Young Master Smeet
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Islington Palestine Solidarity have come good on their promise to publicise responses to their BDS questionnaire:
Lancaster have been organising a nice event in their patch, which they recently encouraged replicating at the organising event: they just hire some digs in Lancashire, people turn up, eat, drink, chat and go for walks: its very pleasant, but usually attracts the usual suspects.
I sent our election address to the Islington Tribune and Islington Gazette: the latter printed it in their letters column.
In response to a challenge from the Green candidate regarding a controversial planning issue in the ward (the building of a tower of student residences on the old nurses home at Archway) I have sent teh following:
Dear Friend,
By way of reply to the Junction Ward Green Party candidate, (letters 15/11/24): our current economic and political system is geared towards promoting the interests of the few of own the world, at the expense of the many who do the work. Housing developers are geared towards making profits for their owners, not serving community needs. The planning system is tooled for supporting profit making.
As the Socialist Party candidate, I am standing solely on the basis of campaigning to create a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments of producing and distributing wealth by, and in the interests of, the whole community.
I don’t expect to win the seat, but it is an opportunity for those who agree with that aim to express support. Whatever the other candidate’s view on the Archway development, a vote for them is a vote for the continuation of a system where the power and advantage in any such dispute is with the wealthy minority.
Yours for World Socialism,
Bill Martin (Socialist Party Candidate, Junction Ward by Election 2024)
Some of us turned up to Archway station, and spent an hour and a half leafletting. There was some engagement from the public, one young woman (too young to vote) who said she was a member of the RCP took a leaflet. We also ran into someone who knew of the Party and was surprised to see us contesting (he wasn’t local).
There was no sign of the other parties, a pro-Palestine stall turned up later. We retired to a cafe, where they allowed us to leave some leaflets.
A few thoughts:
1: Irrationality: I think we have to assume that 71 million Americans knew what they were voting for, and support Trumps policies, these policies appear irrational to us, partly because they are refracted through local propaganda (and, we aren’t the intended audience of these policies).
2: American democracy is big and complicated, some radical measures (minimum wage rises, etc.) won referendums at the same time as Trump was elected. There is, apparently, a disconnect between local action and the perception of the distant ‘Washington elite’ that Trump has worked on very hard.
3: Citizenship as a form of property is under theorised, although it tends not to be manual workers who mostly get exercised about illegal migration, etc. clearly some see a kind of ‘citizenship rent’ as being worth supporting (backed up by tariffs, etc. and winning trade wars). Is imperialism winning votes?
4: Its worth noting that trumps vote was static, the Democrat vote collapsed, in part some are blaming Gaza, I do wonder if the slight margins of sexism (say worth 5% of the vote) come into play in a tight contest – say, would Walz on his own have won?
5: Trump only has 4 years, that’s not enough time to consolidate any big structural changes, although he looks to have the House and the Senate, and he may be able to appoint a couple more Supreme Court judges…Text of our election address:
Capitalism, the system of society we live in, can only be run in the interest of capitalists, the so-called 1 percent, who invest money for profit. Despite the politicians’ promises, it can never be made to work for us, the working class, whose income mainly comes from working for a wage or salary.
Capitalism is a profit-making system that can only work for the few who own not the many who work.
That’s why people’s needs are never met properly and why there are always problems over health care, housing, schools and public services. The politicians blame each other but profits coming before needs is not something any government can change. The Tories weren’t the problem. It was capitalism.
The Socialist Party says society can only be run in the interests of all when the majority working class comes together to bring the wealth of the world into common ownership. To do this, we need to organise politically, to transform the basis of our society, from ownership by the few and production for profit to common ownership by all and production to meet people’s needs.
If you agree with this, and want to let others know you agree, vote for BILL MARTIN the socialist candidate in the up-coming Junction Ward by-election.
“there are limits to the losses Ukraine can take. We do not know where that limit lies, but we’ll know when it happens. Crucially, there will be no victory for Ukraine. Unforgivably, there is not, and never has been, a western strategy except to bleed Russia as long as possible.”
and
“More fundamentally, two ancient ethical questions governing whether a war is just must now be asked and answered: whether there is a reasonable prospect of success, and whether the potential gain is proportionate to the cost.”
This seems to be a sobering analysis, Ukraine is collapsing slowly, it cannot afford to mobilise its 18-25 year olds: Russia will not overrun Ukraine, and the author is right, they simply could not hold it. They may seek to Finlandise the Ukrainian government, but I suspect they will opt for taking Luhansk and Donetsk: I doubt they’ll strike for Odessa (link up with Transnistria?).
An interesting read from a researcher in the area.
The general scope and purposes of the forums is:
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None members may join, and may bring to other forum users attention things relevant to socialism, including events organised by organisations we disagree with.
In this case, as a result of such a notice, I was able to go along and have a pleasant discussion, hear the ICC case and put the party case in opposition.
I went along to this, interesting discussion on the state of the world (although one visitor was there to discuss sectiana and micro-disputes from the 1970’s).
For a bright moment, it seemed we’d been re-admitted to the proletarian milieu, but it ended up with us being confirmed as being relegated to the swamp.
This the JVP’s website:
Looking at their publications:
They have a pamphlet ‘Rapid response to overcome current challenges’
https://www.jvpsrilanka.com/english/download/7416/?tmstv=1727078465Some quotes:
“This economic policy laid the foundation for the severe economic crisis that we face today. Instead of prioritizing and strengthening production, the key features of this policy are the unnecessary expansion of financialisation, austerity measures subsidy cuts, creating market monopolies, inefficient and excessive borrowing, and sale of public property and state-owned enterprises to a small coterie of favoured individuals and companies. This policy, which gradually evolved, is called neoliberalism.”“We advocate a value-added economic approach that considers which products and services should be
manufactured, which production methods should be adopted, which technologies to use, how to utilise
human and physical resources, how foreign trade structure should be shaped and how benefits of the
manufacturing process should be shared among the people. ”“•A comprehensive national plan on economic development goals to be achieved in the short,
medium and long term
• Prepare the human resources required to implement the above plan
• To provide an opportunity for every citizen to participate in the collective task of nation building, in the public and private sectors
[…]
•Constitutional reforms to include the right to recall people’s representatives”A lot of anti-corruption and political reform stuff, which sounds broadly sensible.
Sri Lanka is the refutation to the MMT crowd, as it is a sovereign currency issuing state that did go bankrupt in 2022.
This will be interesting to watch.
I think this does matter: “we will abolish money” does sound a bit like we’re going to do some sort of decree of state getting rid of it. We could talk of abolishing buying and selling, but that has overtones of force and preventing people from doing that: that’s why I think the focus should be on the need, you won’t need to buy or sell, we’ll work together to provide for everyone. It strikes me as a more positive tone.
And, yes, some states have abolished money from time to time, usually through hyper inflation or general collapse.
I think the comparison with ‘abolish the state’ is apt, just getting rid of the actual state won’t rid us of state thinking or behaviour, we need to build the alternatives so that state behaviour becomes unnecessary and unwanted.
It looks like he is doing as intended:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/labour-given-4m-from-tax-haven-based-hedge-fund-with-shares-in-oil-and-arms/“While the £4m donation by Quadrature Capital is the sixth-largest in British political history, it is noteworthy not just for its size, but also its timing.
Electoral Commission records suggest Labour received the donation in the one-week window between former prime minister Rishi Sunak announcing the general election and the start of the ‘pre-poll reporting period’ in which all political donations over £11,180 had to be published weekly, rather than the quarterly norm.”
Worth reading in full.
Quadrature sounds fucking nightmarish: https://quadrature.ai/
“We see a future where Quadrature trades all liquid electronically tradeable asset classes across all horizons to generate consistent, significant returns on our proprietary capital.” It’s the purest form of capital that is now bankrolling the Labour Party.
