ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
So would I! Patrick Cockburn is a reporter specialising in the Middle East who, like Robert Fisk who died last year, doesn’t echo the official narrative. Incidentally, his father was the 1930s Stalinist hack, Claude Cockburn.
I would trust him more than the hacks serving the pro-Biden gang that has now got its snout back in the trough again.
Hannah, if you re-read the article by Greenwald you will see he deals with both the Munchal and the retired officer’s cases — the prosecution does not allege that they brought them with them. Also, in the second article, Munchal says he left his guns outside the building because his mum told him they would both go to prison if they took them in. Some planned insurrectionists ! But also evidence that they did not intend to kill anyone.
It is no good quoting from the media from the period before Greenwald wrote his article. They are precisely the type of coverage he is arguing was over the top.
The Daily Beast article would seem to be an example of what Cockburn and Greenwald were referring to. I had never heard of Greenwald but I have read many articles by Cockburn and he writes some good anti-war stuff and certainly has no brief for Trump or the rioters. In not following the dominant US media approach he has run a serious risk since as Greenwald points out:
“anyone who tries to correct these falsehoods is instantly attacked with the cynical accusation that if you want only truthful reporting about what happened, then you’re trying to “minimize” what happened and are likely an apologist for if not a full-fledged supporter of the protesters themselves.”
In any event, it was clearly a riot not an insurrection.
Before making up your mind on this read the article by Greenwald mentioned by Cockburn (which also deals with the zip tie handcuffs):
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-claims
What could be explanation for these claims by a part of the US media? I suggest that it is pro-Biden elements being taken in by their own claim (put forward to get people to vote for Biden) that Trump was so dangerous that,in the event of him losing, he would refuse to leave the White House and attempt a coup to rule as dictator.
If you recall, there was a Trotskyist on this forum who argued this. An article in the December Socialist Standard dealt with this fantasy:
No, none of you have been saying this, Matthew. Not one.
Otherwise, you’d all have agreed with Marx’s democratic method, rather than Lenin’s elitist ‘materialism’.He has just done it again — accused us of agreeing with Lenin. This despite have been introduced not only to Bogdanov but also to Dietzgen, Pannekoek, critical reviews of Lenin’s book on materialism, etc. None of this made any difference. He continued to denounce us as natural-science materialists and even dismissed Pannekoek as one.
It is true that nobody here (or any other human being, past and present; not one and certainly not Marx) has supported the view that questions of astronomy, physics, etc should be decided by referendum.
It is true, however, that there have been others who have claimed that a tree doesn’t exist when we are not looking at it.
I think you have missed his point which was that there was no evidence that this was the intention of the demonstrators turned mob. He is not defending them or Trump but criticising the way it has been presented by the dominant media which, for various reasons (some partisan), wanted it to be seen as a planned insurrection rather than as a demonstration getting out of hand.
An insurrection is normally defined as an armed uprising against the establishment government. Maybe it means something lesser in the US since they have an Insurrection Act (dating from 1807) governing the use of the armed forces to deal with civil unrest, with what over here would be regarded as a riot (“a wild disturbance by a crowd of people”). In fact that seems a more apt description of what happened on the Capitol on 6 January.
Don’t expect him to say anything much socialist as he was one of the few party members who joined up to fight in that imperialist war. As he joined the RAF he was a volunteer not a conscript.
Another article by Patrick Cockburn exposing the idea that the 6 January riots were an insurrection:
Keep it up,comrades, you’ve got him on the run. The very idea that Marx held such a crackpot position.
Yes, Bijou, he is a slippery customer. For years he has used materialism as a term of abuse, denouncing us as materialists while Marx was only a ‘materialist’ (in scare quotes). Confronted with the evidence that Marx called himself a materialist, he changes and calls us ‘materialists’ and Marx a materialist.
He is not prepared to admit that our materialism and Marx’s are the same. Obviously we don’t accept the 19th natural-science materialism that he distanced himself from but, like him, are historical/social materialists.
In any event, Marx’s materialism had nothing in common with the crackpot idea that the Sun used to go around the Earth at one time because that was what was generally believed and would do so again if a majority voted for it.
The situation is Texas has some parallel with what happened in Britain in the Big Freeze-up of 1963 and for the same reason — that it is not profitable to invest in the extra electricity generation capacity to meet a once in a decade weather condition.
Maybe you are right, Bijou, mockery could be a better way than contempt of dealing with his non-stop lying about us being Leninists.
The other argument is over as it has been admitted that Marx did describe himself as a materialist. Marx did not regard it as a dirty word as had been claimed.
I don’t know whether Marx ever described socialism as democratic, but if he regarded (defined) democracy as a form of state then obviously he wouldn’t have as socialism is not a form of state. As you point out, this does not mean that Marx was “anti-democratic”. Democracy has a wider meaning as a form of organisation that any organisation, not just the state, can take, e.g. a trade union, a political party, a sports club.
Marx was not against workers’ organisations being organised on the basis of some of their members being elected to carry out specific functions and being answerable to those who elected them. He envisaged this as being the case in the classless society that socialism would be, pointing out, in answer to a criticism from Bakunin:
“Election is a political form present in the smallest Russian commune and artel. The character of the election does not depend on this name, but on the economic foundation, the economic situation of the voters, and as soon as the functions have ceased to be political ones, there exists 1) no government function, 2) the distribution of the general functions has become a business matter, that gives no one domination, 3) election has nothing of its present political character.”
He saw universal suffrage as a feature of socialism, describing, and in effect endorsing, the programme of the 1871 Paris Commune:
“While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society. Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is well-known that companies, like individuals, in matters of real business generally know how to put the right man in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it promptly. On the other hand, nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supercede universal suffrage by hierarchical investiture.”
Thus he could be said to be in favour of democracy as an organisational form within socialism, In any event, the SPGB has used the term in relation to socialism right from its foundation in 1904, when it laid down it object as:
“The establishment of a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.”
Before he became a socialist Marx had been a democrat, i.e saw the aim as to establish a democratic state, a political democracy. While, in becoming a socialist, he abandoned this as the aim and way-out for the workers — and criticised those who continued to say it was — he was still in favour of workers struggling for this under capitalism as the best political form within which the workers and socialist movement could develop.
