Devon Socialist Party

Demonstrating their extraordinary committment to evidence-based policy, New Labour's response to the recently published final report of the Cambridge Review of Primary Education was to dismiss it and robotically restate that New Labour policies are working. This despite the damning weight of evidence compiled by 300 academics over three years pointing to the fact that Tory and Labour education policies, have been extremely damaging to Britain's children.

Here are just a few quotes from the press briefing launching the report:

"The report also argues that childhood’s rich potential should be protected from a system apparently bent on pressing children into a uniform mould at an ever-younger age."

 

"the report notes the questionable evidence on which some key educational policies have been based; the disenfranchising of local voice; the rise of unelected and accountable groups taking key decisions behind closed doors; the ‘empty rituals’ of consultation; the authoritarian mindset; and the use of myth and derision to underwrite exaggerated accounts of progress and discredit alternative views."

Since the explosion of Napster in 1999, file sharing has rarely been out of the news. It is usually demonised, yet according tosome estimates around 8 million people in the UK use file sharing networks.

History and Philosophy of the Internet

The Internet was developed in the 1960s by universities and the US military, it consists of networked computers exchanging information over large distances. One of the first uses of it was to send academic papers back and forth over networks for fast peer reviewing of research, so file sharing has always been a part of the Internet. In the 1980s when the home computer became popular, newsgroups became very popular. These forums for discussion were places where anyone could freely discuss and quickly and cheaply spread media quickly to anyone else in the world who was also connected to the Internet.

Devon Socialist Party will be holding a public meeting in Totnes on the 6th of October at Birdwood House on the High Street on the corner of Market Place (see events for details). All are welcome and as the name suggests we will be giving a view of the environment from a Socialist perspective. There has recently been an article on this on the national site and newspaper which you can access by clicking here.

It is often put forward as an objection to socialism that while it is a good idea, it will never happen because of 'human nature'.  Supposedly, humans are naturally greedy, selfish and so couldn't possibly form a society based on cooperation and mutual benefit.  The topic of the discussion in this branch meeting was 'human nature', introduced by SH.  In a lively debate, the points were raised that there doesn't exist a single, fixed human nature, but that human nature is remarkable in that it is remarkably flexible and responsive to influences from the social and cultural environment.  The idea that human nature is one which is fixed, and also biologically determined, is one that is commonplace in capitalist society, providing a useful justification for the continuing of capitalism and class society, as well as providing the rationale for the State, and a strictly limited representative 'democracy'.

The irony that capitalism causes the very behaviours of greed and selfishness in individuals, and yet these characteristics are used to stress the inevitabilty of the status quo, and that nothing better can be won, was not lost on those in the branch meeting.