alanjjohnstone
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Can i refer to the German Peasant War and what Engels said about premature revolutions
“The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realisation of the measures which that domination would imply. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the sharpness of the clash of interests between the various classes, and upon the degree of development of the material means of existence, the relations of production and means of communication upon which the clash of interests of the classes is based every time. What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again depends not upon him, or upon the degree of development of the class struggle and its conditions. He is bound to his doctrines and the demands hitherto propounded which do not emanate from the interrelations of the social classes at a given moment, or from the more or less accidental level of relations of production and means of communication, but from his more or less penetrating insight into the general result of the social and political movement. Thus he necessarily finds himself in a dilemma. What he can do is in contrast to all his actions as hitherto practised, to all his principles and to the present interests of his party; what he ought to do cannot be achieved. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whom conditions are ripe for domination. In the interests of the movement itself, he is compelled to defend the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with phrases and promises, with the assertion that the interests of that alien class are their own interests. Whoever puts himself in this awkward position is irrevocably lost. “
If this observation by Engels is correct, i think we can say it applied to the Bolsheviks in 1917.
As for the question “So why were the Bolsheviks opposed by the bourgeois parties in the Duma?” we can also ask why the wealthy classes also opposed the Mensheviks such as Martov who were supportive of the democratic bourgeois republic.
I think it was because there was a price to pay for failing to mount an effective opposition to the Tsar and his nobles. If you weren’t with the Bolsheviks, you were against them, and that also included any revolutionary ideas from the workers or peasants.
Our position with Russia has been that the Russian bourgeoisie were politically impotent as a class force and that it required the intelligensia to carry out the overthrow of the aristocratic rulers of Russia – a bourgeois revolution without the bourgeoisie, the capitalist revolution without the capitalist.
The Bolshevik leadership was composed of professional revolutionaries and members of the intelligensia ranging from the aristocratic, like Chicherin, to the bureaucratic, like Lenin and Kollontai, via the landed bourgeois (Smilga), the commercial bourgeois (Yoffe) and the higher industrial bourgeois (Pyatakov) or from academic families (Bukharin) These were the sort of people who were used to being a ruling class. The only real worker was Alexander Shlyapnikov and he was also a professional party member. Much the same can be said of the Mensheviks and the SRs.
We have never claimed their was no capitalism in Russia. There were the capitalist mercantile traders for centuries and there were Tsarist industries such as the Putilov works (with mostly French investment and expertise).
And isn’t one of our arguments is that we can achieve a revolution peacefully because the Meiji Revolution in Japan is an example of a change of social system, despite lingering ideological hang-overs such as the divinity of the Emperor, that was done through their constitutional process.
I think TM is merely pointing out is that all history is full of nuances, caveats and shades of grey. That perhaps we offer a simplistic view of human evolution with an overly stageist interpretation of history. It is not refuting it as such but qualifying it. We can generalise but there will always be exceptions and sometimes they can be frequent.
As for the origins of the capitalist class in the UK, there were two – the new industrialists of the mill owners who began to accumulate capital but also those from the landed gentry who already transformed land of the commons into commercial farms with the enclosures and so possessed existing capital to invest. And they were internally divided Whigs V Tories.
Thomas More will be interested in this book review
“In The Light Ages, Seb Falk unpicks many of these popular assumptions. He points out that several accounts of the history of science begin sometime around 1600, as though scientific inquiry just popped out of the ground like a mushroom. But a mushroom is just the visible surface growth of a larger organism. And the same applies to medieval scientific thinking, which was complex, interconnected and wide-ranging. Far from being resistant to foreign ideas, medieval thinkers systematically translated works from Greek, Hebrew and Arabic by writers from Iberia to Persia. Falk speaks of the “irresistible medieval drive to tinker, to redesign, to incrementally improve or upgrade technology” and the same was true of scientific thought.”
A refreshing both are evils article even if the conclusion isn’t so clear
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/09/24/voting-for-the-lesser-of-two-evils-a-vicious-circle/
“Both candidates represent money that begets money, both would keep the existing social order in the US intact, both would support butchers around the world that are friends of the US, and both will try to overthrow those governments that are not subservient to the US. But Biden will bring back normalcy, will try to resurrect the aura of presidency, and will try to remake the image of the US empire. Trump, on the other hand, will continue on his sociopathic path, will continue to amuse the rest of the world with his idiocy, will make the other “leaders” of the world laugh at his ignorance, and may destroy the US empire from within. Hmm … this is a tough decision.”
More vote for the lesser evil arguments
“We’ve got our own reasons to vote for Biden, and Joe ain’t one.”
“…Naomi Klein wrote: “Vote for a more favorable terrain. Our struggle goes way beyond elections. We’re in the streets. We’re talking to our neighbors and co-workers. But who controls the presidency changes what’s politically possible for our struggles.”…”
Cornel West: “A vote for Joe Biden is . . . a way of preserving the condition for the possibility of any kind of democratic practice in the United States.”
And if Biden does not move, which is the very probable position, what then?
Black Panther released after nearly 50 yrs in jail
He said that in his many years behind bars he had matured from the revolutionary position that he adopted in 1971, though he remained committed to the cause of racial equality and justice.
“I now take the ‘r’ off the word and make it ‘evolutionary’,” he said. “Revolution for me is the evolutionary process of building a higher level of consciousness in society at large. I’m an evolutionary revolutionary.”
Further to ALB’s post, Republicans are considering a legal challenge to Bloomberg
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/24/florida-inquiry-michael-bloomberg-voting-effort
“Florida created an unconstitutional system that prohibits people from voting until their debts are paid. Now the state is objecting to those debts being paid. The state seems intent on preventing voting, rather than collecting payment,”
https://www.motherjones.com/food/2020/09/trump-poultry-meatpacking-slaughter-lines-speed-covid/
“Trump’s proposed rule would allow the poultry industry to ramp up kill lines from a maximum of 140 birds per minutes to 175 birds per minute. For the industry—dominated by Tyson, Pilgrim’s Pride, Perdue, Sanderson Farms—a faster line means lower cost and thus more profit. Back in 2012, the Obama US Department of Agriculture estimated that raising the speed limit to 175 birds per minute would lower costs by 3 cents per bird, resulting in an annual boost to the industry’s bottom line worth “at least” $258.9 million.”
“The facts are clear and they are shocking: Factory farming is unhealthy for consumers, dangerous for workers, and devastating for the environment, and it is the largest cause of animal cruelty in the history of mankind.”
The Right continues to portray Rittenhouse as a patriot and have raised $2 million for his legal defence and produced this video
I regularly got one at my work. But I’m more surprised at your age you never got notified by your GP that you were due one as it is common practice for the elderly.
The inoculation regularly has to be adapted to defeat the current mutation of the latest flu so it is a guaranteed revenue for Big Pharma – and that is what they are hoping for with the COVID-19 vaccination, and why they are offering special promotional deals to governments – they are depending on it being something that will require either an annual booster or tinkered with to meet future changes within the virus.
A moment of honesty from Biden?
“I beat the socialist,” Biden said in a local news interview in Wisconsin. “That’s how I got elected. That’s how I got the nomination. Do I look like a socialist? Look at my career — my whole career. I am not a socialist.”
Last month he explained, “You know me. You know my heart. You know my story. Ask yourself: Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters? Really? I want a safe America.”
And to think the Left expect concessions from a President Biden
At a ceremony honoring Bay of Pigs veterans, Trump banned U.S. citizens from bringing home rum or cigars from Cuba and from staying at Cuban government-owned hotels, as he sought to lock in the Cuban-American vote in the swing state of Florida.
The “inclusive” PM
Labour has sacked three junior shadow ministers who joined with Jeremy Corbyn and 14 other Socialist Campaign group MPs in breaking the party’s whip by voting against the second reading of a controversial armed forces bill.
Nadia Whittome, Beth Winter and Olivia Blake defied the whip, which called on Labour MPs to abstain on the overseas operations bill. The legislation aims to introduce a presumption against prosecution for British soldiers serving abroad. The proposed presumption against prosecution applies to offences such as war crimes and torture and critics say it breaches international humanitarian law.
I always found Johnson’s book on the History of Christianity a useful read on how all the various city states treated them as criminal “heretics” to the original gods – and later once the roles were reversed and the shoe was on the other foot, the believers in the old gods became “heretics” “idolators” to be persecuted.
A bit on and the heretics became the Marcionism and Arians etc etc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heresies_in_the_Catholic_Church
As for the very early Jesus followers such as the Ebionites, there just isn’t sufficient surviving evidence to really make any firm conclusions since they are only mentioned briefly in the passing by those little interested in describing them with any accuracy.
