alanjjohnstone
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Further evidence of the race to the bottom. Lower food standards
Israel who’s roll-out has been the most effective now warns that that the single dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine may be providing less protection than originally believed.
While the first dose can take several weeks to promote an effective antibody response, the second dose can trigger different responses, supercharging the protection. Pfizer itself says a single dose of its vaccine is about 52% effective.
Some countries such as the UK have delayed administering their second doses to try to maximise the number of people given a first dose.
The issue of the very apparent failure to achieve socialism is very much on the minds of ourselves. The consequence is mentioned by Marx in the Manifesto – the common ruin of the contending classes, made more stark by Engels and Luxemburg “socialism or barbarism”, which was later made more ominious Istvan Meszaros by who added “…barbarism if we are lucky”
The question of how workers will acquire the appropriate consciousness is the Holy Grail and various theories have been put forward. None of the explanations have been satisfactory because the prove of the pudding is in the eating and we are still striving for it. Many eggs have been broken to make the omelette, but we are still to taste that omelette. We are entitled to ask where is it?
We in the WSM has had the easier task – explaining why socialism has not come about, particularly in those countries you cite as having made a certain amount of social progress – but they had an exceedingly low bar.
I think i can say that our membership have comradely disagreements in opinion over two models of revolution:
(a) the snowball theory, that once a certain stage has been reached, socialist consciousness will grow at an exponential rate and a majority will be reached in a relatively short time, and
(b) the avalanche theory, that once that certain stage has been reached mass socialist consciousness will come suddenly.Both these views reject the view that the growth of socialist consciousness will be a simple 1+1+1 progression as individual workers are “converted” one by one, which is attributed to us.
Marx expected the working class to develop from a mere economic category (a “class in itself” ) into a revolutionary political actor (“class for itself”) — but although the process started it did get stuck on route. A “class consciousness” did develop among particular sections of the working class but this did not develop into a revolutionary socialist consciousness. It stopped short at trade-unionism and labourism. Even if a working class “for itself” has never developed, a class consciousness of a lesser sort did. Marx believed that, as the workers gained more experience of the class struggle and the workings of capitalism, it would become more consciously socialist and democratically organised by the workers themselves. The emergence of socialist understanding out of the experience of the workers could thus be said to be ‘spontaneous’ in the sense that it would require no intervention by people outside the working class to bring it about. Socialist propaganda and agitation would indeed be necessary, but would come to be carried out by workers themselves, whose socialist ideas would have been derived from an interpretation of their class experience of capitalism. The end result would be an independent movement of the socialist-minded and democratically organised working class aimed at winning control of political power in order to abolish capitalism. As Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto, “The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.”
I may differ on the emphasis of my fellow-members and i touched upon it in an earlier post. It is very probable that people develop into socialists through their involvements in all kinds of areas of the class struggle, ranging from strikes to anti-racist or anti-sexist groups to the environmentalist movements. We need to be aware that workers are doing things which, often unknowingly, are contributing to the evolution of class consciousness.
In our critique of vanguardism and Leninism we mean something very specific which is to oppose surrendering power to an individual or group to change society on our behalf. We are not promoting the idea that there will not be better orators or write more lucidly than others. Teachers and authors aren’t necessarily leaders.
The WSM see ourselves merely as an instrument of the working class. We do not seek to substitute ourselves for the class but we try to function to help generalise our fellow-workers experience of the class struggle, to make a total critique of their condition and of its causes, and to develop the mass revolutionary consciousness necessary if society is to be totally transformed. We reject an organisational role. What we want people to come to is the realisation that they should take over their workplaces, communities, and put themselves in a position to control all of the decisions that affect them directly, and to run things themselves.
Whether it is the right approach or not, whether it will succeed or not, who can say, for those who offered better methods and easier ways have also failed to accomplish anything. All we can, in our own defence, claim, is our policies and actions haven’t damaged our fellow-workers. We haven’t gone ahead and imposed an “answer” upon them that was a wrong one.
could collective ownership not be achieved overall but with local syndicalist decision making?
Then why still call it syndicalism because it wouldn’t be, would it, if economic democracy transcended the work-place?
Many others have advocated different decision-making models and we shouldn’t be excluding those as options. Bookchin’s town-hall assemblies and his municipalism. The workers’ councilists. And across the world there are geographic and cultural applications of communities choosing how they are run in their own particular way. Horses for courses, what is best fitting, will bring diverse variety in how production and distribution will be administered and aresources allocated. I’m not saying there will not be coordination. I’m not suggesting autarky. But isn’t it a bit too early to devise the menus of the cook-shops as Marx once said. (we have seen how information technology has already changed the possiblities. Who knows what will be available in the future?) Best practice will prevail.
it wouldn’t just be simple worker co-operatives fighting against corporations, but a fully syndicalised society.I think the real key here is the economic relationships and not the management structure.
You probably have read by now our approach to a post-capitalist society – the end of the exchange economy, no more buying and selling, socially useful production. If syndics and co-ops retained waged-labour, if they continued what some call self-exploitation, endevoring to divide the surplus value extracted from their own labour to the members of the syndic, then all the problems of capitalism will be replicated. Syndicalism under capitalist conditions of the necessity of creating profit does not preclude various enterprises competing, if not locally but perhaps regionally and wider, and if such a co-op failed what then? Out of work? Or parasitical on other workers as some of the Soviet Union industries were?
We see how the kibbutzim and Mondragon quickly hired non-co-op workers who didn’t share equally in it. Similarly, today in Bolivia, mining co-ops have become employers. The aim is to create a world where “from each according to ability, to each according to need”, and at all costs to avoid any confusion with the Stalinist “to each according to work” corruption of the principle.
I’m sure when we come down to it, your own vision of a syndicalised society won’t be that much different from our aspirations for world socialism. We often take different paths in our political journey and acquire, on the way, certain baggage that we are reluctant to shed, and one is terminology and sometimes a view of workers’ past experience and history.
As a final observation, we have believed it is going to be the class struggle that determines the rise of consciousness and bring about change. Just to put it out there, perhaps there might be other motivations for social revolution. Environmentalism, the rise of migrants and the imposition of controls on mobility, perhaps. We see the pandemic having an influence on how we think. I’m just idly speculating in the passing. But whatever might trigger off sociaty change, the means and methods of how we provide for ourselves is primary.
I also recalled a James Connolly quote which i think is apt when we discuss the power of the general strike which i will papraphrase…workers with empty stomachs are up against employers with full wallets.
The rich can weather a cessation of production far better than the poor. But again it is all down to organisation and as Seattle and Winnipeg showed, and even this pandemic, workers can run essential services without the bosses or the State.
The Dominican Republic is one of four countries in Latin America – along with Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador – where abortion is illegal in all circumstances. Scores of Dominican women die each year from botched attempts to end unwanted pregnancies.
Activists in the Dominican Republic fear their own government is banishing its women to the dark ages by upholding a total ban first implemented in 1884.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/jan/18/dominican-republic-total-abortion-ban
Can i add my view.
Syndicalism as with cooperatives is sectional ownership, not collective ownership by society as a whole. It is particular groups of producers taking possession of their work-place and operating it in their own interests to acquire the fruit of their labour.
We stand for social ownership or as we prefer to term it – common ownership – to differentiate it from state or municipal ownership and control.
As a strategy for campaigning and achieving socialism, for sure work-place organisation and formulating the structures of administrating production will be part of it all. But even the IWW have had to change their Haggerty’s Wheel to include the “non-workers” – ie home-makers, the unemployed, the disabled. We must organise outside the work-place and inside wider communities.
The problem was identified long ago with the slogan, “Railroads to the train-workers, mines to the miners and garbage to the garbage-workers”
In my own industry, it was the only union in the UK to adopt GDH Cole’s guild socialism, as we were already a state-owned and government-directed industry so the other unions calls for nationalisation was seen as it was – no solution to control over the job.
Regard general strikes, we are sympathetic to them as a powerful means of leverage such as the current Indian farmers protests, the city-wide strikes of Seattle and Winnipeg (where members of our companion party, the SPC, were active within). We were supportive of the British solidarity General Strike of 1926 but critical of it conduct.
Our point is that a general strike has limited application and should be aimed at specific labour-problems, not as a tool as revolutionary change. Perhaps it may lead to such consciousness but no guarantee on that.
As for how socialism is built, i don’t think it is useful to declare any means is “solely” the method. It has to be based on circumstances and situations. At present, for those countries where the World Socialist Movement has a presence, the current political process, with flaws and all, is sufficient if not perfctly ideal. Other places have their own local characteristics and there may well be a different approach. We have adopted the slogan of the Chartists from the 19th C. “Peacefully if possible, forcefully if necessary.”
The expected push-back against B’Tselem
Just to give a source of the 50% claim. It is the review of its efficiacy in Brasil
There is a whole variety of stats from other countries on how good it is, it seems.
Just to say, i’m in the camp that socialism will be brought about by a substantial minority taking into account that not everybody will engage in the political process. I suggest that we are aiming at effective political power.
“we use terms such as “majority” and “majoritarian” this is not because we are obsessed with counting the number of individual socialists, but to show that we reject minority action to try to establish socialism – majority as the opposite of minority….a majority (yes, but in the democratic rather than mere mathematical sense)….”
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/aug04/icc.html
As ALB elsewhere at another time reminded us, it should be remembered that when the SPGB was formed, women did not yet possess the vote and many men did not qualify for the vote.
ALB, i thought you said you were going to postpone receiving the vaccine until you were sure it had no unwelcomed side-effects.
No word here about the vaccine roll-out.
But it does seem like the vaccine is the type that will require boosters each year or so. Guaranteed income for the pharmaceutical industry despite the pledge that they will be non-profit…only for this years initial shot.
It seems the Chinese vaccine being sent to the poorer nations works only 50% of cases …that seems a very low figure to me
Although they say it is still effective against the mutations, will it be in the future.
My point wasn’t in reference to the definition of lumpenproletariat.
Regards to members personal attitude towards some fellow-workers, I was once very rightly pulled up by other branch members for using the derogatory word, “schemies”.
In response to Ozy, i was trying to merely indicate that members are neither saints nor angels but fallible individuals with character flaws and faults.
We are political comrades with a common aim and shared strategies to achieve it. Beyond that, personality-wise, we are very diverse individuals – and that is a bonus.
We need not “love” one another but we do require to respect eachother, (and i will be the first to hold my hands up as guilty in the past). And we all need to be civil to other members, particularly on the internet that from experience is not the best medium for irony, sarcasm or other communication that is qualified by accompanying body-language or verbal tone in conversation. Misunderstandings happen as every moderator will tell you.
As i said before, i fear that the back-lash against the Capitol riot may result in a more authoritarian State.
Being leftist website this article concentrates on Republican controlled states but i’m confident the Democrats will also follow the lead.
Republicans Are Using Capitol Breach as Excuse to Promote Anti-Protest Bills
Censorship of the media has always been opposed, even by Marx. So if the internet gives expression to ideas we detest, so be it. By criminalising dissent, it merely drives it underground.
We just have to live with the reality that our own voice is a very small one. And when laws and rules are imposed to suppress free speech, ours will be curtailed whenever the ruling class see fit.
As for equating the Capitol riot with a sign of the rise of nazism or fascism in America, i’m not so sure we can compare them. Under Obama we had the tea-party movement. That was the birth of Trumpism, perhaps. I’m not sure. I arrived at politics when anti-vietnam war protesters were being attacked by working class construction workers and Chicago mayor Daly could less loose his police thugs.
What did Marx say…history first tragedy then repeats itself as farce… I think when we see the Capitol protester garbed in a wolf-skins and buffalo horns suggests the latter.
As insightful as always, ALB.
Another story came on my radar.
Goldman-Sachs
The asset management business, fixed income division, and investment bank – which earns fees for advising clients on deals and corporate fundraising – produced a near doubling of third-quarter profit to $3.6bn. Those divisions have benefited from a recovery in merger and acquisition activity, which stalled at the start of the pandemic, and from US stock markets hitting fresh record highs in the latter half of 2020. It has given Credit Suisse a reason to be bullish on Goldman’s earnings, with that bank’s own analysts recently upgrading profit forecasts to $7.4bn.
I always appreciate Norman Finkelstein’s analysis but i do recall that he previously advocated the Two-State solution since his argument was based upon that it was the only option on the negotiating table and hence must be the jumping-off point. I note he is perhaps shifting his stance if indeed he is.
For ourselves, we have always preferred against the Two-State, One-State, a No-State solution. But the realist in me believes that the One-State answer is as unreachable as our own. B’tselem has no domestic base and Haaretz, the Israeli equivalent to the Guardian, although well respected, has very small circulation in Israel. Call it what you will, but the majority of Israel’s jewish population will not consent to a Ersatz Israel that does not guarantee them political dominance.
The status-quo, as Finkelstein once described, suits Israel’s government very well…an occupation with minimum cost. The PA enforces the occupied terrorities internal security, The EU and various NGOs finances the PA administration and US aid subsidises the Israeli military budget. And combined, the US, the UK and the EU despite minor disagreements, provides Israel with the diplomatic cover.
James has been somewhat estranged from his pater and siblings for several months, i believe, divesting himself of any responsibility of the climate change denial conspiracists the Australian Murdoch media have been pushing.
