Socialist Party Head Office
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Email received at Head Office and further evidence that our stickers are being noticed:
Quote:Dear SPGB, as a member of the Scottish Socialist Party (which is not racist)
and pro independence for Scotland, I was disappointed to find a sticker from
your organisation in my street urging people to use the vote as a protest for
world socialism. This referendum is much misunderstood, especially south of
the border, and is a vital opportunity for Scotland to free itself from a
Tory Government that no one in Scotland votes for. It could set an example of
what can be done against a racist government that is prejudiced against the
most vulnerable in society, involves itself in illegal wars, and has an
outdated idea of Britishness. Independence is not about 'borders' in the
negative sense but about 'boundaries' in the positive sense, in the way a
person needs good boundaries to thrive and to have thriving relationships
with others. Scotland has always traditionally been more Socialist than
England and indeed welcomes and campaigns hard for the rights of Asylum
seekers living here. Our largest number of incomers however, are English,
many of whom are also voting Yes. Independence for Scotland will allow the
growth of smaller parties again without the dominance of the English Tory
vote, most importantly the Scottish Socialist Party which has growing support
in Scotland and has formed strong links with Socialists in other countries
including Cuba. Many previously disillusioned voters in Scotland are voting
for the first time as they see the referendum as providing a once in a
lifetime opportunity for self determination and real change. Please call a
halt to encouraging voters in Scotland to waste it. I urge you to put this
email up on your website to educate people as to why Independence for
Scotland is a vital step for the Socialist cause and for World Socialism. I
look forward to hearing from you.
in solidariy, Frances CorrP.S. Apologies for omitting an important point in my last email on Scottish Independence: as a campaigner for the rights of asylum seekers to stay in the country and not be deported back to countries where their lives and wellbeing are at risk, the problem we are faced with in Scotland is that Westminster has control over this issue. We have no legal power over the UK Border Agency who carry out dawn raids on families, including children who are part of our community, taking them by force to detention centres in England to await deportation. In an Independant Scotland this could not happen. Please make sure this information is passed on to your supporters.Thomas Piketty was sent a copy of this review. Here is his reply:
Quote:Sorry that you found my preferred tax policies too weak! Most people usually feel the opposite. Best, ThomasAs this email sent to Head Office yesterday shows, our comrades in Glasgow have been active:
Quote:My name is [x]. I live in Glasgow. I am not a member of the SPGB but, while walking about my hometown I've seen SPGB stickers that ask people to not vote yes or no in the Scottish referendum but to ask for World Socialism. I entirely agree with this sentiment however there are definitely not enough of these stickers, especially compared to the amount of yes and no stickers. I was wondering how I might go about getting some of these stickers to put up? Would it cost me? How many could I get? etc? Thank you for taking the time to read this email. Yours, in solidarity.Email received on 18 August 2014:
Quote:Thank you for your request for a stall at the Anarchist Bookfair on the 18th October. We looked at your website and considered your request during our last Bookfair Collective meeting. I am sorry to have to inform you that we considered the politics of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, in particular your belief in political parties, are not sufficiently compatible with Anarchism for us to able to offer you a stall. I realise that you will be disappointed by our decision but need to let you know that it is final. Jane, on behalf of the Anarchist Bookfair CollectiveOzymandias wrote:If I send money can you send me one of those stickers to my home in Glasgow?The stickers have now arrived at Head Office and some 500 have already been sent on to Scotland. Can you email Head Office with your address and the number you want? Thanks.Anyone else who wants some is welcome to do the same.
Of course., but they won't be available for a week or so. We'll be sending one (or two) to all members, sympathisers, subscribers and contacts in Scotland.
Socialist Party Head Office wrote:We will also be printing a number of ballot paper stickers saying "NEITHER YES NOR NO BUT WORLD SOCIALISM".Here's what it might look like:
Reply received from Max Hastings:
Quote:Nobody sane could discuss World War I in 'favourable ' terms, but all wars are unspeakable for those who have to fight them. Niall Ferguson is out there almost alone among historians. For a variety of views on why Britain could not have remained neutral I recommend you to Margaret Macmillan, Michael Howard, Hew Strachan or Christopher Clark – much more distinguished historians than NF! Best wishes,Max HastingsHere is the statement on this adopted by the Party's Executive Committee on Saturday for publication in the Socialist Standard and as a press release. Members and others are free to publicise it on internet forums and anywhereSocialist Party statement on the Marx copyright controversyThis spring, London-based publishers Lawrence & Wishart came under fire online and in the leftist press for allegedly trying to‘privatise’the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. By now over six thousand activists have signed online petitions demanding that the “nasty, capitalistic” publishers retract their claim of a copyright ‘monopoly’over the duo’s collected writings. The allegations make for compelling headlines, but in reality the issue isn’t so clear cut.The works of Marx and Engels are valuable because they systematically document and explain the basic economic processes underpinning class societies. And an understanding of these processes is vital for identifying the problems with our own class society—capitalism—and what needs to be done to rectify them. Of course, countless later writers have helpfully summarised, elucidated, corrected, and interpreted Marx and Engels’s works, though many of the original writings remain relevant and worthy of study today.Both men having died in the 19th century, the copyrights on their original publications have long since expired. They are now in the public domain, meaning that, as far as the law is concerned, anyone is free to copy and distribute them. However, this status applies only to the works as they were originally published, unannotated and (usually) in German. Under copyright law, whenever someone produces a new version of a public-domain work that extends or transforms it in an intellectually creative way, such as through editing, critical commentary, or translation into another language, a new copyright is manifested in the novel creative elements. British law fixes the term of copyright at 70 years following the death of the creator, so any translations and critical editions produced since 1944 are likely to be proprietary in the UK.The recent furore over Lawrence & Wishart began when they demanded that the Marxists Internet Archive, a free online library, stop distributing material from a particular modern collection with the title Marx/Engels Collected Works. This collection is a 50-volume scholarly edition and English translation which Lawrence & Wishart had commissioned themselves (in collaboration with two other publishers) between 1975 and 2005. Though as a matter of law the publishers have the right to restrict republication of their own particular edition, their detractors have misunderstood this to mean that Lawrence & Wishart were asserting complete economic control over all of Marx and Engels’s works generally. In reality, the original German texts upon which the Collected Works is based, as well as many earlier English translations and editions of these same texts, remain in the public domain.Certainly the Socialist Party would welcome a move by Lawrence & Wishart to release their Collected Works into the public domain, or under terms which would permit the Marxists Internet Archive to resume distributing it. But at the same time it is understandable why they have so far opted not to do this. Like any other private enterprise marketing a product, their very existence is predicated on their exclusive control of the fruits of their employees’ labour. It is illogical toattack a single commercial publisher for engaging in business practices which are, by economic necessity, no different from those of every other one.What we can do, and indeed what we have always done, is to roundly condemn the entire socio-economic system which has led to the repugnant concept of ‘intellectual property’. Not long ago the notion that anyone ought to be able to claim exclusive rights to the expression of an idea would have been considered absurd. Today, however, legislative and technological measures have enabled and entrenched the commodification of humanity’s intellectual output. While computers and the Internet have long since made it feasible to freely share the totality of the world’s knowledge, the realization of this has been thwarted at every turn by those whose business models require that information, like physical commodities, remain scarce. In the digital world, of course, information is never scarce—entire libraries can be duplicated a thousand times over with the click of a button. Rather than face up to this fact, publishers have collectively erected artificial legal and technical barriers to the distribution of knowledge. Here, as elsewhere in capitalism, technological progress and social utility take a back seat to the preservation of profits.The fundamental problem with the removal of Marx/Engels Collected Works from the Internet, then, lies not with Lawrence & Wishart’s demand, nor with the bourgeois copyright regime which gave it legal force. Rather, it is with the capitalist mode of production in general, in which nothing—not even scholarly editions of socialist texts—is produced unless it can be sold at a profit. Capitalist businesses which are not willing to take such legally sanctioned but antisocial steps as are required to preserve their profits are doomed to fail, only to be supplanted by competitors with no such qualms. We therefore call on working people everywhere to unite for a single political solution: the abolition of the global capitalist system and its replacement with one based on common ownership and production for use instead of for profit.
Thanks, but it was mainly to use to contact the book's publishers that we needed it to see if the mistake is there as well as in the Times.
Darren redstar wrote:According to the Times the SPGB (in alliance with the Trotskyoid Awl) is on the verge of taking over the teachers union.unfortunately the times is paywalledhttp://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/education/article4132635.eceIf anyone has the paper cutting or a photocopy or scan of the original article could they send it to Head Office by letter or email so we can make an official complaint from the Party to the publishers. Thanks.
Message received from Alberto in Spain:
Jose Carlos Monedero the second man after Pablo Iglesias of PODEMOS, both professors
of Political Science at the Plutense Unversity in Madrid, used to be one of the
political advisers for Chaves of Venezuela, as you all probably know this so called
Bolivian Revolution it is nothing else but followers of Leninism.
Message received from Critisticuffs in relation to a workshop they are organising on 17 April:
Quote:David Harvey is the dominant commentator on Capital in English and many Capital reading groups use his video lectures or his book – A Companion to Marx' Capital – to guide them. Capital can be a daunting book and David Harvey's commentaries have encouraged many to pick it up and work through it. This, in principle, is a valuable project as much can be learned about the world we are forced to live in from that old book. Yet, those who read A Companion to guide them through Capital in order to learn about the capitalist mode of production will be disappointed: it neither gives an adequate account of what Marx said nor of the capitalist mode of production. In this meeting we want to focus on A Companion's failure to grasp what value and the value forming activity – abstract labour – are. /A Companion/ does not inform the reader what value is – access power to social wealth – and has nothing to say about labour being reduced to pure toil – “expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands” (Capital, p.134). Instead it exclusively concerns itself with the magnitude of value, i.e. for how much a commodity exchanges. Hence, Marx's charge against political economy also applies to his most prominent commentator: “Political economy has indeed analysed value and its magnitude, however incompletely, and has uncovered the content concealed within these forms. But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of value of the product.” (Capital, p.132) All this might seem like a scholastic exercise by people who care about old books instead of, say, the poverty all around us. However, it is important to highlight these problems not because they misrepresent Marx, although this is often the case, but because we think that David Harvey's account in A Companion does not adequately explain the commodity, money and capital; in short capitalism. Harvey's failure to grasp these fundamental concepts is the premise for him proposing futile solutions to socially made poverty. When David Harvey proposes oxidisable money against accumulation this does not only reveal his ignorance of money but also and more fundamentally of commodity production and the poverty it entails. The purpose of our workshop is hence not so much to point out that David Harvey wrote a bad book, but to encourage people to pick up a copy of Capital in order to understand the misery all around us.We have just been informed by email that this exhibition at the Bishopsgate Institute has been extended until 19 May.
Message from the author, Peter Critchley, that he posted to the Socialist Party email address today -Monday 24th March:Just to say that I am the author of The Proletarian Public, the book being discussed by Alan Johnstone.The book was never published in hard copy form. It was written up from notes I made early in my doctoral research. I wanted to write a thesis on the proletarian transformation of politics and the tradition of 'socialism from below'. I share that commitment to working class self-emancipation and autonomy, and so gathered materials for a thesis on proletarian order. As it happened, the thesis took a more philosophical direction, and the notes were left unused. I decided to gather them up and put them out, hoping to inform a little, inspire and just pay tribute to the James Connolly's and the Tom Mann's and all those who breathed fire and life into socialism. We need them back. We need to follow their example.So thanks for the interest. Hope I've done a little something to keep these figures and their ideas alive.
