Bijou Drains
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Hi Major McPharterIt was good to se Clifford and he passed on his regards to NE branch comrades. We had a little time to chat about the old days. It looks like we may have a debate possibility with the Corbynistas in March. Clifford indicated that he would be keen to come back for that event. It would be good to get a big turn out to reignite NE based activity. Would you be able to make it?CheersTim
mcolome1 wrote:jondwhite wrote:I blame Mike Pence and the 'pro-life' position being in fact all about being 'anti-women' and stopping women controlling their lives.All our problems are socially produced, they are not produced by an individual
that's not what "my beloved" would say. According to her all of her problems are caused by a single individual, me!
ALB wrote:Tim Kilgallon wrote:Unfortunately Yunus, the erstwhile leader of the vanguard of the revolutionary working class got lost and couldn't find the building,Thanks, but it doesn't strike me as being unfortunate that there wasn't an SWPer alongside Clifford. Just the opposite. Good thing he didn't turn up !
My use of the work unfortunately was meant to be ironic. I agree that Yunus' absence was a boon for us, I was however looking forward to Yunus and Clifford crossing swords again, it must be close on 28 years since they were last going hammer and tongs at each other at the Monument in Newcastle duing our weekly paper sales.
Hi AdamA very interesting night was had. Visitors were restricted, so only two attendees were there who were not part of the Durham University Union, myself and a friend. There were supposed to be three speakers from each side of the motion, the motion being that capitalism has failed. The three speakers who were to independently put forward their case that Capitalism had failed were supposed to be Harry Cross (labout Momentum) Yunus Bakhsh (from the SWP), and Clifford Slapper, representing the SPGB. Unfortunately Yunus, the erstwhile leader of the vanguard of the revolutionary working class got lost and couldn't find the building, good job it wasn't him that was sent out to find Winter Palace in 1917 As a result Clifford had the opportunity to speak twice.Opposing the motion there was a Madsen Pirie from the Adam Smith Institute, Rory Broomfield from the Freedom Association and a student member of the Liberal Society, whose name I forget.There were about 200 attendees.The speaker from the Labour Party put forward a fairly sound analysis of some of the failures of capitalism, followed by a predictible recipe of Bennite solutions to the issues, state control of industry, price control, higher regulation etc. The speakers against the motion (pro capitalism), trotted out the usual descriptions of what their fantasy of capitalism is, including a quite bizarre contribution from Madsen Pirie about the famous Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, which he somehow imagined had some bearing on the progressiveness of capitailsm, along with a decription of how capitaism was an improvement on feudalism, therefore we should all be gratetful that we weren't living in medieval hovels. He put forward the idea that in capitailism inequality took the form of the rich having Rolls Royces and the poor having Fords, The rich having Caviar, the poor having Cod roe. He somehow had overlooked the 1 million people in the UK who have the choice between food from a food bank or starvation. There was an extraordinary claim from Rory Broomfield that because all of us own some form of private property therefore we all are capitalists (I didn't know that having a pair of trousers and an Auf Wiedersen Box set somehow put me on a par with Bill Gates) and that in capitalism we all have choices about what whisky we drink and where we drink it and that therefore capitalism was a good thing.Clifford Slapper spoke twice, summing up the case against capitaism very adroitly, putting forward the party case and contrasting it with the approaches of both the pro capitalist and the pro state capitalist arguments. His contributions drew solid applause from sections of what appeared to be a rather affluent group of post graduates.There was a brief question and answer session and then a vote was taken by filling through either of the exit doors to signify the voting choice. There was a rather comical moment toward the end of this process where Madsen Pirie had to be redirected as he was about to walk through the door for those those voting that Capitalism had failed, for someone who has supposedly had as much influence on government, I've got to say, he didn't strike me as the sharpest cookie I've ever encountered.The final vote was 105-93 for the motion, which I gather came as a bit of a surprise all round. There was a chance to have a drink afterwards and several students were interested in the Party case, one or two knew of us and one in particular seemed to have a fairly strong understanding of our history and background.I managed to speak to Harry Cross and he seemed very keen to have further debate with the Party. I have provisionally arranged to set up a debate with him on the topic, "should Sociailists Support the Labour Party", sometime in March.
Bob Andrews wrote:Swore blind it was him shot George Orwell. I can believe it. Always was cack-handed the old man. Six inches higher and we would have been spared Nineteen Eighty-Four.if another shot he'd taken one night, in the company of your mother, had missed by six inches, we'd have been spared you!
Tim Kilgallon wrote:ALB wrote:Wittgenstein, Shitgenstein. Can't understand a word of what he wrote. Worse than Hegel. Maybe the Emporer has no clothes.Wittgenstein lived for four years in Newcastle, where he worked as a porter at the RVI Hospital. Local Legend has it that he used to drink in the Trent House pub, which was a popular haunt of mine back in the day. Perhaps it was drinking all that Broon ale that made his writings so incomprehensible.
There is a poem by the local poet Mike Wilkin “Geordie Henderson replies to the biographer of Ludwig Wittgenstein” (Mugs Rite, Bay Press, 1996), :“Div aa knaa oot more / aboot him?Fella, arl else / aa remember, is that / the only gala time /aa got im near a pint, / knaaing he was a Delphi /Oracle, aa askt him / if the Magpies would ever /climb back to the Shangri-La / of Division One.And he wrote / doon arl magisterially /on a raggy beer mat / (which is clagged-up / in wor netty yet!) /“Whereof one cannot spowt / Thereof one must say nowt.”
ALB wrote:Wittgenstein, Shitgenstein. Can't understand a word of what he wrote. Worse than Hegel. Maybe the Emporer has no clothes.Wittgenstein lived for four years in Newcastle, where he worked as a porter at the RVI Hospital. Local Legend has it that he used to drink in the Trent House pub, which was a popular haunt of mine back in the day. Perhaps it was drinking all that Broon ale that made his writings so incomprehensible.
LBird wrote:jondwhite wrote:I've invited Lbird!http://philosophyinpubs.co.uk/I went to a PIP meeting once, about 10 years ago…… the chair was an ex-CP guy, who I'd had, err…, political differences with, during the anti-Poll Tax campaign, when he was the chair of that, too.It didn't go well.At least my son, who was with me, thought it was funny. We didn't go again.
I find it hard to believe, L Bird upsetting someone, is this the same polite, charming, modest and entertaining L Bird that we have witnessed on this forum, surely not.Your son must have had an interesting childhood though? I have a mental picture of him quietly eating a packet of Monster Munch whilst you and his physics teacher are kicking lumps out of each other in the playground, during his year 9 Parents' Evening.
jondwhite wrote:So have they abandoned entryism in respect of the Labour party?I think they are busy entering and trying to take control of the Skegness and District Amateur Dramatic and Allotment Society, and then plan to turn that into a Revolutionary Vanguard Party, in preparation for their planned seizure of state power sometime in 2018.However rumour is that there has already been a split between the "Dramaticist" element in the Skegness group of the IMT and the "Horticulturites" in the same group, with both sides claiming the support of different factions in the Ecuadorian Tendancy for Workers Control (Marxist Leninist). The ETWC (ML) have two members, they Mr Pedro and Mrs Maria Garcia-Lopez of 27 Simon Bolivar Avenue,Guayaquil, who are said to now be sleeping in separate bedrooms.My sources report that it is likely that both factions are likely to launch their own Internationals, claiming each to be the reconstituted 4th international, sadly however there appear to be further difficulties in the Dramaticist group with one side claiming that men dressing up as pantomime dames is a misognistic ritual that supports the Patriarchal status quo, whilst the other side claim that there opponents are homophobic mono culturalists who deny the right of experssion to oppressed minorities.further news will be added as soon as I get it, but I would expect a noticable fall in the quality of vegetables in the annual Allotment Society Vegetable show this year.
irwellian wrote:Who is this "we" you are talking about? The British government? The capitalist class? The workers? As for "destroying the country"… whose country exactly? Theresa May's? Richard Brandon's? The guy who owns Sports Direct? The workers have no country.This whole argument presupposes that migratory patterns are some kind of natural phenomena and that those seeking to migrate will continue to wish to do so in a Socialist society. Remove the cause of the poverty that drives migration and most people would not wish to migrate. Most migrants I've spoken to would love to have stayed where they were, if it wasn't for war, poverty, oppressive regimes, etc.
On the same theme I don't know if anyone has come across this site:https://communistleaguetampa.org/points-of-unity/
Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:TK:"Typical bloody Trotskyist, taking power undemocratically, and then ordering everyone aroound, it's like Kronstadt all over again!!!!!"Isn't it time for your medication?
Another Trotskyist rouse, label all dissent as mental illness, we'll all be off to the gulag!
Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:mcolome1:"I think everybody around here is off topic because the original post was Marx and philosophy and it was changed to a topic that we covered several months ago, and you are repeating the same argumentation."May I suggest you take that up with the moderators?Until then, it's off-topic.
Typical bloody Trotskyist, taking power undemocratically, and then ordering everyone aroound, it's like Kronstadt all over again!!!!!
