Socialist Forum

Posted: 17 Sep 2004 03:17 pm Post subject: SOCIALISM: general discussion

Please post anything ON-TOPIC here. General conversation about capitalism or socialism. Beginners' questions are welcome.

Anyone who has not yet seen the SLP's concise definition "What is socialism?" http://www.slp.org/what_is.htm should probably read it. What do you think?

Posts from September 2004 to September 2005 have been moved to the archive:
http://www.deleonism.org/archive/topic004.shtml
168,000 Bytes

Posted: 10 Oct 2005 10:41 am Post subject:

One thing we never heard about after the fact was the DeLeon conferene in New Jersey. Did that ever happen or was it a dud?

dave

Posted: 11 Oct 2005 05:54 am Post subject:

Trying to remember. Didn't Vince initially call the meeting and then cancel it?

Posted: 11 Oct 2005 10:41 am Post subject:

No it was being put on by some outside org. Vince I think had been a part of it, or tried to be - they spurned his efforts so then he put up a post about "Yellow Light on DeLeon Conference" but then he posted that he would go. Never heard anything from Vince or the people who sponsored the meeting afterward.

dave

Posted: 12 Oct 2005 04:35 am Post subject:

Oh, yeah, Karl Nudelman had some connection with it. If you want him he's emailable at karlnud , at , yahoo , dot , com .

Posted: 16 Oct 2005 01:43 am Post subject:

I emailed him. No response as of yet.

Posted: 24 Oct 2005 12:23 am Post subject:

Hey, have any of you checked out the New Unionist?

http://newunionist.org/

The website is now entirely different and a Jeff Miller is running for the U.S. Senate. I thought this "party" was pretty much defunct from what I understood. So, the deleonist study guide is no longer available on this website.

Posted: 24 Oct 2005 07:21 am Post subject:

There a copy of the NUP's "old" web site at http://www1.minn.net/~nup/ , including the "study guide" at http://www1.minn.net/~nup/chlist.htm . I don't know if it will stay there.

Yes, I also heard that the NUP was defunct, but I didn't hear it directly. I don't know what's going on.

If Jeff's campaign gives some publicity to the fact that the people in the working class produce all the wealth and therefore deserve to have and control all of it, then it's a good thing. I'll say that much without knowing the details.

Posted: 24 Oct 2005 07:32 am Post subject:

I think the NUP continues on the path of avoiding the use of any words that carry sticky connotations, including "socialism" and any mention of that 19th century German guy. Instead, it's "democracy at work". Now, is this good or bad? I can think of arguments for both positions.

"Working Democracy" is the term used several times in their new Program statement at http://newunionist.org/test.html ... a file name like 'test' makes it appear that it's still under development.... So how about this term "Working Democracy" -- is it adequate?

Interesting to note that no term such as "private ownership" or "collective ownership" appears anywhere in the Program document. In fact, the word "own", as used in the sense of ownership, doesn't appear anywhere. The word "own" only appears in such phrases as "manage their own work ... their own lives ...", which is a grammatically different usage of the word. Unless I overlooked it, there is no explicit statement that private ownership must be repealed. Is this fact conveyed adequately by the document saying that the workers will elect the management? To speak of workers' reprsentatives performing the management, but not to speak of private ownership being cancelled, seems confusing to me. The novice reader might be confused as to how workplaces, which presumably, in the interpretation of some readers, are to continue to be the property of the wealthy corporations, could acquire management by the workers.

Posted: 24 Oct 2005 11:50 am Post subject:

Let's look at it as an experiment - They seem to think that the reason Socialism hasn't progressed, i.e. the workers taking over the industries, is bad P.R. So let them dress it up all they want, make their references to revolutionary basics as vague as possible and see where they go. I would like to be surprised - but I don't think that I will. How do you convey a message if your message isn't there? IMHO.
dave

Posted: 26 Oct 2005 03:42 am Post subject:

Perhaps we need a lot more experiments, and tolerance for other people's experiments.

That's why, (Dave,) I thought your critique was too rough on Vince's Cooperative Society genre of socialist literature. Who in this movement could ever possibly know enough to dismiss another person's experiment?

I feel slightly reluctant about telling someone that their method of educating the working class clashes with my own preconceptions about how best to educate the working class. I might say it but I'm also squeamish about saying it. The reason is that nothing at all seems to be effective anyway. Be up front, or beat around the bush; propose immediate demands or stick to one revolutionary demand, focus on human feelings or focus on scientific theory; no matter what people try, the tendency of the working class to escape into illusions doesn't seem to break. Nothing that any socialist has to say is ever nearly as interesting as what fashions the movie stars will wear to the next awards ceremony. I don't know what it's going to take, and no else one seems to know either. If people were flocking to socialist tactic A but spurning tactic B, then we'd have some data, but when people spurn all tactics that ever get tried, we have no data.

May lightning strike me for saying this, but if Marx had known that two more centuries would pass without any tangible progress is getting people to understand the democratic nature of socialism, he might not have been so quick to estrange himself from Bakunin and Proudhon. He thought he could afford to alienate others because history is supposedly on our side. (Smart alecky kid in the back of the room: "Yeah, right.")

Posted: 27 Oct 2005 02:03 am Post subject:

My word, I don't know nothing but to put the message it out there. I was using experiment tongue in cheek. Those who can't come right out and say what they mean are not doing the working class any good. Once they start playing word games of denial - It's been my experience that they don't last too long.

Me too critical of Vince's writing? Looking back perhaps, but I did not think so at the time. I do tend to be critical of writing that ties the development of socialism to anything but socialism - and then to claim some originality of associating the concept of agape with a developing a new form of society.

What diversions people find to not think about the class struggle we can't do anything about. We put the message out there. This is a good medium. If there are only three of us, that's three more than two years ago. The idea will catch on I am convinced - but if it doesn't, it doesn't. Better people than I have died before seeing that day.

Senate votes to NOT raise minimum wage, same level as 1999 but during that same period raises it's own pay by $28,000 - over twice the level of the yearly wage of a person working the minimum wage. I do think that perceptions will start to form - but if not - we are doing every thing that we can.

What you wrote about Marx - that if he knew that it would take two centuries he would have thought differeently about his cohorts - I don't see that.

dave

Posted: 14 Dec 2005 11:39 am Post subject:

On my page of articles from the De Leonist Society of Canada, I just added some correspondences from 1994 when they were debating their new policy on political government. It doesn't seem that they were successful in persuading the De Leonist Society U.S. to make the same policy change.

http://www.deleonism.org/dlsc.htm

Posted: 26 Jan 2006 01:56 am Post subject:

Not that it its going to upset them, but I am recommeding that everyone boycott Google until they reverse their agreement with China over censoring search terms and sites in Google searches by persons in China.

Posted: 26 Jan 2006 02:41 am Post subject:

I didn't see the Google - China news article. What happened?

Posted: 27 Jan 2006 03:57 am Post subject:

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-china-google-usa.html?_r=1

Posted: 27 Jan 2006 05:25 am Post subject:

Thanks for the link. "decision to block politically sensitive terms" -- but no examples! The NY Times usually does better than that. Let's play a guessing game. I bet some of the blocked terms are "independence of Hong Kong" and "independence of Tibet".

Posted: 09 Nov 2006 10:17 am Post subject:

I made this picture last night to advertise this site in other forums. File format is GIF, transparent background optimized for a white background, 434 X 402 pixels, 8 bits per pixels (256 colors), file size 20,700 bytes. Posted image to newsgroups alt.binaries.pictures and alt.binaries.pictures.clip-art ... assuming those are the ones I could use reasonably without being a spammer.

Posted: 05 Dec 2006 09:30 pm Post subject: BOOK EXCERPTS

As part of operating my bookselling website, I have permission from several publishers to reprint excerpts from recent books. Here are some new ones that might be of interest to the commies here:

Cindy Sheehan, Peace Mom : A Mother's Journey Through Heartache to Activism

Al Franken, Randi Rhodes, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., et al., Air America -- The Playbook : What a Bunch of Left Wing Media Types Have to Teach you about a World Gone Right

Amy Goodman and David Goodman, Static : Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back

James Moore and Wayne Slater, Rove Exposed : How Bush's Brain Fooled America

http://www.crimsonbird.com/book-excerpts/index.htm

Posted: 25 Feb 2007 06:12 am Post subject:

Here is a website devoted to disprove dialetics. May prove helpful.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/

Posted: 25 Feb 2007 08:49 am Post subject:

I've been following that author, Rosa Lichtenstein (pseudonym or real name, I don't know) for about a year now, in related forum topics at revleft.com. I agree with much of Rosa's work. I came to the conclusion just a few years ago that dialectics is somewhere between mysticism and poetry, but not science. It is not social science and it is not natural science. Dialectics offers one thing of value: the reminder that quantity changes quality. People who have faith in the 'Free Market' don't realize that quantity changes quality. They don't see how changing numerical values of something can transform something into its qualitative opposite, e.g., "freedom of speech" for the media corporations is the source of censorship in modern society. I'm not so sure that Engels' examples from natural sciences are going to persuade the reader to apply the principle to society. People will tend to reply, "What in the world does does the alkane series from organic chemistry have to do with the subject?" But Engels' attempt was noble. Some leftists say the phrases "dialectical rather than formal logic" and "the dialectical interpretation of (or forces of) history." In my opinion, dialectics has nothing to do with logic, and it has nothing to do with history, except insofar as it is reference to "the transformation of quantity into quality", which is Engels' exact phrase, the one conclusion that he is successful in making explicitly. As for the rest of it, the "interpenetration of opposites", we might as well throw yarrow stalks and generate I Ching hexagrams, as it is poetic mysticism.

Posted: 25 Feb 2007 08:51 am Post subject:

I think that many times "novices" (sorry to use the word in connection with you John) try to understand too much. There is nothing to prove or disprove about dialectics. It's a tool, a way of looking at things simply to generate hypothesis about how they will act or why they acted or are acting in the way that they did, particularly useful as to systems in progress. Dialectics cannot alter reality at all except they can alter the way we explain the world in our brain. If the world that you are analyizing reacts in a manner that would have been suggested by dialetics, or not, is really not the point at all.

dave

Posted: 25 Feb 2007 09:00 am Post subject:

Dave, if it's the case that:

Posted: 25 Feb 2007 12:39 pm Post subject:

That's the point, its just a way of looking at processes. Its not at all determinative of how those processes will turn out. It helps generate a possible explanation that either fits or doesn't fit.

Posted: 25 Feb 2007 05:20 pm Post subject:

That's all I'm asking for. Using your words: can we think of any occasion when it generated a possible explanation for anything and later we said that it seems to fit?

I can think of times when the analogies that you dislike did generate useful solutions. The chemist Kekule had a dream about a snake biting its own tail, and that made him think of the solution, which when checked later turned out to be correct, that the benzene molecule has a ring structure.

Any example of dialectics ever giving anyone any assistance? I can't think of one.

Plenty of examples of it giving wrong answers. Trotskyists cite "dialectical logic" as the explanation for why long lists of reform demands need to be listed.

Hmm, so it gives answers, definitely some wrong ones, and maybe, if we can think of one, a right one. Sounds like astrology to me.

-- Mike Lepore (Capricorn)

Posted: 25 Feb 2007 07:29 pm Post subject:

Well a couple of idea are useful, that history cannot be static but involves constantly developing processes, the idea of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, which I think if as action, reaction and momentary resolution. It gives me the idea such as then when socialism does come, that it will be just a moment until the forces of progress will require changes that we cannot imagine now. No not astrology, (ANALOGY ALERT) more like meteorology and your only tool is a vauge idea that when it is really hot, it usually gets cooler, when it is really dry it usally gets wetter, when the air is very still, a breze will eventually occur; and when things go to the other extreme then everything one thing at a time or all togetehr go back in the opposite direction but they never remain the same.

And of course you don't need a weatherman to tell what way the wind blows.

Posted: 25 Feb 2007 09:07 pm Post subject:

I remember the debate last year on rev-left and I thought Rosa's site would create something to talk about. I never really looked into dialetics and I am a novice. However, why should a tool as dialetics be used since it looks like a complicated way to make sense (explain) of the world and I wonder if that can be done? Some on rev-left call it a tool as Dave did while others would say that just plain common sense would work better.

Posted: 26 Feb 2007 12:39 am Post subject:

John,
> why should a tool as dialetics be used

Well, allegedly, formal logic can't handle changing and unfolding situations, and can't handle the interconnections between things that are oversimplistically regarded as separate.

I don't agree with that. That was true perhaps of Aristotle's logic, the syllogism, but formal reasoning became capable of handling such things when Newton and Leibnitz developed the calculus in the 1600s.

Some background in case you're interested. There were two books where Engels discussed dialectics a lot. He criticized the German philosopher Eugen Duhring in a book entitled Anti-Duhring. Engels also left some notebooks that were published posthumously as a book with the title The Dialectics of Nature.

Engels took a chunk of Anti-Duhring and published it separately as a pamphlet entitled Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. This pamphlet became very popular.

Here is an excerpt from that pamphlet.

___________________

Part II

"German Philosophy"

In the meantime, along with and after the French philosophy of the 18th
century, had arisen the new German philosophy, culminating in Hegel.

Its greatest merit was the taking up again of dialectics as the highest
form of reasoning. The old Greek philosophers were all born natural
dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopaedic of them, had already
analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought. The newer
philosophy, on the other hand, although in it also dialectics had brilliant
exponents (e.g. Descartes and Spinoza), had, especially through English
influence, become more and more rigidly fixed in the so-called metaphysical
mode of reasoning, by which also the French of the 18th century were almost
wholly dominated, at all events in their special philosophical work.
Outside philosophy in the restricted sense, the French nevertheless
produced masterpieces of dialectic. We need only call to mind Diderot's Le
Neveu de Rameau, and Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de
l'inegalite parmi less hommes. We give here, in brief, the essential
character of these two modes of thought.

When we consider and reflect upon Nature at large, or the history of
mankind, or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture of
an endless entanglement of relations and reactions, permutations and
combinations, in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but
everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. We see,
therefore, at first the picture as a whole, with its individual parts still
more or less kept in the background; we observe the movements, transitions,
connections, rather than the things that move, combine, and are connected.
This primitive, naive but intrinsically correct conception of the world is
that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by
Heraclitus: everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is
constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away.

But this conception, correctly as it expresses the general character of the
picture of appearances as a whole, does not suffice to explain the details
of which this picture is made up, and so long as we do not understand
these, we have not a clear idea of the whole picture. In order to
understand these details, we must detach them from their natural, special
causes, effects, etc. This is, primarily, the task of natural science and
historical research: branches of science which the Greek of classical
times, on very good grounds, relegated to a subordinate position, because
they had first of all to collect materials for these sciences to work upon.
A certain amount of natural and historical material must be collected
before there can be any critical analysis, comparison, and arrangement in
classes, orders, and species. The foundations of the exact natural sciences
were, therefore, first worked out by the Greeks of the Alexandrian period
[6], and later on, in the Middle Ages, by the Arabs. Real natural science
dates from the second half of the 15th century, and thence onward it had
advanced with constantly increasing rapidity. The analysis of Nature into
its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and
objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organized
bodies in their manifold forms -- these were the fundamental conditions of
the gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature that have been made during
the last 400 years. But this method of work has also left us as legacy the
habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from
their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in
motion; as constraints, not as essentially variables; in their death, not
in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by
Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow,
metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century.

To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are
isolated, are to be be considered one after the other and apart from each
other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He
thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. His communication is 'yea,
yea; nay, nay'; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." For him,
a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be
itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude on
another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis, one to the other.

At first sight, this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous, because it
is that of so-called sound commonsense. Only sound commonsense, respectable
fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very
wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of
research. And the metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and necessary
as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the nature
of the particular object of investigation, sooner or later reaches a limit,
beyond which it becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble
contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things, it forgets the
connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it
forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, if
forgets their motion. It cannot see the woods for the trees.

For everyday purposes, we know and can say, e.g., whether an animal is
alive or not. But, upon closer inquiry, we find that his is, in many cases,
a very complex question, as the jurists know very well. They have cudgelled
their brains in vain to discover a rational limit beyond which the killing
of the child in its mother's womb is murder. It is just as impossible to
determine absolutely the moment of death, for physiology proves that death
is not an instantaneous, momentary phenomenon, but a very protracted
process.

In like manner, every organized being is every moment the same and not the
same; every moment, it assimilates matter supplied from without, and gets
rid of other matter; every moment, some cells of its body die and others
build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter time, the matter of its body
is completely renewed, and is replaced by other molecules of matter, so
that every organized being is always itself, and yet something other than
itself.

Further, we find upon closer investigation that the two poles of an
antithesis, positive and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they are
opposed, and that despite all their opposition, they mutually
interpenetrate. And we find, in like manner, that cause and effect are
conceptions which only hold good in their application to individual cases;
but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection
with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become
confounded when we contemplate that universal action and reaction in which
causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect
here and now will be cause there and then, and vice versa.

None of these processes and modes of thought enters into the framework of
metaphysical reasoning. Dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends things
and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection,
concatenation, motion, origin and ending. Such processes as those mentioned
above are, therefore, so many corroborations of its own method of
procedure.

Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science
that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasingly
daily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature works
dialectically and not metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal
oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real
historical evolution. In this connection, Darwin must be named before all
others. He dealt the metaphysical conception of Nature the heaviest blow by
his proof that all organic beings, plants, animals, and man himself, are
the products of a process of evolution going on through millions of years.
But, the naturalists, who have learned to think dialectically, are few and
far between, and this conflict of the results of discovery with
preconceived modes of thinking, explains the endless confusion now reigning
in theoretical natural science, the despair of teachers as well as
learners, of authors and readers alike.

An exact representation of the universe, of its evolution, of the
development of mankind, and of the reflection of this evolution in the
minds of men, can therefore only be obtained by the methods of dialectics
with its constant regard to the innumerable actions and reactions of life
and death, of progressive or retrogressive changes.

_______________

end of quoted excerpt

Posted: 26 Feb 2007 12:48 am Post subject:

because prior to dialectics the common sense model was the institutions and relations which exists have always existed and always shall. A stupid example but it illustrates a point, and probably this was done as a parody, but you remember the two very popular hannah barbara shows, the Flintstones and the Jetsons. The absurdity was that Fred and George were both wage workers going to the daily grind. Without dialectics that's how the world looks (not quite that simple but in that direction)

However I can see what Mike is getting at, one defintion of dialectics is:

The art or practice of arriving at the truth by the exchange of logical arguments.

I saw a definition of dialectical materialism: The Marxian interpretation of reality that views matter as the sole subject of change and all change as the product of a constant conflict between opposites arising from the internal contradictions inherent in all events, ideas, and movements.

No we are materialists. We are scientists. Instead of Dialectical materialism I would use the term material dialecticism, as if we needed another bullshit term. But I think it is more accurate.

dave

Posted: 27 Feb 2007 06:49 am Post subject:

That present relations haven't always existed will be learned by anyone who reads a mainstream book on cultural anthropology.

Perhaps I'm overemphasizing Engels' efforts. I'm the only one here who brought up Engels in this context, so I'm not replying to something someone else said. Just adding this. By dialectics Engels didn't mean something like realization that today's social relations haven't always existed. He meant a set of general conclusions that can be made from physics, chemistry, geology and biology, and asserted that if they are true of the whole universe then they must also be true of human history, psychology, economics and politics. From Ohm's law to the class struggle, quite literally.

He wrote much of this stuff after Marx died. Perhaps he knew that Marx would have yelled at him and therefore waited.

Engels also waited until Marx was dead before he wrote his _Origin of the Family_, from which the SLP got its assertion about the "Marxist" endorsement of the method of Lewis Henry Morgan.

Posted: 27 Feb 2007 09:12 am Post subject:

Thesis-antithesis-synthesis is also a lot of bunk. So, a new thing has some of the same features that the old thing had, as well as some new features that the old thing didn't have. The point is trivial.

Anyway, Marx very rarely wrote anything that might be interpreted as a reference to thesis-antithesis-synthesis. I think this popular attribution to Marx comes mainly from the authors of high school social studies books.

Posted: 27 Feb 2007 10:02 am Post subject:

no doubt whatsoever. But I don't see bunk in the idea per se. If it's presented as a law of the universe or a law of anything sure the presentation is bunk. If they present it that all of Marx ideas or indeed any of them are based on the premise - also bunk. If one says that it appears that Marx utilized the idea to generate hypothesis, I would think that was probably true, but no more revealing than if just jump out of bed in the morning with a basket full of fresh idea of how to look at the world. It really doesn't matter, just the end result.

Posted: 27 Feb 2007 06:19 pm Post subject:

You and I are evaluating it as a way to generate ideas. (It's called a heuristic.)

But I don't hear that from others.

Most people say that Marx claimed that dialectics was his way to know the predetermined future, the inevitabilty of socialism. (Marx never said any such thing.)

Most people say that Marx claimed that dialectics permits the socialist movement to be an exact science. (Marx never said that either.)

Marx himself was too vague and ambiguous for me to say what he thought about it. Marx said he intended to turn Hegel's system upside down. We know that Hegel used thesis-antithesis-synthesis very explicitly. We know that Marx wanted to replace Hegel's mind-over-matter with the scientific era's matter-over-mind. We know that Marx retained Hegel's principle that human history isn't merely a written record of names, dates and events, but is an unfolding process with directionality. We know that Marx used the word "contradiction" in the Hegelian sense: that a historical period has conflicting tendencies such that one overpowers the others; e.g., to Marx it was "contradiction" when the early capitalist class, associating itself with the republican form of government, defeated the system of aristocracy, which had the loyalty of the feudal lords.

It's all too easy and tempting to substitute all that together, like the famous proof that Ray Charles is God, and conclude that Marx made considerable use of Hegel's synthesis method.

Posted: 27 Feb 2007 07:11 pm Post subject:

people (any anyway) look for a magical key to understanding, or many times in cases of dealing with Marx to look for the Key that Marx used. Deal with the supposed key and you don't have to deal with his actual analysis of the process of capitalist production. Many many many moons ago I was on the Cornell Campus and I went to the meeting of a newly forming organization on Marxism, Hell the organizer wasn't 15 minutes talking about Marx and he's talking about Hegel, saying that in order to understand Marxism you had to understand Hegalian philosophy. Obviously that guy wasn't going to support the idea of SIU. Oh well.

Posted: 28 Feb 2007 05:47 am Post subject:

I think we're partly responsible for people expecting a magic key because we said socialism "is a science", when we should have said that it's scientific socialism in the sense that it accepts science and endeavors to use science. (When I say 'we' I mean all of Marxianity from the 1840s to the present.) The main characteristic of science is that it can make predictions.

Posted: 28 Feb 2007 06:06 am Post subject:

I was thinking about Hegel today (while sitting on the cold ground and replacing the snowblower's auger axle bolt). Hegel believed that the mind of God is working to resolve itself, in the process of coming to know itself and reach its potential, and this is what we know of as human history. It sounds so similar to the ancient Greek myth of the Fates who weave cloth and then cut the thread, which is the human life span, or the Hindu story about the beginning and end of each eon of the universe being Shiva opening and closing his eyes. Hegel's theory seems to be a mythology. It was probably a handicap for college student Marx and his beer pub buddies to have come from that source.

Posted: 17 Mar 2007 01:26 pm Post subject:

I've been reading the archives and I don't recall half of what I wrote. I figure it must have been the stroke I had. I do recall Ken Ellis and his "robots" are coming--I still can't figure out the Arnold Peterson argument. I got thinking about what one of my high school teachers had said in class and I have no idea why I remember. Anyways he said that one day cloning of people would take place and we are pretty close to that. He also said that one day scientist would construct a biological synthetic man (this was way before the new Battlestar Galatica concept was concieved). What concerned him is that the synthetic people would be property of corporations and would amount to slaves. If capitalism can't have human slaves whose labor is owned once and for all then why not construct a slave who can be programed for various labor.

John T

Posted: 26 Apr 2007 05:01 pm Post subject:

I just scanned some SLP leaflets going back to the 1950s ...
http://www.deleonism.org/leaflets.htm

Posted: 27 Apr 2007 12:16 am Post subject:

I'm working on an images directory. Please see if this is self-
explanatory:

http://www.deleonism.org/images/

Posted: 27 Apr 2007 11:41 am Post subject:

a bit too on the technical side.

A file named "read this first" to practically everyone says "skip over this".

do people need to know the dimensions of the images when you could just give the file size?

if they really needed to know you could have a separate doc titled dimensions of images

probably this is more work, you could make up a webpage index page giving plain english explanations of what the image is.

Where did you get the Hass attribute to the siu chart? I thought that was Walter's.

dave

Posted: 27 Apr 2007 09:13 pm Post subject:

Technical because I wasn't intending it for people to enjoy looking at, but as a way to distribute the files, for others to download - (maybe even SLP sections that want to decorate their own web pages?)

I'll have to think some more about a better way to list the pixel sizes. Reasons why I wanted to indicate the sizes --

(1) If I upload several sizes for each image, the reader needs a way to pick the one they want. Bytes doesn't tell you the resolution that's good to know before printing, reediting, resizing, or using on a web page. You wouldn't download a thumbnail size if you want to print De Leon's face for framing, and you wouldn't download the huge one if you only want to make a thumbnail icon.

(2) If someone wants to insert one of the images into their own web page, the html syntax for inserting an image is

Posted: 27 Apr 2007 11:01 pm Post subject:

I think I know the cartoons ones that you mean but as to the dimensions and what not. I am semi semi literate on that stuff and what you wrote blows right over me.

Posted: 07 May 2007 10:25 pm Post subject:

I thought this might be interesting as a talking point. On my page of articles from 'The People' I just uploaded some examples of when the SLP has urged YES or NO votes on various political questions (other than the question of socialism itself). This is *not* reformism -- which may not be clear to novice readers of SLP literature. De Leon used to do it, and the SLP tinkered with it in the 1980s, but generally the SLP has tended to avoid doing it, both before and after the decade of the 1980s. The breakaway group called The De Leonist Society strongly condemned this practice as reformism.

Here are examples from the 1980s of the party urging YES votes on nuclear freeze propostions, and urging NO votes on two propositions, one of them discriminatory toward AIDS patients and the other an English-as-a-official-language proposition. There's also an example of an 1911 De Leon editorial where he urges NO votes on seven ballot initiatives to amend a state constitution.

http://www.deleonism.org/people.htm#yes-no

Posted: 17 May 2007 07:57 am Post subject:

Mike wrote elsewhere:

We now know that human behavior is a bell curve, as indeed just about everything in biological systems is a bell curve.

dave writes:

I am a Ludite on bell curves as applied to human behaviour. It is pre-determined that IQ should fall on a bell curve so they come up with a test whose results fall on a bell curve over a large enough population so that becomes a validation for the legitimacy of the test. Bullshit.

From sad experience I have learned that IQ tests only measure the intelligence of those who interpret the results of such tests.

Posted: 17 May 2007 08:51 pm Post subject:

That is doubt about the usefulness of measuring it. It could be pointless to perform the test, while it is still true that the results are a normal (Gaussian) distribution. Choose any questions at all and a test score will still be normally distributed. Monitor how much hot salsa dip people eat with their tortilla chips and the results will be normally distributed. Throw horseshoes at a pole and the result will be normally distributed. No problem there. The problem is about whether it's instructive for anything. Even useless noise is the "truth", all the while it remains useless.

The IQ test measures exactly what it asks about. If it asks people to complete the analogy "hand is to glove as cup is to [fork, table, shoe, SAUCER]" then the question measures precisely that -- the proportion of people who complete that analogy with each answer, including the test author's expected answer. It's is one person's interpretation that this is about "innate intelligence." It's another person's interpretation that it measures how many test-takers grew up in households where it was customary to use saucers along with cups. The pointlessness of the procedure has to do with not knowing why the institution has bothered ask in the first place.

I think you're getting at the subject of educational policy. It has been decades since they claimed that a standardized test measures intelligence, but they do claim that the score is "a predictor of success in school" -- that is the phrase used when I took a class at SUNY New Paltz called "educational evaluation instruments." The standardized test remains pointless because, even if it is what someone thinks it is, there's still no knowledge of what to do in response to it. It's not a guide to any subsequent action. For example, some people in education theory believe the slower than average learner will do best when assigned to a class full of slower than average learners, some believe that the slower than average learner will do best when assigned to a class full of faster than average learners, and some some believe that the slower than average learner will do best when assigned to a class with a random mixture of learning rates. Now, even if they did measure something, there is no guide to action. In that case, they might as well have used astrology, since one kind of useless noise is no better than any other kind of useless noise.

Posted: 17 May 2007 10:43 pm Post subject:

You have not told me enough to be convinced that the distribution of number of correct answers to any set of questions will always be a bell curve. How could that be?

Posted: 18 May 2007 04:13 am Post subject:

I don't remember the math well enough to answer that. Something about the central limit theorem. Some requirements are that the trials have to be independent of each other, and the number of trials approaches infinity, the number of measurement ranges goes up while the width of each measurement range goes down. For actual situations, a perfectly normal distribution isn't what you "have", but it's the limit.

Suppose the ranges are 1 to 5 answers right, 6 to 10 answers rights, etc. You can increase the number of ranges while making each range smaller by deifning them as 1 to 2, 3 to 4, 5 to 6, etc. Do that at the same time you increase the number of data points. Plot the number of people who flal in each range (the height of the bar is proportion to the quantity of them.) Any histogram will be choppy, but the limit it's moving toward is the bell curve.

In the above I said "answers right." There doesn't have to be any agreement about what "right" answers are. It could be totally gibberish information, like people guessing at Marx's favorite color, or betting on the rate of reproduction of bacteria, or anything else. The normal distribution is still the limiting case.

I remember way back when, that I found waiting time problems were interesting. For example, how long you have to wait until the next car goes by. If it were random, it probably wouldn't be a uniform distribution, but more likely a normal one. However, if it's the case that the longer you have waited without one going by then the more likely one will go by during the next time unit, then that would give us a Poisson distribution, not a normal.

Why these things were found, I don't know. Even if someone told me, I couldn't read the math well enough to understand it. Nuclear physics is baby stuff compared to statistics.

Posted: 21 May 2007 05:30 pm Post subject:

Listen to what passes for education. My 10th grade daughter was assigned an essay question for homework: "Is it justified to target civilians in a war if it will save lives in the long run by shortening the war?" The general theme of her answer -- that the question already assumes that targeting civilians will shorten the war and merely asks whether it's therefore justified. She says she denies the assumption itself, that adding to the list of targets lengthens the use of warfare - it doesn't shorten it; therefore the assertion that warfare has been shortened is an excuse and is not acceptable. The teacher's response: he deducts a lot of points, and writes on the paper, "Don't challenge my questions. Answer yes or no."

Posted: 22 May 2007 12:43 am Post subject:

The poor boy got lost somewhere. He is to be pitied.

Posted: 12 Jun 2007 03:16 pm Post subject:

Socialist topic: Cooperation at work...I been reading Marx on Mallock this morning and I came across something we may have talked about at an earlier date. Anarchist and non Leninist Communist has the belief that the new society would not have any sort of leadership roles whatsoever but everything would be done by consensus. How that would be done is unknown. However, what I read today was that De Leon pointed out in Capital was:
All combined labor on a large scale requires, more or less, a directing authority, in order to secure the harmonious working of the individual activities, and to perform the general functions that have their origin in the action of the combined organism, as distinguished from the action of its separate organ. A single violin player is his own conductor, an orchestra requires a separate one.

Mike wrote, earlier somewhere, that leadership was a tool. And as I found out it is a tool that even Marx knew was a contributing factor in production. I do know that worker cooperate to start and finish production orders. It does not matter who is smart or not so smart, the work gets completed. Some workers can be left to do their work by themselves because they are their own conductor. But on a larger scale a director is needed.

Under Capitalism we do have supervisors. They are hired as any other worker but their role is a leadership role and are under subjection to the capitalist. The capitalist is absent from production living off the labor of the employee. On the other hand, under the socialist industrial association (union) those supervisors would be voted into their positions by the workers themselves. That would also include the plant manager. They all are held accountable to the workers who voted them into their positions and can be easily voted out. I hope I got the idea of this right.

On the other hand, I understand the term bosses as used by anarchist and commies. But these bosses are the capitalist who, through memo, dictate what is done, or not done, on the production floor. But Marx understood that these supervisors are "hired" because they serve an important function. The leadership "tool" has to be used under socialism.

Question: 1. Would these supervisors be given the right to fire those who don't contribute in production?

2. Would the leadership role play a function beyond the shop floor in people's communities?

Posted: 12 Jun 2007 05:32 pm Post subject:

I'll let your question 1 stew in my head and I go off and run some errands.

As for your question 2, I think I'm ready to answer more quickly. Certainly not the _same_ leadership in the shop and in the community. Recall how people are always asking us "How do you know that socialism won't be taken over by people who want power for themselves?" A good answer to that might have several parts to it, but one of the important parts to the answer would probably be: The kind of "power" being delegated should be so specific that there would be no way for officials to expand beyond it. If a certain administrator has the authority to make decisions about the manufacture of steel can openers, a corrupt individual in that role might, at worst, impact the efficiency or fairness of precisely that limited realm, the manufacture of steel can openers, and could not find a loophole making it possible to become society's dictator. It's necessary to distribute the management role more flatly and widely.

But my present answer is only partial and neglects to consider the point where all the administration has to merge into one main board of directors for all industry generally, which the SLP calls the all-industry congress. By definition, its authority can't be limited to one industry *sector*, but I feel that it should be limited to *industry*.

Posted: 12 Jun 2007 08:19 pm Post subject:

I understand that an administration should have limited or being specifically restricted as not being able to expand it's power base. However, would not the administrations of differing industries merging into an all industry council be a problem? They may be inclined to wield political power over the workforce? Or should there be local industrial councils that sends trusted delegates to the all industry council to discuss what is produced under or over production.

Local civil government, being different in function, would ensure protecting the people from harm be it from a violent person to an industry dumping toxic waste in a creek. Regional representative can be elected and a confederacy of regional groups can meet to decide on universal laws of a nation.

Posted: 12 Jun 2007 10:27 pm Post subject:

Posted: 12 Jun 2007 10:30 pm Post subject:

Posted: 12 Jun 2007 10:41 pm Post subject:

Posted: 12 Jun 2007 10:43 pm Post subject:

Posted: 13 Jun 2007 12:24 pm Post subject:

John asked:

Question: 1. Would these supervisors be given the right to fire those who don't contribute in production?

dave answers:

I imagine it would be up to the individual workplaces to come up with a rules applicable to the circumstances there as to moment by moment control - say a nurse supervisor of an ICU. I imaging the supervisor there would be given almost dictatorial authority in the moment of course all actions being appealable. But the consequences of being "fired" wouldn't be the same either, the overall inclination of society being to have as many people share the load as possible with almost infinite possibilities for a worker to move around from jib to job and up and down the (analogy alert) responsibility ladder .

dave

Posted: 13 Jun 2007 09:58 pm Post subject:

We probably should never describe socialism in terms of what "would" happen. The only thing we have is what we believe should happen, or what we prefer, either as individuals or as organizations.

Much socialist literature declares how socialism "will" be run. Ridiculous. No one can possibly know. Then the socialist organizations try to get around that my saying, if it's not run exactly like this or that, then it doesn't deserve to be called socialism in the first place, so that makes prediction true by definition. Oh, how clever. (Not!)

Posted: 14 Jun 2007 05:27 am Post subject:

Dave wrote:

Posted: 14 Jun 2007 06:44 am Post subject:

You question sound like this: what if the system were set up with so much power delegated to the officials that they could expand their own powers, not only misappropriate resources but even change the economic system, and do it undetected until its too late and people find themselves under a system that they didn't want.

The only answer i can think of is that the members of society have delegated too much power to officials and they thereby screwed themselves. Now they will have to have a revolution, and the next time they should do it right.

Let's suppose the people did set up the system right the first time, which means that management meetings are public events with transcripts published, the allocation of labor vouchers is controlled by software where anyone who wishes to read the programs code can see exactly what it does, etc.

Now, consider, what makes a management meeting an official meeting, rather than just a group of pals who are chatting among themselves? The fact that other people *do what they say to do*. "create a political entity"; "start extracting additional Labor Vouchers for themselves." Why would people do what they said to do? What if the Secretary of the Treasury today were to issue a memo to the morning shift at the minting plant, "Since I'm the boss of printing money, print up an extra million dollars and deliver it in suitcases to my house." He would be in jail within a few hours.

Posted: 14 Jun 2007 03:09 pm Post subject:

You're not worrying too much, because if you can think of a question than a million other people have the same question. Problem with socialists is we tend to answer what no one asked. Difference between a craft union and an industrial union, yeah but no one asked, did they? An algebraic odel to analyze precisely how the idle wealthy extract from the ambitious poor, but no one asked, did they? Everyone asks about the socialist society being apparently unstable, so that any of a hundred things that can go wrong with it. Real or imagined, that's where we have our important work to do. And so I like the much-dreaded blueprints.

Posted: 14 Jun 2007 04:57 pm Post subject:

Seems to me, some of the popular concerns about socialism arise an unconscious and unspoken about democracy in general. It is always within the power of a democracy to kill itself. People can use their free elections to elect officials who abolish free elections. People can use freedom of expression to obtain support for a tyrant who abolishes freedom of expression. To me this goes deeper: any kind of free choice can kill itself. If we as individuals didn't have the power to jump off a cliff, then we wouldn't be free individuals. It's part of the concept of freedom that we could do many things that we won't do. But it also assumes that we don't add deterministic factors that will drive us to do the irrational. If we were under the influence of a powerful drug we just might jump off that cliff; that condition represents a loss of freedom, because we are no longer in the position where we could do it but also choose not to. The same is true for an entire civilization of people. Democracy has the role that, in one individual, we call free choice. Democracy can commit suicide. If society has a systematic force that distorts its reason, like having rulers and ruled, or lifetime political offices, or appointed offices, or unmonitored offices, that is like the individual being stoned on PCP -- it is a loss of free choice. Such a systematic effector may cause whatever degree of democracy that the people exercise to commit suicide. So the question is: what may be done about the ability of people to vote themselves into a dictatorship? The answer is: always strive to identify what is present systematically, whether it is class privilege, faulty civic education, blind faith in "wise" leaders, the excuse of "national security secrets", and more. Fix all of such design flaws one by one. Then the democratic society, which could kill itself it wanted to, will choose not to.

Posted: 15 Jun 2007 02:20 am Post subject:

Mike wrote:

Posted: 30 Jun 2007 07:47 pm Post subject:

There is something I don't understand. We get some good discussions going and no one else joins in. Are people more interested in Leninism and Anarchism?

Posted: 30 Jun 2007 09:09 pm Post subject:

No advertising. The only way someone would know that this forum exists is if they looked up "deleonism" at Wikipedia and saw a link to this site at the bottom of the page. Or if, by coincidence, if someone were to do a Google or Yahoo search on the phrase "a poodle he was and a poodle he remains" -- there's a real good chance of that happening on any given day.

Posted: 01 Jul 2007 02:02 am Post subject:

I know there is no advertising but there was a few I invited who never came. I tend to think that De Leonism is practical but too many on the Left want to reform capitalism, be Liberals or just follow Lenin or Mao. What is upsetting is that a lot on the Left have read Lenin but not De Leon, Debs, Spargo or any other American Socialist. I could care less what was done in Russia or how brutal the Bullshitviks were in creating their system of oppression. I am an American Socialist and this is my home and I reject any Russification of my home land.

Posted: 01 Jul 2007 02:25 pm Post subject:

As for why the more conservative people don't listen to us:

People are distrustful of any claim that many problems may be traced to a single cause, making the simultaneous solution of many problems a comparatively easy task which requires only the willingness. Pollution, capitalism causes it, socialism would solve it. Poverty, capitalism causes it, socialism would solve it. The health care crisis, or economic recessions, or the latest political bribery scandal, or any of a hundred other problems, capitalism causes it, socialism would solve it. It's all true, as anyone would discover if he or she were willing to really listen for twenty minutes, but to someone hearing it for the first time it sounds like a kook's comspiracy theory. To the person who hears all this for the first time, we come off like the person who blames everything on invaders from outer space. To find better ways to communicate will be our challenge.

As for why the leftists, whom we would have thought should already "know better", don't listen to us:

I think it's largely because when people are angry about injustices they usually become less effective. Instead of trying to identify an improved way of living and simply implementing it, they are atttracted to behaivors that have the appearance of being rebellious. It takes more effort to declare a program that says we need to enlighten and cautiously prepare ourselves than it does to declare a program that says we need to chop off the king's head and stick it on a pike.

Posted: 01 Jul 2007 05:39 pm Post subject:

Mike wrote:

Posted: 01 Jul 2007 06:18 pm Post subject:

The Bolshevik fiasco followed the bad precedent that the French revolution started, even though it was a capitalaist one -- the precedent that ousting a privileged master class in the name of new equality must be equated with plenty of blood revenge. I think a good approach to preserving civil liberties, at the same time some of the ousted capitalists will fight back, would be to hold individuals repsonsible for what they actually do. Don't prosecute "counter-revolutionary activity." instead, if someome commits arson, charge them with arson. If someone commits assaut, charge them with assault. What they were probably _thinking_ at the time, say, conduting insurrection against the new socialist system, doesn't matter. I got into this argument with someone online years ago, a "libertarian", naturally. He kept saying, "The capitalists and their supporter won't _allow_ the workers to establish socialism." I kept replying to him, "To 'allow' is a state of mind. Tell me what action you're talking about." We kept this up, back and forth, for about ten posts. He kept using words like tolerate or permit, and I kept insisting that those were states of mind and that he needed to specify an action. Finally he caved in and showed his real colors. He said that if the workers are ever in the process of establishing socialism then he will respond by getting out his rifle and shoot lots of socialists. Then I was able to answer him specifically, that if he does turn out to be a serial killer no better than Berkowitz or Manson, then he should simply be prosecuted as a serial killer, because that was his action. The fact that its purpose was counter-revolutionary should be of no interest to society. That is something that the Bolsheviks and Maoists have never understood, and neither did their mentors, Robesierre and Marat of the terrorist French revolution, when the simple accusation "I heard that person over there mumble, 'Gee, I wonder...'!" was all it took for someone to be dragged to the guillotine. Let's all go shopping for the best ideas around, and then let's have the perceptiveness to say: I borrow this good idea from Karl Marx, and I borrow that good idea from Thomas Jefferson.

Posted: 01 Jul 2007 06:42 pm Post subject:

By the way, the the French revolution, Marat was, in one way, like the Benjamin Franklin of the American revolution. The similarity was that Marat was the guy who owned the little printing shop and he published the newspaper that sided with the revolution. Unfortunately, that's a far as the similarity went. Marat's editorial content was the message that lots of heads should be chopped off, and the more the better.

Posted: 01 Jul 2007 11:24 pm Post subject:

Mike wrote:

Posted: 21 Jul 2007 01:18 pm Post subject:

I've been hanging out over at the debsian list over at riseup.net

A could of "social democrats" and the rest Trotskyists.

It appears what a Trotskyist to them is someone who does transitional demands. Trotsky wrote a pamphlet or gave a speech on the subject of the transitional program. Trtotsky compared the trans. program to run of the demand reforms. Run of the ill reforms are merely to fix certain effects created by capitalism but they don't change the system or the worker. Well transitional demands are to show the workers apparently the futility of capitalism by making demands that eventually cannot be or will never be granted for all practical purposes - like nationalize the auto industry. Trotsky said that transitional demands result in workers crossing a figurative bridge from non-class consciousness to class consciousness.

It's not out style - but really that's all that it is - there is no great philosophical difference than what we do - the every direct appeal to class consciousness.

However I took my socialism amendment proposal over there - no way no way we need to do a transitional program instead.

Hey wait a minute - it seems that the only true measure of what is a transitional demand is whether it actually results in workers becoming class conscious. Show show me how the demand to nationalize the auto industry is actually resulting in class conscious workers? And tell me why a proposal for a very direct socialism amendment is any less of a proposed transition demand than say the demand to nationalize the auto industry?

Stay tuned.

Dave

Posted: 21 Jul 2007 03:51 pm Post subject:

Trotsky's idea was that the revolution will happen when most workers really expect a certain reform even though it won't occur. Suppose most workers not only want the reform but, because they feel so strongly organized, they actually expect it happen next month. Then when it doesn't happen, people will be so disappointed that they will overthrow capitalism. That's how Trotsky's "transitional program" supposedly goes.

Personally, I think it's nuts. There already have been several reforms that people expected and never got (like the forty hour workweek), and the letdown has never radicalize people -- instead it made half of the people conservative and the other half apathetic.

I don't know where do the Trotskyists got the idea that we're supposed to sit back and figure out analytically, but without any evidence, how people will probably react to some hypothetical situation. This goes to the distinction in philosophy between rationalism (we acquire knowledge by just thinking about something) versus empiricism (we acquire knowledge through sensory data). Historically, rationalism goes with superstition and empiricism goes with science. Yet the Trotskyists still want to approach this issue with rationalism.

Posted: 21 Jul 2007 04:43 pm Post subject:

This is what I have been trying to say for a while. Marxist-Leninist are everywhere including the Deb's Tendency. Dave you did a great job of explaining a constitutional amendment on the E-list. I wish I could have read more but I got cut off after your response to "the longest run on sentence". I tried to get back to where I was and all I see is something on Japan.

The very idea of Trotsky's "Transitional Program", though I never read the pamphlet, is something I think to be absurd, non workable and a complete waste of time. Beating around the bush with reforms is going to make workers "class conscious" overnight? Yeah sure, okay I guess. I see that they did not waste anytime to ridicule you and the amendment to the constitution. This is the usual Communist BS. Rather than discuss actual socialist ideas the Communist just ridicule it because it does not fit in with Lenin or Trotsky's paradigm. Got to keep in mind that Lenin continued where Marx left off--cough cough.

Calling the Constitution a capitalist document would offend more than 7/8th of the American population. Running a presidential candidate is not the answer. Running people for Congress for the sole purpose to amend the Constitution for worker's owning the means of production and to have them organize under SIU. I will stay tuned.

Mike wrote:

Posted: 21 Jul 2007 10:32 pm Post subject:

Posted: 21 Jul 2007 10:49 pm Post subject:

I been reading The Elements of Socialism by John Spargo--who has my cousin's name. Since capitalism has offered a higher standard of living workers are resistant to Socialism fearing loss of that standard. How many times have we all seen the mimicking of the rich by workers themselves because they feel if they look and act like them they just might achieve the wealth and fame they have--dumb ass suckers. On the other hand, we see people who come to the U.S. who are use to a lower standard of living. These people are easily exploited, robbed and bullied by the capitalist class. Because of the exploitation the standard of living becomes lower for everyone else. The idea of unions and collective bargaining are becoming a thing of the past as more and more workers are forced by plant closings to accept lower standards of living. The American worker is lying down taking abuse from the capitalist class. And we are suppose to believe that Trotsky's "Transitional Program" is going to make an impact. Plain common sense and explaining what socialism is and what has to be done to get there would be far more effective. Dave's Constitutional Amendment is one such method.

John T.

Posted: 21 Jul 2007 10:50 pm Post subject:

Mike wrote:

The path we take to get there determines where we will arrive. If a minority has to lie to the majority to make them want a revolution, then a minority, a class of leaders, a bureaucracy, must end up ruling the new system. In my way of describing that, socialism has been aborted. So what was it all for? To get rid of capitalism so that we can have state-ism? Done that.

That is the pet peeve I continue to have with Leninist since they are nothing more than snake-oil salesmen. They will lie to the up most to the majority of workers so they would want a so-called revolution. The Leninist want to be the new ruling class over a capitalist/social state run system. No thanks and fuck you. Now, the question is how do Socialist exorcise the Leninist demon possession of Left political parties?

Posted: 22 Jul 2007 12:43 am Post subject:

davesearles wrote:
Hey wait a minute - it seems that the only true measure of what is a transitional demand is whether it actually results in workers becoming class conscious.

Mike wrote:
The path we take to get there determines where we will arrive. If a minority has to lie to the majority to make them want a revolution, then a minority, a class of leaders, a bureaucracy, must end up ruling the new system. In my way of describing that, socialism has been aborted. So what was it all for? To get rid of capitalism so that we can have statism? Done that.

Dave writes:

I'll have to get the Trotsky link. Not Comrade Trotsky said no such thing as lie to them - hat I see. In his work transtional program - he was talking about a program that did treaditional "social democratic" reforms significantly one beter. He said to look for the demand that will (and of course he along with too many other socilists get caught up in their own god damned anlogies) create a bridge the non-class conscious workers will cross over to class consciousness. He didn't say lie to people. Alrigh, lets assume that there are such demands that will lead to the bridge and non-classconscious workers cross over. Fine. Where are they?? And specifically don't you need data to discern if a particualr demand is actully (analogy alert) filling the bill? I ahve been asking htis question and don't seem to be getting an answer. ONE MEMBER SAID - get this - that i was a CRITICAL ABSOLUTE RELATIVIST. critical I can see. But isn't absolute relativist liske George Carlin's "jumbo shrimp" - a contradiction??

Jon go bak to that site. The easiest wway to follow things is to click on chronological. They change the thead names so often it's impossible to follow. Sign on we'll have some fun. But back pedeal on the anti leninism a bit. I think that I am drawing them out a little and if you go into hyper anti-lenin mode they'll go right back into reaction mode.

dave

Posted: 22 Jul 2007 01:05 am Post subject:

Dave wrote:

John, on go back to that site. The easiest way to follow things is to click on chronological. They change the thread names so often it's impossible to follow. Sign on we'll have some fun. But back pedal on the anti Leninism a bit. I think that I am drawing them out a little and if you go into hyper anti-Lenin mode they'll go right back into reaction mode.

I assumed the Trot lied as well being a player of Lenin's program-knif. As far as the "Transitional Program" I have to ask is where is the data to prove that making demands in various capitalist industries have resulted in workers becoming class conscious? I did get to read some more and to cite that it worked "perfectly" in the early days of the Soviet Union, thanks to Leon, therefore it is a perfect example that it works today is a ridiculous assumption.

Yeah, why not sign on. I'll try to be polite and ask who, when, how and why--especially how and why. Is the presence of Leninist on SP, especially the Deb's tendency, constitute a raid on this political party?

John T.

Posted: 22 Jul 2007 01:22 am Post subject:

I did try to send the required e-mail but my it would not go there at all. May be a bug or something else altogether. Oh well.

Posted: 22 Jul 2007 04:31 am Post subject:

I consider it a lie.

Perhaps I was wrong to say it comes from what Trotsky or other old time theorists actually wrote. I refer now to the leftist programs I have seen in the past forty years, regardless of where they got it from.

The attitude is: we insiders know that we want to topple the whole system, but if we were to come right out and say that then people would be "turned off" by it. So let's instead demand these fifty reforms, demands that capitalism stop acting like capitalism. Then we'll get many new duespaying members and voters, with us insiders being their leaders. Once we have millions of people who are steaming with anger at capitalism, but not knowing what to do other than march and chant, we knowledgable insiders can give them a new system in spite of themselves. After it's all over, and we finally have the new system, and we are in charge of controlling it, we'll make the necessary announcements to let everyone know what they had just finished doing. They will thank us later for this.

That is the thinking of what is called the political left.

The only thing that makes [so-called] Trotskyism slightly different from the Communist Party, etc. is that Trotskyism makes slightly (not even considerably -- only slightly) more of an effort to concentrate on the demands that are known to be impossible for a particular reason. For example, they demand that home mortgage foreclosures be outlawed. That's impossible because if it were passed then no lender would ever provide another mortgage at all, and so the reform would just have eliminated home buying itself. Knowing what they're describing is impossible, that's one they choose.

I call that lying to the working class.

Posted: 22 Jul 2007 03:07 pm Post subject:

Mike wrote:

Posted: 22 Jul 2007 04:04 pm Post subject:

While they are giving me the cold shoulder don't post anything. See how long they can stand it. It has to be boring into their souls that someone is aactually asking questions instead of simply throwing bricks.

For Mike's benefit this is the Trotsky quote:

Trotsky wrote in the "Transitional Program":

It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to
find the bridge between present demand and the socialist program of the
revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands,
stemming from today's conditions and from today's consciousness of wide
layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion:
the conquest of power by the proletariat.

http://www.marxist.net/trotsky/programme/index.html

so let's go with it. It cannot be disproved that this is effective. Listen if I thought trowing in a few transitional demands would bring on the revolution I would sure do it, I don't care who thought it was a lie - however after 69 years what in fact is there in 2007 to show for it?

Bullshit. Let's go with it. If they can propose transition demands anyone can right? what ever works as far as providing a bridge to class consciousness I don't care if it's bring back I Love Lucy . But I do happen to believe that the amendment proposal if worded correctly can unite a significant part of the left BECAUSE any group can claim it as it's own. Hell, look how the SWP claimed credit for the phrase get out of Vietnam now!! Any group can change the wording to what their astrologers think is the precise historically dialectically sublime revolutionary leadership inspired wording (caution mixed metaphor ahead )that has come down the pike since sliced bread.

On the morning of the day of the revolution I greet Earth and all of its passengers.

dave

Posted: 22 Jul 2007 04:37 pm Post subject:

Posted: 22 Jul 2007 04:59 pm Post subject:

I can't post. I am using a different e-mail address and I did ASK to join. However, the response was that my "Commands" were forwarded to the administrator and I have to wait to be approved.

Dave, if they don't answer today post it again tomorrow. They want it to go away.

Trot wrote:

This bridge should include a system of transitional demands,
stemming from today's conditions and from today's consciousness of wide
layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion:
the conquest of power by the proletariat.

My take is that if this was a workable en devour then the results would have spoken volumes. However, it has not and that is enough to say that it does not work. America is not Russia nor do I like the idea of the Russification of the United States by Leninist who have taken up residence in every political Left Party.

Dave wrote:

But I do happen to believe that the amendment proposal if worded correctly can unite a significant part of the left BECAUSE any group can claim it as it's own.

We, as Socialist, have to be honest and straight forward not only to the working, non working people as a whole but to every individual laying down all the cards to what our intentions are and what we are going to do next. Being clear would cause more people to become class conscious rather than putting "faith", that's what it is, in a concept of a Leninist of a different era and country.

John T.

Posted: 22 Jul 2007 05:14 pm Post subject:

Posted: 22 Jul 2007 05:36 pm Post subject:

Not to imply that De Leonists are entirely innocent either. The way many of us De Leonists inflate our own egos and practice vanguardism is to make an "analysis" of everything, then make maybe a hundred interpretations of various things all part of the "fundamental definition" of socialism, everything tends to get called a "fundamental principle", and if you disagree with any one of them they you aren't a "genuine socialist." All this, another kind of vanguardism. This is the skeleton in our own closet. (The World Socialist group does this also.)

Posted: 22 Jul 2007 07:33 pm Post subject:

Mike wrote:

Not to imply that De Leonists are entirely innocent either. The way many of us De Leonists inflate our own egos and practice vanguardism is to make an "analysis" of everything, then make maybe a hundred interpretations of various things all part of the "fundamental definition" of socialism, everything tends to get called a "fundamental principle", and if you disagree with any one of them they you aren't a "genuine socialist." All this, another kind of vanguardism. This is the skeleton in our own closet. (The World Socialist group does this also.)

I do recall a few months ago being called a "non socialist/communist/whatever/ simply because I don't always agree on every point. So what. I have read the SLP principles and such and I cannot submit to the discipline of the party because I don't agree with every precept. I do agree with the SIU program but I also agree "as to politics" the role of government when it comes to law, order and the debate on people's civil rights so on and so forth by elected law makers.

I am very happy to be part of this discussion group since both you and Dave have the experience of being in a political party. I have learned a lot and I come to the conclusion that I need to question a lot more. Especially those who offer vague concepts of socialism with no "how to" when it comes to workers running the means of production. I am afraid the "vanguardist" only purpose in life is to rule as kings and queens. No thanks and fuck you.

John T.

Posted: 23 Jul 2007 01:35 am Post subject:

So the forums of riseup.net - I just heard of them for the first itme. How does it go - you can't read or write on the web site? The only way to use the forums is by email?

Posted: 23 Jul 2007 02:28 am Post subject:

Mike wrote:

So the forums of riseup.net - I just heard of them for the first itme. How does it go - you can't read or write on the web site? The only way to use the forums is by email?

I do believe so. I just got accepted and I see that Dave announced his candidacy to run for Congress. I am not use to writing to those who have "reforms" on their agenda which is most likely the Transition concept of Trot.

Posted: 23 Jul 2007 02:50 am Post subject:

Okay, can someone explain to me this:

Posted: 23 Jul 2007 11:07 pm Post subject:

Dave, you got your answer and all I have to say that it amounts to mumbo-jumbo, abracadabra, waiting for the tooth fairy, etc. Basically the TP (toilet paper) concept is that workers are morons, can't think, and need the soft downy mental bridge to class consciousness. I often wonder if workers are already at that point but just afraid of the Leninist bogey man. I don't know how many times, when I have spoken to workers, they think Socialism is what Russia had and say no thanks.

John T.

Posted: 24 Jul 2007 08:15 pm Post subject:

I have been reading the latest replies from the so-called Deb's Tendency. Dave, I was wondering if the SP-USA has become a haven of Leninist? I don't think The American Socialist movement of the early 20th century was influenced by the writings of Lenin. A lot of things were accomplished during that time. After the Soviet Union came along, American Socialism became a fart in the wind. What do you and Mike think when the SP-USA want to destroy the Constitution of the U.S.?

John T.

Posted: 25 Jul 2007 02:20 am Post subject:

Posted: 25 Jul 2007 04:28 am Post subject:

Mike wrote:

Posted: 25 Jul 2007 05:51 am Post subject:

It's true that the Constitution is a bourgeois document, but the rising capitalist class in America and France in the 1700s did a few things right in their efforts to get rid of tyranny and aristocracy. The Constitution was born in a time when the small capitalist class was historically progressive. The founders of the republic invented a more civilized method for resolving social disagreements. Just imagine that -- changing the government by counting votes instead of firing cannons. That's better than what Einstein derived. Then the method the founders handed us was used to fix their own errors, after they left us with slavery and the disfranchisement of women, and the public consciousness evolved beyond the founders' mental limitations in those areas. It was such a good invention, it could even fix what its inventors didn't know was broken. Cry-baby "leftists" had better find something else to ridicule.

Posted: 25 Jul 2007 04:43 pm Post subject:

Now Now give our frinds the benefit of the doubt. We are who we are becuase of our exposure to a bit of intellectual integrity over at the SLP. )mind you I said a bit) Just work the piece at a time. I think that I will yet get the SP to support the amanedment propsal. That would be something of an advance wouldn't it?

dave

Posted: 25 Jul 2007 04:57 pm Post subject:

Dave, I do think they just may, perhaps, support the amendment proposal. I am sure if Eugene Debs were here today he would have thrown full support behind it. From what I have been reading from history, in the early 20th century Socialist movement. Those people were vocal and people actually responded to the message and went into action. Along comes Lenin and capitalist reforms become the norm which are suppose to cause class consciousness by a mental rainbow bridge crossing.

Mike wrote:

It's true that the Constitution is a bourgeois document.

I did not say it wasn't. But they did some things right, as you wrote, "The founders of the republic invented a more civilized method for resolving social disagreements. Just imagine that -- changing the government by counting votes instead of firing cannons." This is what De Leon was talking about? Making Socialism legal through the existing form of government because it CAN resolve social disagreements. Another thing. Many Americans view the Constitution as an important document to ensure their freedom.

Mike also wrote:

Posted: 07 Aug 2007 08:35 pm Post subject:

Due to circumstances beyond my control my 21 year old son managed to wreck havok on my computer. I am at the library. Stay tuned for the return I hope. Anyhow, Dave, I did manage to read my e-mail and I am wondering is why the Trotsky TP supporter has a hard on for you? From what I was told...he is not a member of the SPUSA so I just don't understand why he is sooooo determined to undermine what you are seeking to do?

John T.

Will read the reply on Thursday at the library.

Posted: 05 Dec 2007 06:42 am Post subject:

I'm pretty much done with revleft for a while. Several jerks in love with the advocacy of violence (or so they think).

I am giving the SP a shot. I joined and attended a local meeting and talked about the amendment proposal. It's a new idea to them but I can see that it is at least an acceptable idea. Whther they want to push it is another question. I am thinking more and more that I am going to run on the SP line. I will need all of 250 signatues to get on the ballot.

The name of the amendment: The Red Hen Amendment

Posted: 05 Dec 2007 06:45 am Post subject:

Mike were you going to contact the more left leaning of the GPs? Let me know if they have a meeting perhaps in Albany. I'll come down to meet them if I can to talk about the amendment proposal. That is if they want to hear about it.

Posted: 05 Dec 2007 06:50 am Post subject:

JT back in August:

I am wondering is why the Trotsky TP supporter has a hard on for you? From what I was told...he is not a member of the SPUSA so I just don't understand why he is sooooo determined to undermine what you are seeking to do?

D.S. belatedly:

I don't even recall who that was. I don't take any of it to heart, nor can I ever figure the "why" or "why not" of people out. I just do what I'm going to do in the fassion that I think that it ought to be done. To try to concentrate on anything else is just too complicated.

Posted: 05 Dec 2007 10:51 am Post subject:

Posted: 05 Dec 2007 10:57 am Post subject:

Good luck with the Red Hen Amendment.

It would be best if you upload a web page for it. If you don't still have your reseller space, use mine.

It's also a good idea to write an artice to spread around. A good format might be a bogus interview: Interview with Dave Searles, by Mort Dinglehopper. I asked Dave what he was trying to accomplish. He replied....

Posted: 05 Dec 2007 11:10 am Post subject:

In case the thousands of lurkers who are reading this message aren't alredy aware of it, the name Red Hen apparently comes from the fairy tale of the little red hen, which inspired a labor union song, sung fabulously by Faith Petric on the IWW music CD "Rebel Voices."

Posted: 06 Dec 2007 05:15 am Post subject:

Our kindergarten class at the South Avenue School did the Little Red Hen as a graudation play way back in 1958.

Have been encourgaed by my contacts with the SP. Have been on the list at socialistsunmoderated@pinko.net as opposed to the debsian tendency list.

They are going to discuss whther I should run on the SP line for congress at their exective meeting in March.

I attended a regional mtg. last week. Have to admit that the concept of having a stated goal to work toward regarding worker ownership of the means of production was a little foreign to them but by meeting's end a sizable number of the participants liked the idea of having the amendment proposal.

So there we go. If the SP can adopt this as an accepted tactic, it picks up where the SLP left off, IMHO.

What's left, to have the remnants of the SLP and SP merge?

Posted: 06 Dec 2007 07:46 am Post subject:

Mike - could you write up a short presentation regarding the relative positions of the SLP and SP concerning Industril unionism.

The way that I can figure it is that both Debs and Deleon were on track about the necessity for the Industrial Union and in fact was supposed to be the IWW?? Am I right on this? Was it anyone's idea except for Deleon that this new creature was supposed to be the SIU itself?

Was it that DeLeon simply took the idea further than Debs? I tried to go through the Debs archive and do not see a whole lot there. That is surprising. One would think that his output would have even exceeded Deleon's.

Posted: 06 Dec 2007 07:53 am Post subject:

The SP doesn't have a position on industrial unionism. That was the point of the SP having "left" (Debs) and "right" (Hillquit) factions, sub-organizations within the organization. Unite the working class, but not behind anything in particular, and once they are united, then sub-unite them behind something in particular. [My terminology, my interpretation.]

The SLP differs in that it says there is no option. Without IUism, the movement is already defeated.

Posted: 06 Dec 2007 08:12 am Post subject:

Posted: 06 Dec 2007 08:20 am Post subject:

Posted: 06 Dec 2007 03:11 pm Post subject:

Forget about the Hillquit side of it - just keep it to Debs. I go thto the archive around that time and do not see a whole lot from brother Debs except for a snippet here and there about the workers taking title to the industries. I need to flesh it out to show that the amendment proposal takes them back to their Debsian roots. Thanks.

Posted: 06 Dec 2007 05:40 pm Post subject:

Is this the archive you looked at? There are about a hundred links on this page.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/index.htm

Posted: 06 Dec 2007 05:57 pm Post subject:

Posted: 06 Dec 2007 06:05 pm Post subject:

Here Debs seems to see the union and ballot going together --

Interesting ... De Leon would say backup the ballot with the union ... Debs says backup the union with the ballot.

Copied in part from his 1910 speech "Working Class Politics"

http://www.marxists.org/history/usa/parties/spusa/1910/1100-debs-wclasspolitics.pdf

"The workers once united in one great industrial union will vote a united working class ticket. Not only this, but only when they are so united can they fit themselves to take control of industry when the change comes from wage-slavery to economic freedom. It is precisely because it is the mission of industrial unionism to unite the workers in harmonious cooperation in the industries in which they are employed, and by their enlightened interdependence and self-imposed discipline prepare them for industrial mastery and self-control when the hour strikes, thereby backing up with their economic power the verdict they render at the ballot box, it is precisely because of this fact that every Socialist, every class-conscious worker should be an industrial unionist and strive by all the means at his command to unify the workers in the allembracing bonds of industrial unionism."

Posted: 06 Dec 2007 06:26 pm Post subject:

Personally, I make no secret of the fact that I think that SP members generally have a poor understanding of how to distinguish between the fundamental and the tangential. In their current "Platform", it's not even clear to me which of "social ownership and democratic control of productive resources" and "the spaying and neutering of pets" is regarded by them to be the more fundamental kind of socialist principle.

http://socialistparty-usa.org/platform/

Posted: 06 Dec 2007 09:35 pm Post subject:

yeah the "platform" was thrown together at a St. Louis convention in October while they were otherwise distracted (which of course they often are) But look at the statement of principles, a little more cohesive with the class struggle. But don't get involved in that I need to work on Debs. Yes that's the archive with about 100 links. That's not many for a guy like Debs it would seem to me.

Posted: 07 Dec 2007 03:39 am Post subject:

Maybe there isn't much archived for Debs because maybe he mostly made a lot of speeches without a stenographer to record what he said.

Posted: 07 Dec 2007 05:20 pm Post subject:

Alan Augustson of the Green Party is running for Congress.

http://www.greencommons.org/node/869#comment-2790

I presented Dave's Amendment Proposal in full and here is his response:

Posted: 08 Dec 2007 09:02 am Post subject:

I also thought Dave's wording of the amendment was confusing :o)

But Dave felt that the double-negative form (shall not be excluded from ...) was important.

Posted: 08 Dec 2007 09:09 am Post subject:

Alan Augustson's proposal for "establishment of an hour of labor as the actual unit of exchange" [3rd paragraph of 2nd page of that pdf file] sounds similar to my interpretation of DeLeonistic vouchers.

Posted: 08 Dec 2007 03:14 pm Post subject:

Mike wrote:

Posted: 08 Dec 2007 09:01 pm Post subject: EMAIL ADDRESS SOUGHT

Hello, John,

Might you give me your current email address?

I attempted some months ago to send you a letter to try and reconcile a recent conflict we had, but apparently your jtrim@cecomet.net address is no longer valid.

Did you cancel that address so as to avoid communication with me?

I might point out that when conflicts persist unresolved, it not only comprises an unfortunate rent in the general social fabric, but in the socialist movement, as well. In this case, for example, prior to the conflict you had been posting in the PCS forum, which represented a small extension of the movement, but since then you have not, which represents a small contraction of the movement.

If you please, post your address here, or simply send me a piece of email at vince1 @ fastmail.us and I'll respond.

Peace,

vince

Posted: 08 Dec 2007 09:40 pm Post subject:

I am not ready to do so yet Vince. My e-mail is different yes but my son put the computer on cable and no longer a dial up connection.

From Rambam:

Posted: 09 Dec 2007 08:21 pm Post subject:

The reason for Rambam quote, who is also known as Maimonides, is:

1. The Love Ethic is eternal being in the Ten Commandments and the Hebrew Scriptures.

2. For thousands of years the Love Ethic has been under fire from people who believe hatred and bigotry can keep people in ignorance and easier to manage as slaves. These people always manage to find scapegoats for the ignorant to blame for a nation's problems.

3. Forgiveness is a two way street and even under ideal circumstances it sometimes don't happen right away.

At any rate, I am content to keep my distance from the PCS website until I am ready to look at it again. That may be a long time from now.

John T.

Posted: 10 Dec 2007 08:30 am Post subject: MORE TO JOHN

(I'm sorry this post is so lengthy, but the thoughts just kept coming.)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello, John,

I'm actually less concerned with the PCS website, than I am with reconciliation with a human being--you.

Please also note that the communication I tried to send you attempted to address, in some detail, the conflict and so would have, I believe, assisted you in working through any associated thoughts or emotions, rather than simply allowing them to fester, however slowly or slightly.

Regarding your love ethic quotations, they are of great interest to me and I'm going to look into them further. But if you posted them because you wish me to take a certain message away from them, it would be best if you simply made that message explicit to me, so I'm sure to understand it as you mean it.

Back to the topic of the PCS site for a moment, it is arguably ironic that you of all people, continually railing as you do against vanguardism and socialist and communist false prophets and ideologies, would so blithely assert that you may, indeed, abstain from visiting the PCS site until "...a long time from now," given that PCS is staunchly, indeed aggressively antivanguardist. One would think and hope that you would, in fact, be zealous in your support of such an organization, especially a new one that is trying to get off the ground. More on this point, below.

Additionally, I believe that one of the unique strengths of PCS is its pledge to place itself as a distinct counterpoint to the many and varied other groups out there, in actively and deliberately treating members and non-members alike with respect and sensitivity. And that's what I'm trying to do here. Which actually and arguably comprises a second irony regarding your statement that you may be staying away a long, long time: the Universe knows I'm not perfect, but if you're seeking treatment from an organization or individual socialist that actively attempts more sensitivity and respect than I've shown you (and by extension your wife), or at least tried to show you thus far over the time I've known you, I feel confident asserting that you're not likely to find it, or find it easily.

Also, telling me: "I am not upset or anything like that..." while also asserting you may indeed be staying away from PCS until "...a long time from now," suggests that you are, in fact, upset at me. In reading the sentence in your post it also strikes me as the second time you've presented me with a barbed remark. We all learn about each other over time, and I'm learning that on occasion your tone takes a decidedly hard and harsh turn. That kind of oblique hostility was, in fact, a large part of the reason for the original conflict.

Another point, if you'll forgive me: I would have hoped that you'd not have allowed negative emotion based on a conflict to have prevented you from continuing to post in the PCS Discussion Forum. What if they threw a revolution and nobody came? I don't know if you've consciously perceived what a mammoth undertaking (and financial expenditure) the creation and population of the very extensive PCS Forum was, and yet the tiny crew of participants posting at its grand opening. Still, had those four or five individuals continued to post, that could have been an adequate critical mass to attract others, and create a forum of reasonable activity and traffic. However, you apparently chose to allow your negative emotion over our conflict to effect a termination of what had previously been an attractive pattern of semi-regular posting by you, one of our very, very few initial participants, Again--a contraction of a limb of the movement that was just beginning a very modest expansion; and of course an arguable slight in itself, toward me, given the amount of time, money, mental energy, and frankly anguish I've put in over the last 2 years 7 months now building the PCS website, in an attempt to expand the parameters of this movement. A movement that you apparently support, given your presence, contributions, and activity here at DeLeonism.org and elsewhere.

Building PCS and especially its extensive, content-rich, arguably well-and-creatively-designed website has been something of a lonely effort, and people like me rely in good measure on various kinds of support, whether emotional, psychological, financial, promotional, or organizational, from comrades and other interested persons to sustain our efforts, and the reasonable mental state required to continue to make them. I'm not exactly working under ideal personal conditions, as the PCS Donation page describes. I submit that you, and everyone else, should keep these points very much in mind as you continue to discuss and indeed anguish over the possible reasons for the fragmentation and diminutive size of this movement. It's not just the continued misunderstanding by the working class of the idea of socialism, and the fact that capitalism somehow manages to keep hobbling along--it's also the continuing implosion of the socialist movement, by the socialist movement.

A note sounded at the PCS site perhaps deserves a refrain here: the love ethic and the behaviors implied therein would be a definite assist to the movement for socialism, right now, in addition to its critical role after the revolution.

In conclusion, then, I respectfully suggest you allow me to send you my email, before allowing negative thoughts and emotions on your part to fester further. I may even be able to post it in the PCS thread here at DeLeonism.org if you so request, and depending upon its contents, which I'd have to review, anew.

I have my limits too, of time and money if not of desire, and I've already expended amounts of same in composing the emails to you, sending them, processing them as they were returned, searching out old emails to find another address for you, searching here for such an address, searching RevLeft for your new address, and now composing this series of posts.

So, I'm not going to broach any of this again. If and when you're ready to read what I've written, to come back to the PCS site, and/or to attempt reconciliation with me, then please do so and you'll always be welcome at my site, if not in my heart, as well. If you choose not to move forward, however, then we'll simply resign ourselves to yet one more fissure amongst the thousands and thousands that spider throughout the socialist edifice, and the millions or billions throughout the human one.

I Remain,

vince, PCS

Posted: 10 Dec 2007 01:44 pm Post subject:

Power chord wrote:

I'm not going to broach any of this again.

Dave Searles writes:

HIP HIP, HURRAH!!!!

Posted: 10 Dec 2007 09:19 pm Post subject:

I think I'll start a comic strip relettering project. Take other people's comics, replace their words with my own, and redistribute them.

Posted: 10 Dec 2007 09:29 pm Post subject:

Hey, this is fun! Does anyone have any good comics to contribute?

Posted: 10 Dec 2007 09:39 pm Post subject:

Some of my originals are so small, there's only enough room for small lettering.

Posted: 10 Dec 2007 09:47 pm Post subject:

I'm doing this while I'm waiting "on hold" for the representative from DirecTV to return, so I can swear at her some more.

Posted: 10 Dec 2007 10:10 pm Post subject:

That God-damned DirecTV -- I called them on June 24th and permanently cancelled my account, and now they got a collection agency after me to try to make me pay for July through December! They just told me on the phone that it's corrected now, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Posted: 11 Dec 2007 03:10 pm Post subject:

Vince...what are you trying to do? I said when I am ready I will talk but you are doing it again being pushy. I repeat when I am ready to talk I will but until then there will be no active e-mail address to give out.

John T.

Posted: 11 Dec 2007 03:55 pm Post subject:

Mike, the IWW is running some YouTube videos.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Y5l7uwtqkqU

In this video an old fellow said that the IWW wanted the workers to operate the means of production. He also said, and get this, the IWW wanted to abolish the wage system but were really vague on what to do after that.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=e9TGCG-p52I&feature=related

I think it is a great idea in using comics/cartoons and the SIU concept. It would be beneficial to explain how the industrial government would work in that format including tables and graphs. Perhaps a You Tube presentation might go into production?

John T.

Posted: 11 Dec 2007 06:41 pm Post subject:

Glad to see the IWW doing that. Those are easy to produce. Any video files, and collages of motionless image files, can be imported into a video editing prgram. Movie Maker probably came with your computer. Better software than that is needed to save the results to other formats besides the clunky .wmv format, such as the preferred .mpg format. Software is free or cheap shareware. One of these days I'll have to go shopping for a few parts. Need a firewire cable to plug into the camcorder, and a firewire PC card to plug into the computer to give the firewire cable something to attach to. Also some kind of attachment to capture video signals from the s-video jacks or RCA jacks of a dvd player, vcr or cable tv.

Posted: 11 Dec 2007 07:19 pm Post subject:

I would not know what to do with Movie Maker. Anyways, here is a presentation of one of the best guitarist around...Phil Keaggy!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=sTsHn9a9u1c&feature=related

Posted: 11 Dec 2007 07:37 pm Post subject:

He is a good guitar player.

I have an Ovation sunburst acoustic guitar, bought it in 1976.

Posted: 11 Dec 2007 11:46 pm Post subject:

I have a Washburn Bass in which I am in the process learning. The person responsible for me taking up the bass is Tom Peterson of Cheap Trick. Here he is playing his 12 string bass (his invention) and singing "I know What I Want."

http://youtube.com/watch?v=HYzHDH4fs2s&feature=related

Wink

Posted: 12 Dec 2007 03:21 am Post subject:

I also played a bass for a while. Two guys I jammed with in my home town after I left college needed a third player on bass and they lent me one. I used a flat pick. But I can't read the F-clef as well as I can read the G-clef.

The video you linked to, the familiar sounding melody he begins with, we heard Hendrix play that, right?

Posted: 12 Dec 2007 01:31 pm Post subject:

It's very possible that he started with a Hendrix melody. I know these guys are older than I am and their influences were the Beatles, Hendrix and others.

I play with index and middle finger because I like the softer tone it produces. I've been experimenting with the pick on certain songs but I still remain faster with the fingers. On the other hand, I don't believe I am having any problems reading either G or F clefs. I just fumble through the chords with my left hand but I am getting better. I wish I had done this when I was younger.

Okay, lets get back on subject. I realize that the IWW is more of a collective bargaining union that happens to promote the end of the wage system. I do believe we touched on that any union does collective bargaining. This is pretty much the standard and this is what working people expect as a member. But just to say that the wage system needs to end is not enough to get anyone to think. Like I wrote about the old timer saying that things were fuzzy as to what to do after the wage system is gone. Guess we need to fill the void.

Posted: 12 Dec 2007 03:46 pm Post subject:

Posted: 12 Dec 2007 03:54 pm Post subject:

Posted: 12 Dec 2007 04:04 pm Post subject:

The comment in the video about how it's fuzzy what comes after that -- I think the fuzziness should be part of the message.

It should be said:

"x percent of us think the new system should have independent worker coops that trade with each other, y percent of us think the new system should have central planning and direct allocation, z percent of us think whatever and this and that. We all agree that capitalism is murdering us and cannot be tolerated, so join us, we'll get rid of this present situation that's murdering us. One dya the people will vote on the details of how the new system will operate. And then if we decide democratically to change it several times, we'll change several times. Join us, and the groupings who hold various opinions about the best goal will show you their summaries of what they believe to be the pro's and con's of their positions, so you can discuss them if you wish. But there's a lot we agree on already, so join us."

Gee, hundreds of little socialist factions out there, what should be so hard about just saying that simple thing? Everyone tends to make their own task harder. The universal tendency of "revolutionaries" to act like spoiled babies doesn't help either.

Posted: 13 Dec 2007 12:48 pm Post subject:

I tend to think the term "revolutionaries" is out dated and creates images of that defunct system of Leninism. I do believe that Socialist and Anarchist agree that Capitalism is murdering us and it would be great if they all joined together and agree to experiment on different ideas in regards to economics and politics but they don't. They rather argue about either a entire system based on economic cooperation or and entire system based on politics and dictatorship and shout down anything they perceive going against their pet concepts.

Posted: 14 Dec 2007 04:16 pm Post subject:

Mike wrote:

Posted: 14 Dec 2007 11:47 pm Post subject:

Look what I found...the entire history of the IWW

http://www.brightcove.tv/title.jsp?title=433480993&channel=219646953

John T. Very Happy

Posted: 15 Dec 2007 07:46 am Post subject:

I didn't say it right. I don't know how to put it into words, but ways have to be found for workers to cooperate on those things that they already agree on without closing off other options.

Posted: 15 Dec 2007 04:10 pm Post subject:

Mike wrote:

Posted: 16 Dec 2007 03:59 pm Post subject:

I like this presentation:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=eSYczEWz1Q4&feature=related

Very Happy

Posted: 17 Dec 2007 01:42 am Post subject:

That video is excellent. I have an idea - I'm making a list inside my links page for "some videos recommended by our fourm users". I'll start copying links there now, although I'm procrastinating with the upload of the revised version of the page.

Posted: 17 Dec 2007 11:27 am Post subject:

That person has also made a few other theater presentations on You Tube.

http://youtube.com/usthepeople

Viewing these has raised my hopes that there are those out there who refuse to accept the Soviet Union as being a Socialist State. Terror, violence and executions would have greatly upset Marx being that he pointed those tactics out to be the Capitalist way of maintaining power.

John T.

Posted: 12 Jan 2008 12:35 pm Post subject:

Here is something I did not know. I have been conversing with a fellow over on Messiah Truth Forum and he wrote:

Posted: 12 Jan 2008 08:50 pm Post subject:

John, I just don't see the interest as to the deep pshological causes of Marx being such a good social scientist. We all get our drive from somewhere, from good expereinces and bad from exposure to all sorts of idea and wacks and cranks. These experiences broaden us but for the most part they aren't transferable from one to another or they don't seem to be.

Take a look at:

http://www.kolel.org/zohar/map.html

dave

Posted: 13 Jan 2008 04:11 pm Post subject:

Dave wrote:

Posted: 13 Jan 2008 09:10 pm Post subject:

How about that. He came up with sources:

www.newkabbalah.com/hegel.htm

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/hegel%20contents.htm

www.wbenjamin.org/hegel_kabbalah.html

John T.

Posted: 14 Jan 2008 02:17 am Post subject:

I WILL USE AN ANALOGY or perhaps it is merely an illustration.

One of the great physical discoveries was reportedly made by a man in a bathtub, another was by Galileo walking past swinging lamps, another supposedly was of newton sitting under an apple tree. If the apple tree story was true, would it benefit science to be able to find that tree to ascertain what particular properties about that tree made Newton think heavily upon the subject of gravity? Same with dielectrics.. Perhaps Marx needed the formality of the process to help him clear his mind. I do the came thing with trying to construct legal arguments based up the hundreds of court cases I read in a week.

For Jonathan Livingston Seagull it was practicing steady flight. For Mike it's battling the next snow storm with his all powerful snow blower.

Posted: 14 Jan 2008 04:33 am Post subject:

Oh boy, someone mentioned old science stories. Now I'm unable to control myself.

The story about Newton and the apple tree is believed to be made up by someone. What really happened was that Newton spent a lot of time thinking about whether the force that makes dropped objects fall down might be the same force that keeps the moon orbiting the earth. The laws of motion that he published in 1666 are his conclusions about that.

The story about Galileo is believed by historians to be true. He was a kid, sitting in church, daydreaming, looking up at the glass-enclosed candles that were swinging on long chains. This got him thinking about what makes a pendulum behave as it does.

The story about Archimedes is believed to be true. The king told him to determine whether a certain crown was solid gold or merely gold plated. He realized that if it's pure gold then it has the same density (mass divided by volume) as pure gold. It's was easy to determine the mass of the crown: just weigh it. But how could he find the volume of an irregularly shaped object? He realized the answer when he got into the bathtub and noticed the water level rise. A submerged object displaces a volume of water equal to its own volume. Later he added a related discovery: the weight of that displaced amount of fluid is the same magnitude of force as the buoyancy that holds up a floating object.

All you have to do is get me started about old science stories and I'll never shut up.

Posted: 14 Jan 2008 04:46 am Post subject:

I have never heard that story about Marx originally intending to become a minister. He went to college to study law, starting at the University of Bonn in 1835 and transferring to the University of Berlin in 1836. He disliked the idea of becoming a lawyer and wished that he could become a famous poet instead. His girlfriend Jenny liked his poetry but everyone told him that he had little talent for it. Neither of those predicted outcomes happened. In 1841 he ended up with a Ph.D. in philosophy.

Posted: 14 Jan 2008 01:24 pm Post subject:

Maybe it was that using the refractory telescope that he invented or was one of the first to use he thought that he saw an apple lying about the rubble on the surface of the moon and wondered if the same force that obviously made the apple fall upon the surface of the moon also kept the apple in orbit around the earth, accompanied by the moon's surface and the rest of the moon that it contained.

But tell me something, that rock they found in Antarctica a couple of years ago - how did they ever ascertain that it came from Mars? What would have been the mechanics of it? A meteor hitting Mars and knocking off a chunk of Mars at super orbital speed, and then the rock survived the fall through earth's atmosphere? Maybe Antarctica's coldness kept the rock from burning up on the way down.

Posted: 15 Jan 2008 06:58 am Post subject:

Meteorite ALH84001 found in Antarctica in 1984 contained microscopic sized air bubbles. The mixture of gases in those bubbles was found to have the same proportions as the atmosphere of Mars. The precision of those percentages is believed to be good evidence.

Yes, they figure a meteor clobbered Marx and sent rocks flying in many directions, a small number of them reaching earth.

Reason it didn't burn up in earth's atmosphere is because some meteors are mostly iron instead of "stony" silicate class, and those are the ones that don't burn up. They melt on the outside but don't get changed much inside. The climate of Antarctica couldn't matter. An environment that's about fifty degrees colder isn't really significant when friction heats things to a thousand-plus degrees. Also, the heating occurs at high altitudes, where tropical regions are almost as cold as polar regions anyway.

Posted: 16 Jan 2008 04:35 pm Post subject:

I said it was a couple of years and it was a dozen times that. Ouch.

Posted: 16 Jan 2008 07:54 pm Post subject:

there is an SLP myspace page:

http://groups.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=groups.groupProfile&groupID=102879791&Mytoken=5F7C3524-5112-481D-924FFD6D692724F03876836

Posted: 16 Jan 2008 11:52 pm Post subject:

I just signed up to join that SLP myspace group. It requires a moderator to approve it. It didn't ask me why I want to join, so I can't imagine what the moderator's criterion could be.

Posted: 17 Jan 2008 08:10 pm Post subject:

In any event myspace will not let you post for 7 days of registering with myspace. I don't remeber getting the slp site's approval. probably I will have a clearer recallection of it 24 years hence.

I am beginning, just beginning to think that I'm getting the cold shoulder at SLP myspace. We shall see.

Posted: 17 Jan 2008 08:34 pm Post subject:

So far the site looks like a place where one person copies an article from The People and another person replies yes, what a terrific article. But you actually tried, God forbid, to discuss a thought. I'm not sure whether that's allowed. If new kinds of thinking were tolerated, wouldn't that tend to spiral out of control?

I had a myspace account but there's no way to change the email address, because they send a confirmation request to old email address that no longer works. So I just registered a new account. Too bad I have to lose all the swingers that were in my friends network :o) Watch out, hotties, 'cause there's a new Capricorn male on the block! That stupid childish myspace company, bah.

Posted: 17 Jan 2008 08:43 pm Post subject:

Posted: 21 Jan 2008 12:30 pm Post subject:

Has everyone seen this site. Looks very interesting

http://www.marxisthistory.org/subject/usa/eam/index.html

Posted: 23 Jan 2008 09:57 pm Post subject:

It seems like the slp myspace page has had its posting options severely curtailed. No ability to start new topic. Now I just tried to post to an existing topic and it doesn't register on the index.

Posted: 24 Jan 2008 02:34 am Post subject:

I can't do much to help because my myspace "seven days" hasn't passed yet, because the group moderator hasn't approved my group membership, and because I'm watching the movie "Rage at Dawn" on the Encore Westerns channel.

Posted: 27 Jan 2008 06:13 pm Post subject:

The SLP myspace group, in addition to taking away the button to create a new topic, I think they turned off posting also, except for the two party members. There an already-existing topic where someone posted a test message. I clicked reply to it. Got a composition window. Typed "test". Click to post it. Didn't get any kind of "done" response to indicate that it received my post. Instead it forwarded me automatically to my set-profile page. Tried again, same. My replies do not appear in the topic.

Posted: 27 Jan 2008 06:30 pm Post subject:

How come davesearles doesn't appear in the "view all members" list of the myspace group? Do they only list the ones who have uploaded avatars? My own posting approval is in doubt, but you have already done it.

Posted: 28 Jan 2008 12:49 pm Post subject:

They took me off of the group list. I have written the moderator several times no response.

Spooky

Posted: 31 Jan 2008 06:37 pm Post subject: alternate SLP myplace

I put up an alternate SLP type page on myspace, just so there would be something. Please suggest changes here or sign on and make suggestions there.

http://groups.myspace.com/SocialistLaborPartyideasactions

dave

Posted: 31 Jan 2008 06:50 pm Post subject:

Okay, I clicked "join" for that newest group and it says sent to moderator, i guess that's you, for approval. I suppose scores of myspace users will now find it by searching forums for the word "socialist". Did the creation process let you enter a whole list of search keywords, or is the name the only search criterion?

Posted: 31 Jan 2008 06:54 pm Post subject:

This is very serious now. Can there be any doubt that you were expelled from the SLP group because you suggested that the SLP and the SP could both endorse the amendment proposal?

Now this is not serious. A panda walks into a bar and orders a tossed salad....

Posted: 01 Feb 2008 10:32 am Post subject:

I guess that I was very bad to suggest such a thing.

I deleted the site that I created. Too much work for now. Do you and/or John want to take up the idea? (Where is John anyway?)

What are you paying for fuel oil? We just got a bill for just about $4.00/gal.

Posted: 01 Feb 2008 07:19 pm Post subject:

What is "take up the idea"? If you have any suggestions I will tell you about them as I think of them. What are the outstanding needs or problems or questions? Do you mean the composition of a letter to be issued to political parties?

I tried to explain this point here a year or two ago: the trick to writing is to have the first phase in which you give no consideration to how to phrase anything, just blurt out what you want to include, possibly using personal codes that no one else would understand, and sort over the order of the parts. The very last step should be to choose what words to use. That's the basis of the caricature of a novelist who is frustrated by trying to begin the project with a choice of words. In the movie "Throw Momma From the Train", Richard Dreyfus stares at the typewriter for a long time and all he has completed of his novel is three words "The night was --." He's doing it backwards. You're supposed to write the whole thing without regard to which words sound right. Only when you're not trying to choose any intended meaning should you go back and perform the copy editing.

I don't see an indication of the price per gallon on my oil bills, just the balance due. I think the price per gallon was on the handwritten paper that the guy sticks on the front door, but they're not in the filing cabinet. If any piece of paper in this house doesn't get placed into the filing cabinet it's lost.

I'm trying to keep the thermostat turned off as much as possible. The way I use the woodstove, the temperature in here ramps up and ramps down. I let the indoor temp drop to about 60, which occurs around 2 PM, then I make a make a fire, which brings the temp up to about 80, which occurs around 10 PM, then I let the fire go out, repeat cycle. I allow the zone for the hot water tank to switch on and off of its own free will.

Posted: 01 Feb 2008 09:04 pm Post subject:

We could create new myspace accounts, with traditional sounding myspace names like MistressErotica47 or something like that, and then reapply for entry into the SLP forum.

Posted: 03 Feb 2008 03:45 pm Post subject:

Dave wrote:

Posted: 04 Feb 2008 02:15 pm Post subject:

Thanks Dave for the link you provided on Mon Jan 21, 2008 12:30 pm. I like the early American Socialist movement. Very Happy

John

Posted: 04 Feb 2008 09:33 pm Post subject:

If this isn't the SLP program I'll be a monkey's uncle!!

The workers themselves must take the initiative
in uniting their forces for effective economic and political
action; the leaders will never do it for them. They
must no longer suffer themselves to be deceived by
the specious arguments of their betrayers, who blatantly
boast of their unionism that they may traffic in
it and sell out the dupes who blindly follow them. I
have very little use for labor leaders in general and none
at all for the kind who feel their self-importance and
are so impressed by their own wisdom that where they
lead their dupes are expected to blindly follow without
a question. Such “leaders” lead their victims to
the shambles and deliver them over for a consideration
and this is possible only among craft-divided wageslaves
who are kept apart for the very purpose that
they may feel their economic helplessness and rely upon
some “leader” to do something for them.
Economic unity will be speedily followed by
political unity. The workers once united in one great
industrial union will vote a united working class ticket.
Not only this, but only when they are so united can
they fit themselves to take control of industry when
the change comes from wage-slavery to economic freedom.
It is precisely because it is the mission of industrial
unionism to unite the workers in harmonious
cooperation in the industries in which they are employed,
and by their enlightened interdependence and
self-imposed discipline prepare them for industrial
mastery and self-control when the hour strikes, thereby
backing up with their economic power the verdict they
render at the ballot box, it is precisely because of this
fact that every Socialist, every class-conscious worker
should be an industrial unionist and strive by all the
means at his command to unify the workers in the all embracing
bonds of industrial unionism.

Debs 9/18/1910

http://www.marxisthistory.org/subject/usa/eam/index.html

Posted: 05 Feb 2008 04:05 am Post subject:

I don't recall the SLP ever denying that Debs wanted the SIU. The SLP sells Deb's pamphlet "The Coming Union." What do the have against him? The fact that he was in the same party as the reformists, the fact that the SP has "left" and"right" factions. The SLP believes that a socialist party has to be unanymous about everything.

Posted: 09 Feb 2008 11:27 pm Post subject:

Mike, can you find a way to put this link

http://www.youtube.com/PFANS

right on the forum index page?

Dave

Posted: 10 Feb 2008 08:58 am Post subject:

The software allows adding some content on every forum page, but not just on the forum index page.

But it wouldn't be approprate there since it's not not part of the same domain. The right way to promote something on another domain would be to make an improved kind of "recommended links" page, to replace the primitive-looking list of links that I have now.

They're really nice videos that Wally Petrovich made. I'm gonna congratulate them.

Posted: 11 Feb 2008 03:28 pm Post subject:

Thank you Dave for that video link. I am going make use of it at a few other forums. Cool

Posted: 12 Feb 2008 02:50 pm Post subject:

Wally's website has a link to this one. The concepts presented by the chart has an industrial union flare to it being that the All Industrial Congress has both input from the industrial union and from every community through Local Congresses. But we know how that works. Presenting a basic outline at

http://www.peopleforanewsociety.org/

was good. Visual helps always make a better impact on a person's mind than trying to create the image from reading. I hope they pay us a visit here. Very Happy

John

Posted: 19 Feb 2008 05:52 pm Post subject:

I recently wrote to the: http://www.thelaborparty.org/

I wrote leaving this address and the Yahoo Group address citing that a Constitution Amendment is needed for the formation of worker's socialist industrial union. They also want to 1. Amend the Constitution to Guarantee Everyone a Job at a Living Wage, 2. Pay Laid-off Workers Two Months Severance for Every Year of Service...This tells me that they rather have the Capitalist in control of production and distribution but politically guarantee everyone would have a right to a living wage and severance. It is Labor Party policy NOT to interfere in the internal affairs and politics of individual unions. I don't see much difference between the Labor Party and the Socialist Party USA. Too bad they don't see that the present government serves the interest of the corporate elite and that most labor unions are in partnership with capitalist. This is just an example of people who think they can make capitalism more moral and responsible to those who work for them politically. They don't see that capitalism has to be taken on both economically and politically. I hope whomever I sent an e-mail to would join either this forum or the Yahoo group. I am also trying to work on the Noahide forum that I am at but it seems awfully quiet right now. However, I do see my post has been read 77 times since it was posted last week.

John

Posted: 19 Feb 2008 06:31 pm Post subject:

The Labor Party e-mail address was denied to me so the message sent was sent back to me. They have a snail mail address and telephone and fax number--wonder if they actually work? I will try again using a different e-mail address.

Labor Party
PO Box 53177
Washington, DC 20009
Tel: 202.234.5190
Fax: 202.234.5266

Posted: 21 Feb 2008 12:35 pm Post subject:

E-mail was accepted but no response and I know they are not that busy. At any rate, I need to understand a few things from SP literature.

Public ownership becomes a fraud if decisions are made by distant bureaucrats or authoritarian managers. In socialist society power resides in worker-managed and cooperative enterprises. Community-based cooperatives help provide the flexibility and innovation required in a dynamic socialist economy. Workers have the right to form unions freely, and to strike and engage in other forms of job actions.

I agree with the first sentence because public ownership would be a fraud if bureaucrats and authoritarian managers ran industries and distribution centers. This is exactly how the place that I work at conducts itself. Every store is ran in much the same manner including having the same sales of food stuffs. Yet stores have been closed and the corporation has filed bankruptcy. The second and third sentence is a bit vague since it does not explain how worker-managed and cooperatives enterprises would function or what that flexibility would be in a socialist economy. It appears that all work places would be independent of each other like many are today under Capitalism. I may not understand what is being presented either. As to the last sentence I have to ask is that why would there be strikes and other job actions if workers are in control of the means of production and distribution?

John T.

Posted: 21 Feb 2008 11:35 pm Post subject:

Posted: 22 Feb 2008 02:04 am Post subject:

Do not read SP literature expecting it to fit together. It's hodgepodge. This is why I'm trying to buck up the worker take over of the industries part of it.

Posted: 22 Feb 2008 02:14 pm Post subject:

John - could I ask you to not put text in colors. For some reason I can't read it, I have to paste it ino a word document and change it to balck text to be able to read it. Thanks.

Posted: 22 Feb 2008 04:06 pm Post subject:

Dave wrote:

Posted: 23 Feb 2008 05:16 am Post subject:

Ha-ha, how old is your computer monitor, Dave? 1978 ? :o)

Posted: 23 Feb 2008 05:18 am Post subject:

:o) Some people buy a fixer-upper house or car ... Dave decided to join a fixer-upper poitical party :o)

Posted: 23 Feb 2008 03:05 pm Post subject:

Mike wrote:

Posted: 23 Feb 2008 10:08 pm Post subject:

Some people want to call it socialism to have a system of independent "cooperatives" that conduct private trade in competition with one another. They have the right to use any name they choose, but I think it's Tower of Babel confusion.

Posted: 24 Feb 2008 12:05 am Post subject:

http://www.socialist2008.org/podcast/Socialist2008_1.mp3
24 minute interview with Brian Moore, SP-USA 2008 presidential candidate

This surprised me: Recorded when he was still seeking the SP's nomination, he said he has been "a due-paying member of the Socialist Party ... since last month" [around time index 4:38] Can you imagine the SLP nominating a candidate who has been in the party for only a month?

______________________

Press release issued October 2007 announcing his nomination by the national convention
http://www.votebrianmoore.com/articles.htm

______________________

"Issues"
http://votebrianmoore.com/issues.htm

I want to know: Why are these selected topics rather than others to be considered by a socialist organization to be the issues? (Regulate the banking and insurance industries? Oppose English being the official language? Disband NATO? Why should I even care?) -- People just assume that their own pet peeves should be adopted by others and become their pet peeves also - in this, the political left, right and center are equally guilty.

The large number of spelling errors in the document don't help the party's image.

The list of "issues" repeated here, including the spelling errors:
http://www.myspace.com/votesocialist08

______________________

The SP-USA MySpace blog
http://www.myspace.com/socialistpartyus

______________________

Posted: 24 Feb 2008 01:51 pm Post subject:

SP is a hodgepodge. They nominated Brian it seems not becuase of who he was but becuase of who he wasn't (a member of any of the established factions.)

This is one reason that I'm trying ever so adroitly to try to influence the organization to adopt the amamedment proposal, as a unifying theme. Perhaps it will work, and perhaps not. What else do I have to do?

Posted: 24 Feb 2008 08:05 pm Post subject:

I agree with what you're doing, Dave. It can only help.

I'm just saying what I think your greatest obstacle is. It's that reformism habit. The SP's idea of adopting your suggestion would probably mean inserting it somewhere into a long list of other goals ....

...
135. Figure out some way to remove the danger from anything that's dangerous
136. Save the woodpecker from extinction
137. Enact a constitutional amendment to adopt workers' control of the industries
138. Make bridges wider
...

Even if your idea is adopted, there's still the problem of misleading people into thinking that socialism isn't about a sweeping conversion to a new system, but only one item in a long list of adjustments.

Posted: 24 Feb 2008 08:20 pm Post subject:

issues.htm says:

[5] "Phase out all nuclear power plants, shut down waste incinerators, landfills and open-pit mining."

Don't send our garbage to landfills but don't send it to incinerators either. In that case, maybe we ought to keep our garbage. Breakfast cereal boxes can be used as modern art in the living room.

[21] "six weeks annual paid vacation"

How was it calculated that five weeks would be too little, while seven weeks would be too much?

[26] "Reinforce and enhance government and private support of the arts, sports and culture."

Great. Sports don't get enough attention, and I'm looking forward to paying higher taxes to promote the practice of people throwing rubber balls through the air.

[34] "Promote liberal arts, along with engineering and science, in colleges and universities."

That's a relief. I was afraid that colleges might offer some other courses besides the liberal arts and the sciences.