ALB
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That’s quite good and not too long. Even if he is a bit vague and even misleading as to what Marx and Luxemburg meant by socialism. I thought I heard him say at one point “statified property” and at another “state control”.
What would be the party’s position on Trump’s peace proposal
Our general position is set out in the opening paragraph of the editorial in this month’s Socialist Standard
Hopefully the war in Ukraine will end quickly. Ideally, it should end immediately and unconditionally — in the interest of humanity in general and the working class in particular, the killing and destruction should just stop .
As we said in our manifesto issued in June 1917 during the first world slaughter:
Every Socialist must, therefore, wish to see peace established at once to save further maiming and slaughter of our fellow Workers. All those who on any pretext, or for any supposed reason, wish the war to continue, at once stamp themselves as anti-Socialist, anti-working class, and pro-capitalist.
In saying that the war could have been avoided Trump has virtually admitted that it was provoked by the actions of previous US administrations who pursued the policy of expanding NATO right up to the frontiers of ex-USSR Russia. The expansion to include Ukraine turned out to be an expansion too far.
The alternative explanation that the war was caused simply by a mad dictator bent on expanding his domain has been shown to wrong and those who accepted it have been left with egg on their face.
UK £2.26bn loan will be used in Ukraine for weapons, Zelensky says
Starmer could end up like Blair. Remembered only as a war-monger. There’s a chance of the killing and destruction in Ukraine coming to an end but he wants to keep the war going.
The Conservatives easily won the Vincent Square by-election taking the seat back from Labour:
https://www.westminster.gov.uk/media/document/declaration-of-results-of-vincent-square-by-election
Turnout was 29.07% which is not bad for a local by-election. There were 10 rejected ballot papers, 5 for being blank or having something written on them.
This compares with 18 and 15 in the May 2022 council elections. The figure of 15 is likely to be explained by there being no Green Party candidate then and some die-hard Greens taking the advice of their candidate this time not to “vote rubbish”.
If so, interesting that some Greens took the same principled position as us in not voting for something they don’t want.
We were only able to distribute 600 rather than the planned 1000 leaflets here due to so many electors living in apartment blocs without access:
“In the 2021 census Vincent Square ranked number 8 of all the wards in England and Wales for flats or apartments, which make up 97.0% of households here.”
No, WEZ, you are not the only one here enjoying seeing the European “Atlanticists” running around like headless chickens.
The pro-NATO Rumanian government, not content with annulling an election in which a pro-Russian candidate emerged as the front runner have now arrested him;
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c70eky7l6pxo
This shows that the issue in the Ukraine war never was about “defending democracy” but defending a pro-Western government.
What a bunch of hypocrites the European NATO leaders are.
Yesterday we finished distributing the leaflets, in Vincent Square and in Syon & Brentford Lock. In the end a total of 600 were distributed in the former and 1400 in the latter. Previously 950 had been distributed in Hammersmith Broadway. The election takes place in Vincent Square tomorrow and in Brentford a week later.
Meanwhile the Greens have dared to raise a world issue in another by-election in Hounslow a week tomorrow, in Brentford East (which we haven’t been leafletting):
https://m.facebook.com/groups/brentfordtoday/posts/1847196339375453/?locale=en_GB
As can be seen, they got criticised for doing so. Gaza may be a bit remote (even if a chance to kick the Labour Party) but, despite what Tory councillor Jack Emsley says, potholes and street lighting are affected by how capitalism works at an international level. Local councils are largely financed by money from central government but this is restricted by the need for the government to give to profit-making.
The parties contesting local elections all claim to be able to improve local services and amenities but, as we say in our leaflet they “end up having to do the system’s dirty work of saving money on public services so that taxes on profits can be kept down”. This includes the Greens, as can be seen from when they are in office, as currently in Bristol and previously in Brighton. For example:
https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/thousands-sign-petition-against-monthly-9902035
Yes, Starmer seems determined to keep the war going in the hope that Ukraine will eventually be in a better bargaining position. Evidently he doesn’t care how many people die and how much infrastructure is destroyed in the meantime. What a cynical bastard but that’s the sort of dirty work you must do if you assume responsibility for being in power under capitalism.
I don’t know about the SPEWers entering the Green Party but at least one other Trot group, the SWP breakaway RS21, may be doing this. Look at this letter entitled “Marginal Force” in the Letters page of this issue of the Weekly Worker:
https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1525/letters/
Here’s the key passage:
“I confess I don’t understand comrade Macnair’s insistence that it is “nonsense” to describe the Green Party of England and Wales as a “broad front” party. It is a party which contains conservatives, liberals, socialists, even some communists. It’s a party which seems to have little in the way of internal discipline, and whose elected officials and local branches often diverge wildly from one another in their politics. And it’s a party with a platform of standard social democratic policies hardly distinct from that of Corbyn’s Labour or from the umpteen different left-of-Labour projects over the years – and I don’t see any reason to assume that the new electoral formation which many on the left have been pushing for since 2019 will have a substantially different platform. In fact, it’s entirely conceivable that a new post-Corbynite party may end up with an almost identical policy platform to the Greens, but with substantially less internal democracy.”
“For whatever it’s worth, my instinct is that the most likely path out of this is by acting as a communist ‘party within a party’ within some broader electoral formation (whether it’s the Greens, Labour or some other party or coalition), while pushing for electoral reform, but I remain open-minded.”On the anecdotal level, on one of the pro-Palestine demonstrations before the general election I got talking to someone from RS21 and said that I supposed they’d be voting Labour and he replied that he’d be voting for the Greens.
A comrade has noticed that the Greens are now claiming to be not just a left-of-Labour party but a socialist party. What a joke.
500 leaflets were distributed door-to-door this morning in the Isleworth part of the Syon & Brentford ward of Hounslow Council for the by-election on 6 March. That makes a total of over 700 so far.
The main contest here is between Labour and someone the Green Party candidate has labelled “a divisive ex-Labour councillor”. Theo Dennison, who is standing as an Independent, was at one point presented as one of those left-of-Labour Independents. He was associated with George Galloway’s campaign in Rochdale but now says that it is a “smear” to mention this as the Labourites are doing. He does, however, cite an endorsement by a Hounslow Labour councillor who has defected to the Workers Party of Britain (but without mentioning this).
He stood as an Independent in the same ward in the 2022 local elections and in a by-election in May last year in a neighbouring ward. In both he came second. This time he is sparing no effort and money to get back into the Council Chamber. There is nothing particularly leftwing about his campaign. He is projecting himself as an ordinary independent to represent the residents of Brentford against those of the rest of Hounslow and has called on all anti-Labour people, including Tories, to rally round him. A complete opportunist.
His leafletters had been there before us, which means that people will get both our leaflets at the same time and note the contrast. The Greens and Labourites had also passed by.
Also standing are the Tories, LibDems and ReformUK whose candidate is a Sikh sporting a turban in their colours. A clever choice perhaps, since there are quite a number of people in the ward whose parents or grandparents emigrated from India. In fact, one of the polling stations is in a Hindu Temple.
There are doubts about the authenticity of this speech:
https://www.humanecologyreview.org/pastissues/her71/71abruzzi.pdf
For the record, Robin has a short letter in this week’s Weekly Worker correcting someone who had written that we thought trade union activity was reformist. Scroll down to the end.
Most of the other letters are about the “mass communist party” idea.
