Reply to a Sanders supporter. The same goes for Corbyn.
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I like Sanders, very much, and believe he is a sincere and honourable man.
However, once a sincere person is elected to office in any government anywhere, they become the captive of capitalism, compelled by the system to represent the interests of the ruling class of the nation state, whichever nation state it happens to be.
The Left, the Right, and the Centre are all parties of capitalism, which they think they can run in their respective ways. But capitalism cannot be controlled, only abolished. It cannot be run in the interests of the exploited, being itself the reason for their exploitation.
Left failure leads to Right resurgence and Right or centrist failure to Left resurgence, and then the same cycle over and over. Anyone trying to control capitalism will always fail, because it is the economic basis of society which needs to be overhauled. What is needed is the abolition of wage-labour and capital.
You will respond, “surely, a little is better than nothing?” Except it will always result in nothing, because exploitation can never serve the exploited.
By calling for the “bettering” of the system, reformism has served to postpone world socialist revolution indefinitely, and no number of reformist short-cuts will ever lead to socialism.
The fact that there is no impetus toward socialist revolution currently evident is not to be met by therefore pursuing reformist dead-ends.
There is the World Socialist Movement –http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb – with a Party in the USA, the WSPUS , in Britain, India and Canada. The membership is minute, it is true, but there is no alternative to world socialism if the Earth is to have a future.
Certainly not Left Capitalism!Sanders defines his “socialism”.
As been said on the forum many times, Sanders admits what he means by socialism is still basically mostly FDR New Deal with little bits of Truman, JFK, LBJ and MLK mixed in.
I went to a meeting last week at which the speaker quoted from a Labour Party document in which the word “socialism” was defined. The document (a discussion not a policy one) entitled Alternative Models of Ownership advocated workers cooperatives and municipal ownership. The passage reads:
“What we have presented, as an alternative, amounts to the first steps in challenging that dominant model of ownership and control. We have shown, in simple, practical terms, how a government committed to addressing those profound, structural problems could implement key policies that would rectify them. Its goal would be nothing other than the creation of an economy which is fairer, more democratic, and more sustainable; that would overturn the hierarchies of power in our economy, placing those who create the real wealth in charge; that would end decades of under-investment and wasted potential by tearing down the vested interests that hold this country back
The historic name for that society is socialism, and this is Labour’s goal.“ (emphasis added).
Actually, state-subsidised producer cooperatives is what Ferdinand Lassalle advocated in Germany in the 19th century and which Marx criticised in part III of his Critique of the Gotha Programme. So the Tories who are denouncing Corbyn and McDonnell as “Marxists” have got it wrong. They should be calling them “Lassalleans”. Not sure, though, that this would have any contemporary resonance.
Even so, whatever reformism Corbyn espouses, I don’t believe he would last as PM. Labour voters would end up seeing him ousted after election and replaced with a more amenable (to the capitalists) Labour leader.
In my locality there are very few Labour voters that I know of. Those I know are voting Tory in a general election rather than vote for Corbyn. I think too that the next election will see the Conservatives win, in spite of what is being portrayed as the Brexit “debacle.”
Even the very poor and homeless I have listened to support the Tories, and everyone I know here voted Brexit.“…Labour voters would end up seeing him ousted after election and replaced with a more amenable (to the capitalists) Labour leader….”
I think the reality will be that the media will leave voters with no option for I think we can foresee a vicious and constant campaign of de-legitimacy which would make the present anti-Semitism accusations mild indeed. We’ll get a good hint of what is to come in any election campaign.
This is assuming that there will be a Labour majority in the House of Commons. I would have thought that it is much more likely that Labour will emerge as the party with the largest number of MPs but without a majority and so will have to govern with the support of the Liberals and/or the Scots Nats. In which case these could make their support conditional on some other Labour politician being prime minister. That would allow Corbyn to retire from front line politics gracefully and tend to his allotment. In any event, it would provide the Labour Party with an alibi for not carrying out their policies or for why they didn’t work.
Yep. And I think the Labour Party will oust him as leader anyway.
The document (a discussion not a policy one) entitled Alternative Models of Ownership advocated workers cooperatives and municipal ownership.
Interesting and comprehensive document though.
Matt, you may be interested to know that i’m in the middle of doing a draft pamphlet on co-operatives which I hope will offer our own much needed comprehensive response to co-ops which has always been a popular topic of the Left. (As disclosure, I’ve used the co-operative for three funerals)
I wasn’t going to include “municipal socialism” which was once popular and was called “sewer socialism” in America as it began with demands for cities to install sanitation systems but now it is mentioned here, i’ll have to include a paragraph or few on it in relation to Richard Wolff who espouses what ALB describes as Lassalleanism. Maybe i’ll add a line or two on GDH Cole’s guild socialism as my old union already being part of the state required an alternative to nationalization and endorsed it but the Whitley system stole its thunder.
To qualify as a “Lassallean” Wolff would have to advocate state aided producer coops. I don’t suppose he’d be opposed to this but does he actually advocate it? If he’s just advocating the formation of producer coops to (somehow)outcompete traditional capitalist firms then he’d be a “Proudhonist” ! Or maybe he’s just an “Owenite”. In any event, he’s not a Marxist. Trust you’ll be tearing him to pieces in a whole chapter not just a paragraph or few.
Richard Wolff is not a Marxist, he is a Owenian because Karl Marx never advocated for the creation of Coops or communes, Proudhon was not the father of anarchism either as it has been propagated, he was a proposer of land reform like the American economist Henry George. Lasalle was one of the original founders of the vanguard party concept, most Leninists are Lassalleans, but the concept originally came from the French Jacobins
Wolff has indeed suggested this, ALB, but I would have to search out the sources. (one little annoying thing is he often makes use of video lectures without transcripts on websites such as Truthdig)
It is one of my online criticisms whenever his articles appear (and I have also done so on the blog) that he proposes that the State fosters his WSDEs, ignoring his Marxist ABC that the State is not a neutral body but the tool of the capitalist class i.e. its executive committee. So he expects the “conventional” capitalist class to provide the rope to hang themselves rather than expect it to strangle any movement towards workers participation/control of production when it becomes perceived as a threat to their class interests.
I usually suggest in these comments that for the State to do the turnaround as Wolff requires it to do in promoting WSDEs, it would mean a popular political revolution for State power and if that was possible why stop half-way and not go the whole hog to socialism proper. Why urge taking people up to the top of the hill and then all the way back down again like some grand old duke of York.
Wolff’s pet hobby-horse Mondragon could not have got off the ground except by being under the combined umbrella of the very conservative Spanish Catholic Church and Franco’s fascist government in the separatist Basque region – a strange origin that liberals and progressive seem to neglect to mention since it raises a core question – what was their motive if Mondragon is supposed to be pro-worker and anti-capitalist?
Karl Marx never advocated to build a socialist-communist society within a capitalist society, it is like a hybrid attached to capitalism, or a graft or capitalism, or parallel society running along side with capitalism, it must be a post capitalist society. This is the type of society that all these reformers and confusers are proposing. Many years ago, I learned a good lesson from Adam Buick in regard to Feuerbach, when he told me that we can not make any true analysis from second hand sources, we must study the original source, and he was totally correct
To understand Marx and Engels, we must study the original sources, we must study their body of ideas, and how their ideas evolved thru their time, because many of heir ideas changed according to the development of capitalism, it is like departing from the experiences of the Soviet Union, wherever departs from the Soviet Union experiences and its leaders, will always make wrong conclusions. It is like the blind guiding the blinds
All these so called socialists which are showing on the political scenarios they are not socialists, they are just social democrats, and to understand the origin and history of the Social Democracy we must study its history and its original sources including the critique made by Marx to the Gotham program.
The best sources of original information that we have in the whole world, I repeat again: In the whole world, ( Europe, Asia, Africa, Middle East also known as a North Africa, Australia, The Americas, which include the Caribbean, etc ) it is the Socialist Party of Great Britain and the World Socialist Movement. Bernie Sanders, Ocasio Cortes, the DSA, and others, they are not a threat to capital, they are its beauty parlor, we do not need a new deal, we need a new society
Richard Wolff is just another Leninist of others stripes, it is like the ICC which denies that they are Leninists or Trotskyists, but they support all the principles propagated by the so called “Marxist-Leninists”. There is not any ruling class which will shoot to itself, the ruling class is not going to give up their surplus in order to please the workers. In Argentina several industries were taken over by the workers, and they had to run them as corporate enterprises, and when they started to produce profits the state passed several laws to take them away from the workers. In Bolivia coops and communes are also run like corporate enterprises. The Caribbean islands they had coops run by the workers unions and they also had their own supermarkets for the workers, and all of them were taken over by the banking. system.
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