ALB
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Apparently a banner saying “Capitalism is crisis” has been replaced by one saying “What would Jesus do?”. At least that is what Friday’s Times “reported” (ie misinterpreted, distorted or simply made up to make a good story):”Other protestors claimed that the Occupy London message was not anti-capitalist, and removed a prominent banner bearing the slogan ‘Capitalism is crisis’. Sean Ganley, 34, an unemployed engineer from Northampton, said: ‘There are elements here co-opting the movement and we want to be dissociated from them. We don’t like obscene wealth but we’re not anti-capitalists.”I don’t know if this is true. It might be since, after all, it is possible to be against “obscene wealth” without being against capitalism. But if people are trying to co-opt the movement in this sense all the more reason for socialists to be there. I may go along on Monday to see if the “Capitalism is Crisis” banner which was there at the start is still there.
John Bissett reports that he visited the Occupy Newcastle camp and even passed a night there. He found the campers were mainly Green types, but open to discussion and ideas. During the day talks and discussions are organised (during the night most go home).
Maybe but Freud and his followers didn’t know anything about genes, DNA, etc. Freud proposed that there was (must be/might be) some sort of “sexual energy” but this has never been discovered though Reich thought he had and went completely off the rails with his theory of “orgone energy”. Fromm didn’t suffer from the discrediting of Freud’s hypothesis since he explained the development of the individual as being mainly due to social influences.
I think that Fromm was the best of the “Freudo-Marxists” because he abandoned the idea that there was a biological basis to the drives Freud thought he had discovered and offered instead an explanation based on social interactions. Reich and Marcuse didn’t do this.Whereas Freud (and Reich and Marcuse) saw the mind as something to be explained in terms of the individual’s instinctual biological development, Fromm saw that the mind as a social phenomenon. While Freud explained mental illness in terms of the failure of an individual to develop normally through the various stages of sexual development which his theory posited, Fromm (who was a medical doctor and practising psychiatrist himself) explained mental illness in terms of the failure of the individual to relate properly with other individuals. For him, not only the mind but (most) mental illnesses were social.This seems to me to be much more in line with Marx’s historical materialism, even though Fromm never completely abandoned “psychoanalysis”. While Reich and Marcuse’s ideas have been discredited along with those of Freud, Fromm’s retain some of their validity especially his view that humans need to live and feel part of a genuine community.
Hch wrote:Finally, if the SPGB supported TUSC and the Campaign for a New Workers Party, you would come into contact with workers who are supportive of socialist ideas.Why would we need to “enter” a reformist organisation to meet workers and get our ideas across? In any event, judging by the results of the last general election TUSC has no wider an audience than we have. In fact, in the Vauxhall cobstitutency in London, which we contested, the Trotskyist candidate got fewer votes than us. He was incidentally from a Trot group that wanted to join TUSC but was denied access to it. The rumour was that TUSC leader Bob Crow, as an unreconstructed Stalinists, didn’t like Trots. I’m sure he’d like us even less.
Hch wrote:I can only conclude that the SPGBs dismissal of the Campaign for a New Workers Party shows a lack of confidence in your own ideas.What’s the point of forming a Labour Party Mark 2. It would fail just as the existing Labour Party did, and for the same reason. Seeking support on the basis of reforms to capitalism, if it gets elected it will have no mandate for socialism and so will have no alternative but to run capitalism. But capitalism can run only as a profit-making system in the interests of those who live off profits. It can never be made to work in the interest of the majority class of wage and salary workers. In the end instead of Labour-style parties changing capitalism, capitalism changes them so they eventually end as simple managers of capitalism. That’s one of the mistakes the workers movement made in the 20th century. We don’t want this to be repeated in the 21st.
Why don’t we support TUSC, ie the Trotskyists United Supporters Club? You’ve got it right in one. It’s because they are reformists. Either genuinely because they mistakenly believe that the minimum wage can be tripled, pensions doubled and a massive public works programme for paid from increased taxes on profits implemented under capitalism. Or because they are practising the machiavellian trotskyist tactic of “transitional demands”, of trying to lead workers in reformist struggles which they (but not the workers) know are unachievable in the hope that when these reforms are not achieved the workers will turn to them who as a vanguard will lead them in an assault on the state, overthrow it and set up … state capitalism. No thanks.We tell the workers the truth: that capitalism can never be made to work in their interest and that the only way out is the establishment of socialism as a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources, production solely and directly for use and distribution on the principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”.
