‘Humanity at the Crossroads: A Political and Humanist Dialogue’, by Raymond Garbet. Newton Books. Edinburgh, 2015. 260 pages.
This is a self-published book by a long-term member of the old Communist Party of Great Britain who is now a member of the pro-independence Scottish Green Party and so shares the illusion that an independent Scottish government would be able to buck the economic laws of capitalism and put people before profits.
He is also a member of the Humanists (hence the book’s sub-title). As such he rejects religion (which he defines as any belief in the exist of a ‘soul’) but doesn’t call himself an atheist because that is saying what you are against not what you are for, preferring ‘Secular Humanist’; which is fair enough. Basically, he sees the way forward for humanity as the UN taking action to deal with climate change, world poverty and human rights abuses; a worthy internationalist perspective but another illusion to expect that collection of capitalist states to do anything about any of these.
If you buy the book you get a Trotskyist pamphlet thrown in free as he has a 20-page interview with Colin Fox, ex-MSP and leading member of the Scottish Socialist Party (which Garbet annoyingly refers to as the Socialist Party) and representative within it of the old Militant Tendency. The trouble is that it is outdated as Fox puts his group’s pre-Corbyn line that the Labour Party is finished and so for the need for a new union-based workers party, stressing ‘the enormous obstacles that exist in reclaiming the Labour Party as Jeremy Corbyn has been attempting for years.’ But, to be honest, we didn’t see it coming either, not that it makes any fundamental difference. That Fox is no socialist is summed up in his last word: ‘we want to create a society where everyone receives a decent wage.’
Adam Buick
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