Inveresk Street Ingrate

Mark'us in

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 10:36:00 +0000

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 127

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 127th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1563 friends!

Recent blogs:

Too Good to be True
Banks, who needs them?
GB Shaw as a Guide to Socialism

Coming Events:

Radical Film Forum, Sundays 6pm - 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN.

13th December - Earthlings

17th January - Manufacturing Consent (part one)

31st January - Manufacturing Consent (part two)

Capitalism and the Arctic - DVD

Tuesday 15th December, 8pm

Committee room, Chiswick Town Hall, Heathfield Terrace, London W4

Advance notice:

Debate with Dr Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute

Thursday, 4th February, 7pm

Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1

Quote for the week:

"Those who busy themselves with State-Socialism, that is to say, those who demand the nationalisation or municipalisation of certain services, do not trouble at all about the lot of the workers engaged in them; but even admitting that they sought to improve the lot of those employed would they be able to do so? If they can, let them begin by improving the conditions of the underpaid workers in the Post Office, in the State tobacco factories, railways and State ironworks. The workshops of the State and municipality are prisons quite as bad as private workshops, if not worse." Paul Lafargue, Socialism and Nationalisation, 1882.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Let's Rock Again! (2004)

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 14:39:00 +0000

December 2009 Socialist Standard: Down and out in Mayfair

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:14:00 +0000

December 2009 Socialist Standard

Editorial

Copenhagen: another predictable failure

Regular Columns

Pathfinders Calorie counts and pet scans

Cooking the Books 1 This year’s Nobel Prize for Economics

Cooking the Books 2 Free is good

Material World The advance of capitalism

Greasy Pole BNP – Question Time Without Answers

Pieces Together Capitalist Paradox; Drug Pushers Pay Off; All Right For Some

50 Years Ago Second thoughts

Main Articles

Down and out in Mayfair We still live in a society that if you don’t have the ability to pay you ‘goes’ without.

Capitalism and food security – an oxymoron Food security for all the people of the world will only be possible when the profit motive is taken out of food supply.

The World Around You Someone employs you, and you work for them, and they control a big part of your waking hours.

Too good to be true We are conditioned to accept the absurdities and contradictions that capitalism throws up.

Debating the “S-Word” Is any word more over-used and misunderstood today than “socialism”?

On modern life (Eric Fromm ) Some selected quotes from Fromm's 'The Art of Loving'.

How I got to be a socialist “… I came to know about ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ but always preferred ‘our’.”

Ire of the Irate Itinerant Cartoon Strip

Book Reviews, & Meetings

Book Reviews:Why not socialism? By G. A. Cohen; Where the Other Half Lives: Lower Income Housing in a Neoliberal World Sarah Glynn, ed; Critical Social Theory and the End of Work By Edward Granter; Free. The Future of a Radical Price. By Chris Anderson; Plebs. By Colin Waugh.

Socialist Party Meetings: Clapham, Chiswick & Norwich:

Voice From The Back

End of a dream; How about socialism?; Capitalism is gangsterism; The new gangsters

'Before it gets shoved under the bed next to the boworker . . . '

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:08:00 +0000

As closing lines to articles goes, you'd have to go some to top the closing line to last month's Pathfinders column in the Socialist Standard

Capitalists think they can save money by forcing puritanical self-denial on workers, but with the stress of exploitation we face, we don’t need temperance, we need to lose our tempers. [My emphasis.]

The link to the article is here and, if you start at the top, you get the full benefit of the pay-off line.

Now, where is this month's Socialist Standard

Return of the Secaucus 7 (1979)

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:58:00 +0000

Can you name the top 200 Premier League goalscorers?

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 20:57:00 +0000

Too much hair on your head? Can't afford a haircut?

Take the 'Can you name the top 200 Premier League goalscorers?' quiz and you will have torn out half your hair in a matter of minutes. I spent five minutes hitting the table top whilst trying to remember the name of a current Premiership striker who scores every bastard week.

Oh, and word of forewarning; don't go near the various well know Scandinavian and Dutch forwards of yesteryear unless you have the patience of a saint and the spelling chops of one of those geeks from Spellbound.

I scored 77/200. You can do better.

Hat tip to 'kained and able' on urban 75.

Love it

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 18:52:00 +0000

If Bullard stays fit, Hull stay up. As simple as.

Mixing Footie and Politics (7) Shankly, Socialism and Glasgow Celtic

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 21:59:00 +0000

Just spotted this.

Ian Bone raises that most important of political questions: 'Is there a socialist way of playing football?'

Ian shows his age (and his dress sense) by mentioning the great Hungarian side of the early fifties.

Arguably the greatest International team never to have won the World Cup, they lost the '54 final against West Germany in disputed circumstances, and one of the great ifs of football pub talk is, but for the Soviet tanks rolling into Budapest in '56, how they would have measured up against the Brazil of Pele and Garrincha in Sweden in '58.

Anyway, back to the matter in hand. I show my good taste and access to YouTube clips by pointing you in the direction of the definitive answer to Ian's question.

Bill Shankly describes the great Celtic side of the Jock Stein era:

That wee nugget should be on a T shirt, not this silly bollocks which is currently doing the rounds on the left blogosphere.

"Socialism without the politics." I like that.

Whatever did happen to World in Common?

Hard To Get (1938)

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:58:00 +0000

Injury time

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:54:00 +0000

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 126

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 126th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1563 friends!

Recent blogs:

The illusion of freedom
WSPUS Manifesto on the War, 1917
1789: France’s bourgeois revolution

Coming Events:

Radical Film Forum

Sundays 6pm - 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN.

29th November - Sicko

13th December - Earthlings

Quote for the week:

"Scientific socialism considers our views dependent upon our material needs, and our political standpoint dependent upon the economic position of the class we belong to. Moreover, this conception corresponds with the aspirations of the masses whose needs are in the first place material, while the ruling class must necessarily base itself on the deductive principle, on the preconceived unscientific notion that the spiritual salvation and the mental training of the masses are to precede the solution of the social question." Joseph Dietzgen, Scientific Socialism, 1873.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Word of the day

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:02:00 +0000

Mauger

prep. 1. In spite of; in opposition to; notwithstanding.

A man must needs love maugre his heed. - Chaucer.

This mauger all the world will I keep safe. - Shak.

So, mauger Darren not even knowing that the word mauger previously existed, he just scored 42 points with it on Lexulous.

Does that make sense?

Apologies for referring to myself in the third person. Darren won't do it again.

Blame it on Fidel! (2006)

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:04:00 +0000

Strip Pain-T

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:41:00 +0000

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 125

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 125th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1551 friends!

Recent blogs:

Capitalism or Socialism?
A Man Before His Time - Gerrard Winstanley
The Myth of Soviet “Socialism”

Quote for the week:

"Money is a new form of slavery, which differs from the old form of slavery only in its impersonality, its annihilation of all humane relations with the slave." Leo Tolstoy, What to do?, 1887.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Meano Keano has a Beano

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:56:00 +0000

Like the rest of us, he can't remember the last time Ipswich won two games in a row, but some things Roy Keane never forgets.

In Roy's mansion, FAI stands for 'Feckin' Arrogant Ingrates'.

Missing the revolution for the football

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:41:00 +0000

. . . but in fact this is my favourite football quote (quote? OK, maybe more anecdote) of the day:

At a meeting in Manchester in around 1970, I hears the following exchange:
Speaker: "The bourgeoisie needs football. Football is part of the way they control the working class. It's virtually the only thing preventing a revolution. If they got rid of football there'd be a revolution in Britain."
Heckler: "Yeah... three o'clock next Saturday!"

Anecdote by 'jgw' in the comments box of Luna 17 blog.

Hurly Burley

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:14:00 +0000

This should have been my football quote of the day (or even yesterday:

"I don't think what he wanted to do got across to some players and also I think some of them are too thick to take it on board – and not good enough to take it on board, anyway, to be perfectly honest with you . . . " [Craig Burley commenting on the sacking of his uncle, George Burley, as manager of Scotland.]

Nice to see that even after retirement, Craig is still tenacious in the tackle.

Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987)

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:59:00 +0000

Down in the tube station at 18:48

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:27:00 +0000

Just spotted this intriguing picture of Engels plastered* across a London Underground tube train advertising panel over at Solomon's Mindfield blog.

No, it's not Workers Power trying to do Banksy but part of London Underground's most recent 'Art On The Underground' campaign. (See the Mayor of London blurb in the bottom left hand of the picture? Boris will be pleased.)

I say 'recent' but it dates from June and July of this year. What can I say? I came late to the Party.

By way of an apology, please follow the link which will explain that the poster (and quote) is part of an art project devised by Jeremy Deller, which is entitled 'What is the city but the people?'

To quote the bloke Deller himself:

' . . . I came up with the idea to give [London Underground] staff a collection of quotes and the idea grew from there. I often wish announcements were more personal and reflected the realities and absurdities of living and working in a big city. I think the travelling public enjoys some humour and unexpected insight during their journey.'

As well as the Engels' quote in his project, Deller also includes quotes from Ghandi, Napoleon, Sartre and Goethe amongst others. The idea behind the project was that from time to time, London Underground drivers (and others) would insert quotes from the great and the good in amongst the usual pronouncements of 'Mind the Doors'; 'Next stop Russell Square' & 'I used to be someone, you fuckers'.**

It's been a while since I've travelled on the Underground in London but if their tannoy system is anything like the mumbled, garbled and strangulated announcements of drivers and others on the NYC Subway system, then they could have been reading from the collected editorials of Daniel De Leon all this time and I'd have been none the wiser.

More on the project (and the public's response to it) from the LA Times; Open Magazine; and that natural institution, Arthur Smith.

Before I forget: that particular quote from Engels? I understand that the original plan was to place it as it as massive poster in the Clapham North tube station, but the Executive Committee of the SPGB had a word. No need to take the piss, is there? we're just working up to our second wind.

Footnotes

* 'plastered' - Insert your Marx and Engels boozing it up on Tottenham Court Road joke here.

**'I used to be someone, you fuckers'. - Allegedly said by a tired and emotional Jah Wooble over a London Underground tannoy system sometime in the mid-eighties whilst he was working for said organisation.

Obama - Whose President?

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:20:00 +0000

Latest post to the World Socialist Party of the United States website:

Obama - Whose President?

Tricots for goalposts

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:42:00 +0000

Diplomatic incident between the Republics of France and Ireland over the small matter of Sarkozy and last night's World Cup play-off game in Dublin.

Hat tip to a Urban 75er.

Radical Film Forum - 'Matewan'

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 11:35:00 +0000

Matewan

Sunday 15th November at 6pm 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 (nearest tube: Clapham North)

John Sayles's 1987 classic drama ". . . illustrating the events of a coal mine-workers' strike and attempt to unionize in 1920 in Matewan, a small town in the hills of West Virginia."

From John Sayles's book, 'Thinking in Pictures: the making of the movie Matewan (1987)

Why Matewan?
There's no place in America like the hills of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. There'll be a river, usually fast running and not too wide, and on the flatland along its banks a railroad track and maybe a little town, only two or three streets deep before the land starts rising up steep all around you. You've got to look straight up to see the sky and often there's a soft mist shrouding the holler. The hills hug around you - stay inside of them for a while and a flat horizon seems cold and unwelcoming. It's always been a hard life there, with not enough bottomland to farm and no easy way to get manufactured goods in or out of the area. The cash crops had to be torn out from the ground, first timber and then coal. It's a land that doesn't yield anything easily.
In the late sixties I hitchhiked through the area several times and most of the people who gave me rides were coal miners or people with mining in their families. They spoke with a mixture of pride and resignation about the mining - resignation about how dark and dirty and cold and wet and dangerous it was and pride that they were the people to do it, to do it well. The United Mine Workers were going through heavy times then. Their president, Tony Boyle, was accused of having his election opponent, Jock Yablonski, murdered. The coal companies and most of the political machinery that fed on them and even the UAW hierarchy denied even the existence of black lung disease and refused any compensation for it. All this was added to the usual mine accidents and disasters and wild fluctuations in coal prices. But every miner I talked to would shake his head and say, "Buddy, this ain't nothin compared to what used to go on. I could tell you some stories." The stories would be about their grandfathers and uncles and fathers and mothers, and the older men would tell their own stories from when they were young. The stories had a lot of Old West to them, only set in those embracing hills and coffinlike seams of three-foot coal. It was a whole hunk of our history I'd never heard of, that a lot of people had never heard of.
In 1977 I wrote a novel called Union Dues that begins in West Virginia coal country and moves to Boston. Before I wrote it I did a lot of reading in labor history, especially about the coal fields, and that was when I came across the story of the Matewan Massacre. In a book about the Hatfield and McCoy feud in Mingo County, there was a mention of a distant cousin of the Hatfields named Sid, chief of police of the town of Matewan, who was involved in a bloody shoot-out in 1920, during the mine wars of the era. It got me interested, but accounts of the incident were few and highly prejudiced. The rhetoric of both the company-controlled newspapers of the day and their counterparts on the political left was rich in lurid metaphor but short on eyewitness testimony. But a few characters stuck in my head - Sid Hatfield; the mayor, Cabell Testerman, who wouldn't be bought at a time when the coal companies routinely paid the salaries of public officials and expected their strike breakers to be deputized and aided in busting the union; a man known only as Few Clothes, a giant black miner who joined the strikers and was rumored to have fought in the Spanish-American War; and C.E. Lively, a company spy so skilled he was once elected president of a UMW local. Aspects and details of other union showdowns in the area also began to accumulate - and transportations of blacks from Alabama and European immigrants just off the boat to scab against the strikers; the life of the coal camp and company store; the feudal system of mine guards and "Baldwin thugs" that enforced the near slavery the miners and their families lived in. All the elements and principles involved seemed basic to the idea of what America has become and what it should be. Individualism versus collectivism, the personal and political legacy of racism, the immigrant dream and the reality that greeted it, monopoly capitalism, at its most extreme versus American populism at its most violent, plus a lawman with two guns strapped on walking to the centre of town to face a bunch of armed enforcers - what more could you ask for in a story? And yet it was a story unknown to most Americans, untold on film but for a silent short financed by the UMW in the aftermath of the massacre. The movie was called Smilin' Sid and the only known print was stolen by coal company agents and never seen again.
Though there were familiar Western elements to the story, it had a unique character because of its setting. The hills of West Virginia, the people and the music have a mood and rhythm to them that need to be seen and heard to be felt completely. There is a cyclical sense of time there, a feeling of inescapable fate that in the story resists the optimism and progressive collectivism of the 1920s workers' movement. Politics are always at the mercy of human nature and custom, and the coal wars of the twenties were so personal that they make ideology accessible in a story, make it immediate and emotional. It was this emotional immediacy that made me think of making a movie about the events in Matewan.
If storytelling has a positive function it's to put us in touch with other people's lives, to help us connect and draw strength or knowledge from people we'll never meet, to help us see beyond our own experience. The people I read about in the history books and people I met in the hills of Kentucky and West Virginia had important stories to tell and I wanted to find a way to pass them on.

Wales 3 Scotland 0

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:11:00 +0000

What a thing to wake up to on a wet Saturday morning.

It gets worse:

"Scotland have not beaten Wales since 1984 and that did not look like altering here as the Scots suffered their fourth successive away defeat - and their fourth road trip on the trot where they have not scored." [BBC Report]

25 years since beating Wales? Frankie were number 1 in the charts with Relax, for christ sake.

What makes it even more depressing is that when you dig out the stats for that Scotland win way back in February 1984, the scorers that day were Davie Cooper and Mo Johnston in a 2-1 win. To have that sort of quality in the team today.

I'm away out to drown my sorrows in a Chinese.

Industrial Worker interviews Noam Chomsky

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 12:23:00 +0000

Spotted over at Mind Glow blog:

The editor of the Industrial Worker, Diane Krauthamer, spoke to Noam Chomsky at his MIT office in Cambridge, MA, on October 9th, 2009.
The Industrial Worker is the official newspaper of the IWW (the Industrial Workers of the World), a radical union.

For more info, please visit: The IWW official website

http://www.iww.org

The interview is in 4 parts on YouTube:

Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRlbLETWLwo

Part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y673_j2x_g

Part 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttqwp30lKCc

Part 4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67k4EgRT-ak

A word of warning; I found the sound in the videos a bit spotty but that may just be me. An interesting enough interview with Chomsky discussing the revival of sit down strikes, his father's 'membership' of the IWW and the rise of the populist right, amongst other things.

Hat tip to Jason for the links.

A novel approach to politics

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 06:43:00 +0000

Back to the Socialist Standard.

There are long term plans to digitise every issue of the Socialist Standard going back to September 1904, in order that they can be made available online for anyone and everyone to read but, in the meantime, the work of posting articles of interest from old Socialist Standards falls on the shoulders of a few members who do the work off their own bat.

So, therefore, kudos to my old Central London Branch mucker Rob S for recently posting on the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog three old articles from the Socialist Standard on novelists and thinkers who have been of interest to socialists going back several decades:

From the March 1971 issue of the Standard, Robert Barltrop's review of the (then) recently published paperback version of the four volumed collected essays, journalism and letters of George Orwell: Coming up for Orwell
From the May 1987 issue of the Standard, Carl Pinel's Leo Tolstoy: author and anarchist
And from the November 1973 Standard, Paul Bennett's Camus: Portrait of a 'Rebel'

It'll come as no surprise to seasoned SPGB watchers that of three authors under discussion, Tolstoy comes out best from the three review essays. (Though with obvious qualification.)

To be honest, despite being a long term fan of Barltrop as a writer, I'm rather disappointed by the tone of his article on Orwell. A bit too sniffy and vinegary for my liking. Maybe, as someone who had just returned to the SPGB after ten years of other political activity, he was playing to a particular gallery a bit.

I much prefer both Brian Rubin's article on Orwell from the December 1983 Socialist Standard and (I believe) Les Dale's article on the Political Ideas of Orwell from the October 1986 issue of the Standard.

Of course Orwell knew about the SPGB. As an avowed anti-Stalinist writer and journalist in London in the 30s and 40s how could he have not crossed paths with the SPGB? There is the mention in passing to the SPGB in the aforementioned Collected Essays but it's also the case that I remember from a few years back a comrade mentioning that when he looked at Orwell's collected papers for research purposes in London they contained a number of SPGB pamphlets, with scribblings in the margins.

I wish now that I'd asked him what Party pamphlets were in Orwell's collected papers and what were those damn scribbles.

You Left Me Seering Stars

noreply@blogger.com (Darren) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:19:00 +0000

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 124

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 124th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1547 friends!

Recent blogs:

Out of control
Conspiraloons
Free is cheaper

Quote for the week:

"Irrespective of the uniforms we wore, we were all victims." Harry Patch, WWI Veteran.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain