As for uncritical support for
As for uncritical support for the Occupy Movement , please share your criticism of it and don’t be reticient about revealing them. Otherwise, the silence about any flaws or faults is effectively uncritical support. In the past i have been very vocal in criticising certain aspects of the SPGB. If i never challenged those then it would be uncritical support of the Party. Your claim that it has taken the party a hundred years to understand capitalism is wrong. It understood sufficient to demand society changes when it was founded in 1904. But i guess you could make the claim that from the time of the Peasants Revolt , the Diggers , the Chartists , the labouring class has had the required knowledge of the ruling class and the social system they live under to reach an appropriate solution to their exploitation, although by no means the popular concensus solution, as most people were diverted into taking wrong roads. That has been the trouble, the same mistakes , the same errors , made over and over again. The longevity and its unbroken existence of the SPGB has resulted in it being less prone although not immune to this problem of collective short-memory. I think the thing about an organisation such as the SPGB is that it did indeed build up its case over the years through the direct experience of its members and has had repeated confirmation of the validity of its arguments in the practical politics and world events of the working class. Scientifically, a theory is only valid if it can predict and without being too determinist, the SPGB has successfully reached correct conclusions from its principles upon the development of the working class struggles. There is two parts to consciousness….identifying yourself as a class but also recognising the implications of your class position – its consequences. “class in itself” plus”class for itself” You all know the formula. Marx believed as the workers gained more experience of the class struggle and the workings of capitalism, it would become more consciously socialist. It would not require the intervention by people(leaders) or parties(vanguards) outside the working class to bring it about. But workers can never win the class struggle while it is confined simply to militancy. It has to be transformed into a socialist consciousness. It means talking about it, sharing ideas about it – in short educating ourselves and our fellow workers about it. We depend for the success of our message on people who are prepared to THINK. We cannot do what in Lenin’s day the Bolsheviks would have done, that is to seize power by a minority, and then lead the sheep into the promised land Yet that socialist consciousness cannot be achieved solely by ideological persuasion and propaganda. It has to link up with the practical struggle. That is the dilemma. The SPGB role is a limited one. When conditions are ripe the working class will acquire their power of self-determination. I do not believe anybody knows how this revolutionary consciousness is going to arise. Socialism is established by the working class understanding and wanting socialism and its establishment will result from an intensification of the class struggle. What is it that is going to provoke the working class into escalating the class struggle and acquiring socialist consciousness i have the honesty of confessing i have no idea. But does that stop me from cautioning against proven wrong tactics and answers. If socialism arises mechanistically solely out of the struggle – the movement – then indeed we should all be Leninists and Trotskyists. But it doesn’t . It is also an idea that is created by discussion and argument , by engaging people in the concept of what socialism is and that political case is based upon the understanding we possess of capitalism’s operation and contradictions. We have to explain capitalism to explain socialism. The exact same task as the Occupy Movement has to propagandise and popularise when it decides upon its own actions, such as exposing tax evasion. The difference is that we disagree with those Occupy analyses and we shouldn’t be reluctant in challenging them. If they refuse to debate an issue and treat any criticism as undermining – that is their failing, a flaw in the movement that has to be rectified. “A period of revolution begins not because life has become physically impossible but because growing numbers of workers have their eyes suddenly opened to the fact that problems hitherto accepted as part of man’s unavoidable heritage has become capable of solution…No crisis of capitalism , however desperate it may be , can ever by itself give us socialism ” – Will Capitalism Collapse ? Bertell Ollman had this to say”Progress from the workers’ conditions to class consciousness involves not one but many steps, each of which constitutes a real problem of achievement for some section of the working class. First, workers must recognize that they have interests. Second, they must be able to see their interests as individuals in their interests as members of a class. Third, they must be able to distinguish what Marx considers their main interests as workers from other less important economic interests. Fourth, they must believe that their class interests come prior to their interests as members of a particular nation, religion, race, etc. Fifth, they must truly hate their capitalist exploiters. Sixth, they must have an idea, however vague, that their situation could be qualitatively improved. Seventh, they must believe that they themselves, through some means or other, can help bring about this improvement. Eighth, they must believe that Marx’s strategy, or that advocated by Marxist leaders, offers the best means for achieving their aims. And, ninth, having arrived at all the foregoing, they must not be afraid to act when the time comes…What we find then is that most workers have climbed a few of these steps (enough to complain), that some have scaled most of them (enough to vote for working-class candidates), but that relatively few have managed to ascend to the top.” The Party may not be the possessors of the Holy Grail, but we do hold valuable insights from the past. Thus we canmore readily facilitate the understanding of other workers. That is all we can realistically do. How effective we have been , no-one will make claims of success but what we can do differently for a greater influence in the future is up for debate. There should not be an either/or approach but a varied mix.