ethical-capitalism : Message: Ethical socialism, ethical capitalism or apocalypse!

The current edition of the Weekly Worker (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/745/index.html) is a hoot!

The final paragraph of Dave Vincent's article "PCS opts for talks", consisting simply of "I despair", sums up the state of Marxism in Britain and internationally. Elsewhere in the same issue, Peter Manson's article "Expensive absurdity" reports on the 80-90 strong conference of Left Alternative, the Socialist Workers Party's (SWP's) new "electoral front that does not contest elections". Considering that the SWP has long been the largest Marxist organisation in England, its troubles during a massive crisis of capitalism are remarkable!

James Turley, in the article "Obamania and the left", says "by mid-2007, it was abundantly clear that the Nader movement had all but wilted. So where had these people gone? To the Barack Obama campaign, of course: the electrifying orator and prophet of 'hope', 'change' and a host of other vagaries had poached this grassroots constituency with impunity." Rather than celebrating Obama's victory, and pointing out the correctness of Ralph Nader's former supporters in shifting the Democrats to the left, and they are way to the left of New Labour in Britain as a cursory look at www.barackobama.com would reveal, Turley moans about the Democrats being a capitalist party. Surely, as Ted North reports on "progressive, Keynesian [Gordon] Brown" in "Brown’s recovery and the global downturn", with Labour easily winning the Glenrothes by-election and "the Scotish Socialist Party winning 212 and Solidarity a disastrous 87 votes", part of the solution to achieving socialism in Britain too is participating in a capitalist party!

So what does the CPGB (Communist Party of Great Britain, publishers of the Weekly Worker) recommend as a solution? Well, they have been plugging away with their pet project of a unified 'Marxist Party', with such monumental success that their guru John Bridge (alias Jack Conrad) cheerfully reports, in "Future course to be voted on", that (under their leadership) "the national committee [of the Campaign for a Marxist Party] unanimously agreed to put a motion to the December 6 AGM to close down the organisation" and instead "establish a committee in 2009 with the aim of promoting the study of Marxism and the unity of Marxists as Marxists"!

Surely it's time to face facts - Marxism, as a force capable of challenging for power, in Western countries anyway, is dead!

But what about the unethical capitalism of George W Bush? Surely the Obama victory marks the point at which it is mortally wounded too! Obama's recent remarks about closing Guantanamo Bay are an indication that this era is coming to an end. Granted, Obama's programme is not as revolutionary as I proposed in my Ethical Capitalism Network (www.ethicalcapitalism.net), but the struggle between the more ethical and less ethical capitalists has surely been won!

But the socialist left in Britain is not dead! The Convention of the Left at the time of the Labour Party conference in Manchester in September brought together many hundreds of left-wingers inside and outside that party to discuss the way forward. That unity is not over - local meetings (including in Manchester) are taking place and there is a recall conference, now postponed to Saturday the 24th of January (also in Manchester - see www.conventionoftheleft.org), which will hopefully set up some sort of anti-capitalist network. [Incidentally, an SWP member (Ian Allinson) suggested this when I raised the issue at a South East Manchester SWP meeting.] In the current economic climate, a charter of reformist demands (like the SWP's People Before Profit Charter) or even transitional demands (like those of the Socialist Party) is inadequate. We need to point out the need to replace the entire capitalist system, even if we don't use the word "revolution".

I now recognise that the idea of hierarchies of committees based on workplaces, as proposed by Marxists, should be part of an ethical socialist society - as long as there are also committees based on local communities and the government is elected by proportional representation (preferably by single transferable vote). I now recommend a fusion of my ideas and those of Marxists and anarchists. I'd strongly welcome a democratic revolutionary socialist party based on such a fusion, but a looser and broader anti-capitalist network (perhaps called the Anti-Capitalist Network) appears to me preferable in Britain at present.

So what will those nasty unethical capitalists do when they see their power and wealth slipping away (due to a looming victory of ethical capitalism or socialism). Well, we should be prepared for them to try to bring about some sort of apocalypse. As I sang in my song "99 Blue Balloons" (see http://www.socialiststeve.me.uk/poetry.htm), when there is "nothing left but suicide" they could allow a terrorist attack on a nuclear power station (like 9/11 was an inside job - watch the BBC "Conspiracy Files" programme on the third tower, that collapsed despite not being hit by a plane, at http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=9072062020229593250 or read my review of it at http://www.socialiststeve.me.uk/conspiracy-files.htm).

An alternative apocalypse could come about via artificial bacteria being released to target people with certain genetic characteristics (a sort of racial war but it could be based on genetic characteristics other than race like the colour of people's eyes). This may sound like science fiction, but J Craig Venter's institute in the USA has proposed precisely this, supposedly to stop global warming, and they first decoded the human genome mainly using Venter's DNA. I now see my most important task being to do more work on my artificial intelligence/simulation language SDML (I've almost finished making databases much faster) and working in the field of bioinformatics to prevent such an apocalypse. In the meantime, you can download and try out SDML, which is available as open source Smalltalk code (as I publicised in a message I sent several days ago at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PRsocialism/message/134).

--
Steve Wallis (Manchester, England)
Preferred email address: revolutionarysocialiststeve@...
Blogs: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/steve-wallis-socialist-blog,
http://blog.myspace.com/galaxiasteve
My socialist website: http://www.socialiststeve.me.uk
My pages at Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1038291480, MySpace:http://www.myspace.com/galaxiasteve and Bebo:
http://www.bebo.com/SteveW519
Founder, Ethical Capitalism Network: http://www.ethicalcapitalism.net
Founder, Foundation for Proportional Representation-based Socialism: http://www.PRsocialism.org
Founder, Revolutionary Platform Network: http://www.revolutionaryplatform.net
My revolutionary socialist band, Galaxia: http://www.galaxiamusic.net,http://www.myspace.com/galaxiamusic, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Galaxia-a-revolutionary-socialist-band/84310120180, http://www.bebo.com/galaxiamusic.
My socialist band, Red Day: http://www.red-day.net, http://www.myspace.com/reddayband,http://www.facebook.com/pages/Red-Day/27468311341
Author, "Revolution Destroyed? Have I ensured that a world socialist revolution will never happen?":http://www.revolutiondestroyed.net
For discussion of the credit crunch, go to
http://www.revolutionaryplatform.net/forum/index.php?board=156
For discussion of 9/11 conspiracy theories, go to http://www.revolutionaryplatform.net/forum/index.php?board=89

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