[Victor]

Vin wrote:

Brand is now calling on all his 'followers' on twitter to vote labour, obviously believing (like the internet committee) that 'follower' on twitter means support. I think he underestimates his twitter 'followers'This has probably been planned all along 

Are we allowed to use the word 'wanker' on this forum?

[Victor]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

We have to find a way to break this cycle of "lesser evilism"…I'm open to suggestions …

I think I speak for the democratic majority when I say we haven't got an f-ing clue mate.

[Victor]

I suspect the central issue here is not going to be addressed honestly – partly because it possibly can't be.  Why does humanity have these hierarchical property-based systems in the first place?  Class systems, slave-holding and feudalism have all manifested in different ways in different human societies down the ages.  None of these were inevitable.  So why did they arise?  What does it say about the human condition?   Something is fucked-up here.  Something's wrong.  No-one really knows what it is.  Capitalism relies on the notion that it is a 'rational' or reason-based system, but if you ask me it is thoroughly irrational.  That's political knowledge.  It's putting the political back in the economic.  Why do only a few of us have this knowledge and awareness?  That can't be right, can it.  Which is not to say we're bound to be right.  We might be wrong, but most of us were once pro-capitalist or reformist, so we have experienced both sides of the fence.  How did we get here? I think there is an intellectual problem.  Not an intelligence problem, just a problem of culture and inclination, which may in turn have its roots in biologic factors.  Maybe the human brain (or mind, or both) is geared to be led in most cases, and those of us who 'odd' are the would-be leaders under different social circumstances.  It just so happens that, due to the accident of social circumstances, it's Richard Branson who is the captain of industry, not you and me.  Or is that just reactionary crap?A prospect can have all the intelligence in the world, but unless they're willing to receive the information and have an inclination to listen, then you might as well be talking to a brick wall.  Education in a way acts as a block.  It's a form of indoctrination.  We've all engaged online with the typical 'educated' American who has been indoctrinated in Austrian School linear economics and thinks socialism is anything to the left of John McCain.  That's what education (schooling) does.  It befuddles the mind.  That's why I suggest the problem is not intelligence, but intellect.  Anyone who has attempted to argue the SPGB case (I have) must surely recognise this.  It's represented in different forms in all our experiences.  Is this a result of something to do with the way people are, or is it just the social conditions?

[Victor]

You're a very, very, very, very nice man.  Yes, you are. 

[Victor]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

It does get a bit blurred, doesn't it?…a CEO is "employed" by the share-holders, yet his "wages" is often in the shape of privileged share options. Takes us back to all that discussion on the state-capitalist apparachiks and nomenclatura and Rizzi's and Burnham's managerial elites as a ruling class (not to mention Paul Cardan), and not the owning class….but i don't think we should go off topic too muchManagement in football is not the manager or coach but the board and , oh we know only too often, the battles football managers have had with their board of directors and the resignations and the sackings that have ensued. Always as you say…the ultimate winner is the person at the top with the most shares in the club – the owner. 

Yes, but I think it's also fair to say that often even the equity owners aren't all that vested in the profits and losses of the club itself.  Their interest is usually in the commercial side of things – i.e. merchandising sponsorship, restaurants, supporting businesses.  In the lower divisions, the motives of owners might also be a little more complex than they appear.  Some of them, though successful businessmen in other respects, will be motivated by a genuine wish to keep a club going in the interests of the community.  There's also the prestige this gives them.  Of course, some of the lower league clubs are invested in because they have a potential fan base that could be lucrative and so a new consortium put the money in to build-up the club and see it promoted through the divisions in the hope that this commercial potential can be better exploited with a higher profile and TV rights.

[Victor]

Thanks for the link.  This is good.  It does give us hope because it's only a short step from saying 'We can run the system ourselves' to saying 'We can run a whole new system in our interests'.

[Victor]

Threads like this really drive home the differences between the SPGB and 'the others'.  Despite having some qualified reservations (the Left are cynics but might be right about the capacity of workers), I am with you on this and wish you every success in the elections. 

[Victor]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

Robbo and LBird…i think we have to be sure of our words…Victor is wrong …people aren't ignorant…they are unaroused politically. We know our friends and co-workers only too well…they can analyse a football game with precision…they can judge a racehorse's capability to a photo fuinish…and they leave me mathematically dumbfounded when it comes to calculating all those complex bets at the bookies…it is certainly not from lack of intellectual prowness that workers do not understand socialism…it is the missing will that they lack.

Quote:

From Hegel from his Philosophy of the Mind:“If, therefore man does not want to perish he must recognize the world as a self-dependent world which in its essential nature is already complete, must accept the conditions set for him by the world and wrest from it what he wants for himself. As a rule ,the man believes that this submission is only forced on him by necessity. But, in truth, this unity with the world must be recognized, not as a relation imposed by necessity, but as the rational …therefore the man behaves quite rationally in abandoning his plan for completely transforming the world and in striving to realize his personal aims, passions and interests only within the framework of the world in which he is a part.” 

Socialist Parry members are not superior to society. We understand how the class society basically works. That is the difference to the majority of the working class, which do not understand and therefore do not see the need to abolish capitalism. I would like to quote Bookchin and Mattick

Quote:

From his Anarchism , Marxism and the Future of the Left :-"…human beings cannot be free – except under very rare conditions , such as during revolutions and for limited periods of time ; even then , they must still leave the barricades and return to work to satisfy their needs and those of their families . They have to eat , if you please….."Bookchin continued with an example:-" …In May 1937 in Barcelona , the workers had to conquer the Stalinist counterrevolution then and there . But they delayed , and after four days they had to leave the streets to obtain food…"

 

Quote:

“There is no evidence that the last hundred years of labour strife have led to the revolutionizing of the working class in the sense of a growing willingness to do away with the capitalist system…In times of depression no less in than these of prosperity , the continuing confrontations of labor and capital have led not to an political radicalization of the working class , but to an intensified insistence upon better accommodations within the capitalist system…No matter how much he [ the worker ] may emancipate himself ideologically ,for all practical purposes he must proceed as if he were still under the sway of bourgeois ideology .He may realize that his individual needs can only be assured by collective class actions , but he will still be forced to attend to his immediate needs as an individual .It is this situation , rather than some conditioned inability to transcend capitalism. He may realize that his individual needs can only be assured by collective class actions , but he will still be forced to attend to his immediate needs as an individual .It is this situation , rather than some conditioned inability to transcend capitalist ideology, that makes the workers reluctant to express and to act upon their anti- capitalist attitudes ” – Marxism, Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie

From our literature, these two supplementary quotes are of interest“A period of revolution begins not because life has become physically impossible but because growing numbers of workers have their eyes suddenly opened to the fact that problems hitherto accepted as part of man’s unavoidable heritage has become capable of solution…No crisis of capitalism, however desperate it may be, can ever by itself give us socialism ” – Will Capitalism Collapse ?And here we also stated :-“If we hoped to achieve Socialism ONLY by our propaganda, the outlook would indeed be bad. But it is Capitalism itself unable to solve crises , unemployment, and poverty, engaging in horrifying wars, which is digging its own grave. Workers are learning by bitter experience and bloody sacrifice for interests not their own. They are learning slowly. Our job is to shorten the time, to speed up the process.” – Socialism or Chaos Socialist consciousness involves understanding socialism which means talking about it, sharing ideas about it – in short educating ourselves and our fellow workers about it.But some detractors, have the mistaken idea that the Socialist Party of Great Britain thinks selling a copy of the Socialist Standard and holding meetings is the key to revolution. If that really was the case, the world would be in for a very long wait. People become socialists from their experiences; meeting socialists is part of that experience. Some in our party have the view the problem with the SPGB's theory is NOT because it emphasises education but because it inadequately theorises the relationship between education and struggle/practice. For example, it has little or nothing positive to say about what workers are to do in the meantime. The working class is simply the working class, a bundle of contradictions. It is both the most conservative class because they have the most to lose AND, at the same time, the most revolutionary because they have the most to gain. I think early members understood aspects of socialism better that some of us today.

Quote:

"he has to ask what are the essentials of Socialism. The first essential he discovers is—a human race. Without humanity there can be no Socialism. Directly he admits this he discovers that, even as the frigidly pure, passionless, scientific exponent and advocate of Socialism the every day affairs of men do matter, for assuredly if any calamity threatened to blot Man out of the scheme of things, to obliterate one of the essentials of his scientific obsession, it would concern him….  ….To say that the Socialist can view all things from the standpoint that nothing matters but Socialism is an easy matter, but it wants a deal of upholding when the worker has got to view the labour market from the standpoint of the seller of labour-power. Is he, if he understands Socialist economics, and therefore all the better understands the necessity of the struggle against capitalist encroachment, to give up personal participation in the struggle? Is he, directly he becomes armed and equipped for the battle of the future, to be rendered powerless and paralytic in the equally necessary struggle of the present?If, when a worker attains to class-consciousness, he ceases to require food, clothing and shelter, ceases to be a vendor of labour-power, ceases to be under the necessity which all commodity owners are under—of fighting for the realisation of the value of his commodity, in this case labour-power; if, in short, he ceases to be anything but a pure abstraction in whom even the charitable raven could find no want to minister to, no lodgement for a beakful of material sustenance, then it might be logical to say that no Socialist can belong to a trade union.But if the class-conscious worker still must live by the sweat of his brow, or rather by the sale of his potential energy, then he must resort to the instrument which make the conditions of a sale, as distinct from the conditions which environ the chattel slave’s dole.Among these instruments, for a certain number, are, under present conditions, trade unions on a non-revolutionary base. And as far as the Socialist thinks them necessary to his personal economic welfare, as far, that is, as economic pressure forces him to, he is right and justified in using them."http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1910s/1911/no-87-november-1911/socialist-and-trade-unionism

 Sorry for the extensive extracts…

Thank you for this response.  I've read through this carefully and I think you've persuaded me that there are reasons beyond the capacity of workers that make it difficult to spread the case for socialism. LBird can probably ignore my earlier response now, though I'll leave it up as my concerns I think are legitimate and may yet be proved right (I hope not).

[Victor]

LBird wrote:

Victor wrote:

Perhaps I am being harsh, but at the moment the SPGB in most of its publicity asks for a level of intellectual engagement that, realistically, most people just don't have the capacity for or simply don't have time for.

I have the capacity and made the time, and assume that I'm no different to most other workers.

Your intelligence, political knowledge and willingness to think about issues 'rationally' (in the social sense) are not typical.  I can understand why you might be reluctant to admit this, but for the purposes of discussions like this, I think it's useless pretending that you are typical just so as to appear 'nice' or politic.  If you're typical or, to use your own turn-of-phrase, 'no different to most other workers', then why doesn't the SPGB have more members?

LBird wrote:

If we want socialism, most workers have to have the capacity and to make the time. If they don't, socialism won't happen.

I agree that socialism cannot work unless the majority of people have the capacity to understand it, and then choose to understand it and accept it.  I am not saying socialism won't happen, and I do hold to a democratic position similar to yours, but the issue remains of whether people (workers), on the whole, are able to understand.  (i). Is LBird special? (ii). Or are you really just typical and for some odd reason humanity has never had socialist societies (barring primitive exceptions in the distant past and in the present)?I accept there is ample evidence for (ii).  Workers have demonstrated plenty of times a capacity for self-organisation and self-direction, when given the opportunity.  Workers run the present capitalist system.  There seems to be no reason why, now that capitalism has reached an advanced stage of abundance, socialism could not replace it.  So why hasn't that happened?  Why are we as far as ever from that goal?I should add there is another way of looking at my post.  My remarks could be seen, less threateningly, as just an argument that you might take a leaf out of Russell Brand's book and make the arguments suit the audience. 

[Victor]

Depends what you mean by a "genuine socialised health system".  Not heresy though.  I'm just not sure if lauding the Cuban system on a socialist basis reflects reality. Also, I imagine that health workers in Cuba are generally quite keen not to be seen to criticise the health system there (though I rely here on Western propaganda and so could be wrong about that – I admit that I do not know a great deal about Cuba). 

[Victor]

In reality, Brand is a London media phenomenon only.  Most ordinary people don't know he exists – and don't care.  Which is not to dismiss him completely – what he says will have some impact, and he does come out with some intelligent and thought-through argument – but he lives in a bubble and his worldview reflects this to an extent.Any constructive discussion about how to get the message about socialism across to people would have to involve an acknowledgement of a few unspoken (and unpleasant) truths about the public.  First, people are ignorant.  Most people see world socialism as pie in the sky material.   Find a way to make your message relevant to people's everyday concerns.  Second, most people aren't literate in the sense that the average SPGB member might be.  Decide on a group you want to target, consider how the message can be delivered efficaciously, look at the words used, the medium selected, etc. – isn't that what Russell Brand does?  This requires an element of dumbing down, but might be effective.  Brand doesn't usually tell people explicitly that he is a pseudo-socialist, New Age spiritualist….or whatever he is.  Instead, he taps into the emotional brain.  He knows his audience and he pushes the right buttons.  He's not sincere.  He's manipulative.  But it works.Perhaps I am being harsh, but at the moment the SPGB in most of its publicity asks for a level of intellectual engagement that, realistically, most people just don't have the capacity for or simply don't have time for.

[Author]

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