make their pitch for your votes
Not a word about socialism. Which of course is a good thing.
An example of leftists sharing Trump’s delusion about tariffs being used to resurrect manufacturing industry in the home country:
https://mailchi.mp/plutobooks/could-tariffs-ever-be-radical?e=0378739eef
The 3000 leaflets for distribution in the Herne Hill & Loughborough Junction local by-election in London arrived from the printers yesterday. Here is what it says.
Real change, not damage limitation
Fellow workers
They call it democracy but it’s nothing of the sort.
Labour didn’t even want this by-election. They’d rather stitch it up behind closed doors than face a real challenge. This isn’t about serving the people, it’s about protecting their grip on power. Councillors are parachuted in, selections are stage-managed, and decisions are made long before you ever see a ballot paper.
Meanwhile, rents rise, wages stagnate, benefits are cut, food banks multiply and estates are handed over to developers. Labour’s record in Lambeth is clear enough.
Now they ask for your vote again. So do the Greens, Lib Dems and others who promise change but only offer better management of a system built on exploitation. They won’t end your problems. They won’t challenge the class system. They won’t stop capitalism — they serve it.
No confidence in their system. No votes for our bosses’ parties. Until we end capitalism, nothing changes.
That’s why the Socialist Party is standing in this election. Not for tweaks or token reforms, but for real change. Common ownership, democratic control, production for need not profit.
If you want that, you can show it by voting for the Socialist candidate, Adam Buick.
Promoted and publish by Mark Hutton on behalf of Adam Buick, both at 52 Clapham High St, London SW4 7UN.
In the latest Weekly Worker, out today, they again accuse TAS of “Spgbism”.
TAS apparently argues that the proposed new “mass communist party” should have as its stated aim the winning of political power to expropriate the capitalist class and end working class exploitation, and should not have a programme of immediate demands but should simply say that it supports workers struggles to improve or protect from getting worse their conditions under capitalism.
In his article Jack Conrad says of this:
“… it seems, that the TAS comrades reject the idea of a minimum-maximum programme tout court. I say “seems” because at the moment it is more implied than explicitly stated. Nonetheless, comrade Wrack does provide us with this telling statement:
‘I see the programme … as being a programme for government – a government by the working class. It is a statement of intent, a series of policies that the working class will implement to change the way society is organised, to break the power of the ruling class, to end for ever the exploitation of the majority of the world’s population.’”.To which Conrad comments:
“If the programme is based on the ultimate destination, but fails to map out the route needed to get there, then what we have is an attempt to combine the SWP’s minimalism with the utopian impossibilism of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its ‘Our object and declaration of principles’.6”
The 6 is a footnote reference to our website where we set out and explain what our object and declaration what they mean. Conrad evidentially considers that “you are like the SPGB” will be a killer argument that will floor TAS and get them to change their position. Let’s hope that some readers of the WW follow the link that Conrad provides.
Conrad also writes:
“TAS … propose a Bakuninist leap from today’s capitalism to the communist future, where there is no state, no classes, no money, no markets.”
(Actually, Bakunin didn’t propose “no money, no markets”).
Earlier he had set out what the WW holds:
“ … the centrality of programme, the necessity of having a minimum (or immediate) section of that programme, of socialism being the transition period between capitalism and communism, or of socialism beginning as capitalism, but ruled over by the working class …”
This of course is pure Leninism which TAS seems to have moved beyond in accepting that socialism and communism are just two different words to refer to the same system of society “where there is no state, no classes, no money, no markets”.
The prospects of the two groups uniting seem slender if they can’t even agree on what socialism means. We shall see.
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1533/rediscovering-our-words/
Now the market for US government bonds is being affected. Selling bonds is the way governments mainly borrow money. The “yield” is the rate of interest on their nominal value. If it goes up it means that a government has to pay more for renewed and new loans
Of course the US government will never go bankrupt as its “collateral” is its power to raise money through taxation to repay its debts. But if yields keep going up it will have to use more in of its tax income to service its future debts.
One of its main creditors is China — yes, China lends money to American — and there is speculation that, as part of the economic war going on between to the two, China is selling some of its US bonds precisely to lower their price and so increase the yield on new loans (even this would harm China by reducing the value of the bonds it keeps).
Reformmuck tries to overtake Labour on the left:
https://www.grimsbytelegraph.co.uk/news/local-news/reform-uks-leader-nigel-farage-10091214.amp
This strategy might work to steal Labour votes.
According to this, the Trump administration is pursuing the same policy of restoring manufacturing as long advocated by the trade union movement and Labour Party leftwingers here.
The Green Oarty candidate in Herne Hill and Loughborough Junction has launched his campaign. He is promising cleaner air but has stopped short of promising more sunshine:
