twc
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Lizzie: “it’s not only votes that count but politically conscious ones at that!”
False. Your slick paraphrase garbles what I carefully wrote.
Politically conscious votes — endorsement of a political party’s cunning plan to remedy capitalism’s ills — are the ones that actually do count under capitalism.
The Socialist Party seeks only class conscious votes — the votes that count toward establishing Socialism.
That is why I carefully distinguished the necessity of the Socialist Party’s electoral integrity from the electoral duplicity of the vote-cadging rest to fabricate a false “political consciousness”, of which Lizzie is a sad casualty.
The Socialist Party seeks votes from people who agree with its Object and Declaration of Principles (https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/our-object-and-declaration-principles/).
The Party encourages votes that are cast consciously for Socialism, and actively discourages all other votes.
Its political integrity is an essential exemplar of the Socialism it seeks to establish.
Consequently the Party’s electoral activity is diametrically opposed to that of every other political party and candidate who inevitably find themselves in the desperate position of having to spout vote-catching political drivel about curing social ills that the Socialist Party holds to be indissoluble to the capitalist mode of production.
Lizzy’s “non-derisory” polling results for such political parties and candidates are not indicative of genuine support. They are indicative measures of the political duping of a socially ignorant electorate — which is the theme of this thread.
Lizzy’s “non-derisory” results can never be permanent attainments. The history of capitalist elections reveals them to be volatile, and capable of spiriting away as capitalism turns and twists.
Rather, it is precisely Lizzy’s “non-derisory” results that turn out to be permanently “derisory”.
Lizzy parades her brilliance before us mingled with malicious glee. Pity might be humanly acceptable but Lizzy’s sneering inhumanity merits only our pity.
“Childlike views on science”
- “If it was true that the world is spinnin’ round on its axle so quick as that, if a man started out from Calais to fly to Dover, by the time he got to England he’d find ‘imself in North America, or p’r’aps farther off still”.
Tressell paints these capitalists as buffoons. Nevertheless they are confronting the foundational contradiction of modern physics, here expressed in technical terms…
Suppose that you dropped a ball from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, about 50 metres up.
It takes 3 seconds for a ball to fall 50 m from rest (Galileo’s equations of falling bodies):
- ½ g t2 = 50 metres; or t = 3 seconds
In those 3 seconds, a spinning Earth would move about 1 km to the East (geometry of a spherical Earth of radius R):
- 2π R cosine(<Pisa’s latitude>) / 24 hours = 1 km in 3 seconds
Now the Leaning Tower is connected to the Earth.
But what about the falling ball? It is apparently unconnected to the Earth. Why doesn’t it hit the ground a kilometre to the West of the Leaning Tower?
The contradictory answers…
- because the Earth doesn’t spin — Aristotle around 300 BCE;
- because an object in “free fall” is in reality “unfree” in the sense that it inherits a spinning Earth’s [tangential and rotational] motion — Galileo reached this conclusion around 1900 years later.
Modern astronomical science had arisen out of the self-consciously anti-physical epicycles of Ptolemy and Copernicus through the proto-physical ellipses of Kepler’s planetary laws.
Galileo’s investigations laid the solid physical foundations of modern astronomy, which Newton extended to the Solar System and beyond.
Coriolis Effect
Postscript. The Earth’s rotation has a minor influence on the path of a “free falling” ball — the “Coriolis effect” — which amounts to a 6 mm deflection in a 50 m fall at the latitude of Pisa; but that is another story.
Actually, the charity lady is Mrs M.B. Sile — imbecile.
This is satire. The lady is named, like many of Robert Tressell’s characters, for the role she plays under capitalism, here in an imbecilic charity.
- … a jumbled list of items of expenditure, subscriptions, donations, legacies, and collections, winding up with “the general summary showed a balance in hand of £178.4.6’. (They always kept a good balance in hand because of the Secretary’s salary and the rent of the offices.)
After this very explicit financial statement came the most important part of the report: “Thanks are expressed to Sir Graball D’Encloseland for a donation of 2 guineas. Mrs Grosare, 1 guinea. Mrs Starvem, Hospital tickets. Lady Slumrent, letter of admission to Convalescent Home. Mrs Knobrane, 1 guinea. Mrs M.B. Sile, 1 guinea. Mrs M.T. Head, 1 guinea. Mrs Sledging, gifts of clothing”—and so on for another quarter of a column, the whole concluding with a vote of thanks to the Secretary and an urgent appeal to the charitable public for more funds to enable the Society to continue its noble work.
Meantime, in spite of this and kindred organizations the conditions of the under-paid poverty stricken and unemployed workers remained the same. Although the people who got the grocery and coal orders, the “Nourishment”, and the cast-off clothes and boots, were very glad to have them, yet these things did far more harm than good. They humiliated, degraded and pauperized those who received them, and the existence of the societies prevented the problem being grappled with in a sane and practical manner. The people lacked the necessaries of life: the necessaries of life are produced by Work: these people were willing to work, but were prevented from doing so by the idiotic system of society which these “charitable” people are determined to do their best to perpetuate.
If the people who expect to be praised and glorified for being charitable were never to give another farthing it would be far better for the industrious poor, because then the community as a whole would be compelled to deal with the absurd and unnecessary state of affairs that exists today—millions of people living and dying in wretchedness and poverty in an age when science and machinery have made it possible to produce such an abundance of everything that everyone might enjoy plenty and comfort. If it were not for all this so-called charity the starving unemployed men all over the country would demand to be allowed to work and produce the things they are perishing for want of, instead of being—as they are now—content to wear their masters’ cast-off clothing and to eat the crumbs that fall from his table.
“Ragged trousered” is a euphemism for “ragged arsed” (= a “down-and-out”). The author’s pen name suggests the trestle on which painters stand when working overhead. The name of the protagonist, Frank Owen, hints at “utopian socialist” Robert Owen.
The most accursed nickname is reserved for Mr Hunter, the general foreman or “manager” of Rushton [= rush it on ] & Co., Builders and Decorators. Behind his back, the men call him Nimrod — “the mighty hunter [= overseer] before the Lord [=Rushton]” (Genesis 10: 8-12).
This extraordinary novel repays returning to from time to time.
————Julius Cæsar I.2
SOOTHSAYER
——Beware the ides of March.
CÆSAR
——He is a dreamer. Let us leave him. Pass.————Julius Cæsar III.1
CÆSAR
——The ides of March are come.
SOOTHSAYER
——Ay, Cæsar, but not gone.Here is the Juice Media’s take on Israel & Gaza…
- Impotence of capitalist rights to life, liberty and property to solve international contradictions:
- Impotence of international capitalist law to prevent war, and its concomitant civilian targeting, civilian hostages, and national occupation.
As Marx (Capital Vol. 1) pointed out in the class struggle over the limits of the working day
- There is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights force decides.
Unfortunately the Juice Media, who are superb exposers of capitalist “shit-fuckery”, consider that nationalist propaganda disseminated by nationalist government and media “has been the cause of every major war this century”.
But nationalist propaganda is not a “bug” but a “feature” of capitalism. The root cause is the capitalist mode of production itself. Socialism is, as for all pressing social problems under capitalism, the only viable solution.
National anthems, even when multi-lingual, invariably call upon God’s guidance and military might. France’s La Marseillaise is one of the few secular exceptions.
The state of Oklahoma’s anthem is another exception. It was lifted straight out of the musical Oklahoma! (Rodgers and Hammerstein: Broadway 1943; movie 1955). The official anthem starts at timestamp 00:45.
When Australian Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam was removing “God Save the Queen”, he floated the possibility of Waltzing Matilda, a bush ballad about a swagman [an itinerant] who “steals” a wandering jumbuck [sheep] from a squatter [a land-grabber of Aboriginal territories for cattle stations, and who typically, in outback Queensland, finished up bound to foreign (UK) capital].
Waltzing Matilda was deemed infra dig for the official national anthem, but it fondly remained the unofficial one.
Recently, the inclusive We are Australian by the Seekers is another unofficial Australian anthem.
- ‘Moo (no doubt an “All Black” supporter)’
What makes you think that, twc?Kiri Te Kanawa. And, perhaps mistakenly, I thought you hailed from, or once dwelled in, Aotearoa (New Zealand).
To clarify.
My comments relate solely to the text of “I Vow to Thee, My Country”, and in no way to the text of the International Rugby Union’s “World in Union”, which Moo (no doubt an “All Black” supporter) commends to us.
As ALB says, the text of “I Vow to Thee, My Country” is a rallying cry for youth to sacrifice their young lives, gloriously, for country.
As an anthem for blood sport, it better suits the perspective of the rabid one-eyed supporter.
By setting this fierce Old-Testament laden text (innocently enough for a girl’s school choir) to his rollicking “Jupiter” music from The Planets, he inadvertently created an ideal patriotic hymn for militaristic ceremonies and Last Night of the Proms.
Yet Gustav Holst was a decent human, though a muddled astrologer and confused socialist—many fin-de-siècle radicals went off the rails.
As a young man, Holst conducted [William Morris’s] Hammersmith socialist choir and read News from Nowhere.
He was a Christian socialist, later in cahoots with the “red vicar” of Haxted [Catholic] church in the Cotswolds, and so he approached (like that other decent human but confused socialist, Paul Dirac) within a few degrees separation from Stalin’s anti-socialist Russia.
Socialists might enjoy Tony Palmer’s hit film Holst: In the Bleak Midwinter for BBC4 in 2011.
pgb wrote:
- [Marx and Engels] understood the role of nationality in shaping class-based movements, and that distinctive cultures, languages and ‘ways of life’ are embodied in nations and permeate all aspects of peoples lives.
In the Communist Manifesto’s famous Chapter I “Bourgeois and Proletarians”, Marx and Engels deal exclusively with the class war, and see “the role of nationality, etc.” as an impediment to the class war.
The Communist Manifesto is about as anti-nationalist as you can get.
It defiantly sees “national interest” as a backwards capitulation to the interests, and so thought patterns, of the class enemy.
- The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood.
All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe.
In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.
And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
Marx and Engels did take sides (inconsistently with the Manifesto) in some national struggles, where they backed the side they thought might break feudal strangleholds or (ambitiously) hasten socialism along.
But they never “understood the role of nationality, etc.” as grounds for justifying nations retaliating against each other. Capitalism is universal retaliation.
So when they wrote in the Manifesto
- Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.
they were asking (in 1848) a national proletariat to engage in class war with its national bourgeoisie, and not to go out of its way to join forces with it.
