Socialist Party Head Office
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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.
We have also received this email at Head Office from what appears to be a government agency:
Fracking: The Debate on Hydraulic Fracturing for Gas
The Mermaid, London, 19th May 2014Govtoday and Securing the Future are delighted to be hosting Fracking:
The Debate on Hydraulic Fracturing for Gas. The conference will be held
on Tuesday 19th May at the Mermaid Conference Centre, London.REGISTER YOUR PLACE TODAY via the URL below
http://www.fracking-conference.co.uk/index.php?option=com_gtereg&subid=
{subtag:subid}&refcode=FR14AG&Itemid=262Discounts for Group Bookings Available
VIEW FULL DETAILS OF THE PROGRAMME
http://www.fracking-conference.co.uk/programmeAlicia Greally
Marketing Executive
Tel: + 44 (0) 161 686 5589
Email: alicia.greally@gtevent.co.ukFracking: the Debate on Hydraulic Fracturing for Gas will discuss how the
advancement of fracking could contribute significantly to the UK’s energy
security and reduce the reliance on imported gas as the country moves to
a low carbon economy.The conference will provide delegates with an opportunity to hear about and
understand the prospect of increased shale gas extraction in the UK.A high profile panel of speakers will discuss the impact of the recent
recommendations examining the cases both for and against fracking UK shale.Confirmed Speakers INCLUDE:
Duarte Figueira
Head of the Office of Unconventional Gas and Oil
Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC)Dan Byles MP
All Party Parliamentary Group on Unconventional Oil and GasProfessor John Loughhead
Executive Director
UK Energy Research CentreJoin The Debate
TOPIC: The Debate on Hydraulic Fracturing for Gas in the UK
Have Your Say – comment on this topic using the guest log on provided
below.Username: fracking20 Password: fracking20
Comrade Paddy Shannon who is not on this forum has sent in this contribution:The thing about quantum mechanics is that it works but nobody knows why it works. There have always been two conflicting views on this, which one could call the chaos and the hidden order perspectives. On the chaos side there were Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and others who contended that fundamental ‘particles’ were probably not really particles, nor waves, nor anything we can possibly imagine, and their behaviour was essentially unknowable. Even attempts to measure their position or velocity introduce an observer bias. ‘Theory’ in the prevailing Copenhagen perspective is really ‘probability’. It works because, just like with humans, you can’t predict the behaviour of individuals but you can always predict the behaviour of crowds.The other school of thought follows the tradition of classical Newtonian physics (though this goes right back to Aristotle’s dictum ‘a thing is either X or it is non-X’), and this school has never been able to accept the Copenhagen view as anything but a fudge. In this viewpoint belong Einstein (“God doesn’t play dice” etc) and Erwin Schrodinger, whose famous ‘cat’ was an attempt to illustrate the intrinsic paradox of quantum uncertainty (how can a cat be dead and not dead?). Pilot wave, hidden variables etc, are attempts to explain quantum phenomena in deterministic frameworks.Quantum mechanics is the practice of quantum physics, without the theory. You do the sums, you get the right answers, no questions asked. Quantum theory, on the other hand, is where all the bitching takes place, with jobs and promotions often depending on which view you take. For an accessible and entertaining bitching session about string theorists and why they are the spawn of Satan, check out Lee Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics.
Another letter received on this:Dear Editors, RE: R. BrandTotally agree with Ian McRae – Letters Soc. Stand. January 2014 – he has hit the nail right on the head with his comments and condemnation of R. Brand.Your printed reply is very disappointing after so much learned writing which appears in the Socialist Standard – anyone new to Socialism and reading this article on first viewing of the Soc. Standard would, in my opinion, be likely to put the magazine down and forget the idea of a new way of living as led by as yet another ' bunch of nutters'.Biggest problem we have is continuing with the title SOCIALISM – the majority of people to whom I talk about this logical idea of human progression and betterment invariably condemn the title Socialism as State Capitalism with their minds wandering off in the direction of the next 'big bucks' job or 'who's won the footy tonight' ! Is a change possibly on the cards ?T.L. Smith
DAP who is not on this forum has sent in this contribution:Yes, it's (an ad?) from Money Week and they are known to be quite bearish, especially the editor, Merryn Somerset Webb, who also writes in the FT.There's a grain of truth of course but lots of hyperbole. YMS's comment underneath is right about not properly taking inflation into account. Big nominal numbers can be deceptive here – percentages are best.The point about gilts being in a bubble is right of course and interest rates will indeed rise as we know. But the main problem is likely to be the levels of personal debt not state debt, as these are far more serious and have risen more noticeably in the last 10-20 years. State debt is less of a problem in a relative boom, which will happen at some point, but personal debt is, as we've seen before. But highlighting that, I guess, doesn't fit in so neatly with the obvious agenda of the writer!
Conway Hall's publicity for this debate here:http://www.conwayhall.org.uk/what-are-we-going-to-do-with-capitalism
There's now going to be a local radio broadcast on this too on Sunday 19 January..
Here's the details.
Due to be broadcast *19th January 6pm* on Resonance FM, this half hour
program is an insider’s tour of the many faces of Speakers’ Corner,
peppered with sonic surprises. It reveals Corner’s intriguing origins, its
enduring mystique, and why people who write it off as a realm of cranks and
fanatics should think again. The show gives a taste of the incredible
archive of oral history, field recordings and photos which is nearly ready
for researchers at Bishopsgate Institute.The show features
– snippets of oral history with Speakers' Corner regulars
– entertaining archive footage of orators and hecklers past and present
– a musical adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s gallows satire “Clever Tom
Clinch” by the amazing Kalbakken.Listen online anywhere in the world: http://resonancefm.com/listen Or tune in to 104.4FM if your radio is near London Bridge! After the 19th you can download it from On the Record's website<http://soundsfromthepark.on-the-record.org.uk/radio-show/> .
