ALB
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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.
Marx on “materialistic-critical socialism” and its materialist basis.
Another extract from Starmer’s speech:
“For too long Labour has failed to realise that the only way to deliver social justice and equality is through a strong partnership with business. Under my leadership that mindset will change.”
Actually, this has always been Labour’s mindset when in office. It means allowing business to make profits and maintaining conditions favourable for profit-making. Since profits arise from the surplus value workers create it means accepting worker exploitation and, if need be, opposing strikes for higher wages. In the end it means abandoning promised reforms aimed at promoting “social justice and equality” if they conflict with profit-making.
We have seen it so many times before. What is slightly new, I suppose, is that this time Starmer is “getting Labour’s betrayal in in advance”, not that it really is a betrayal since Labour has only ever been anti-capitalist in words. When in office it has been obliged to maintain “a strong partnership” with profit-seeking private business since capitalism runs on profits.
Far from working with capitalists within capitalism being the only way to improve things for workers history, in the form of the record of all previous Labour governments, has shown the opposite to be the case — that capitalism cannot be made to work in the interests of the majority; as a profit-making system it can only work in the interests of the profit-takers.
Anybody without an axe to grind or an obsession to pursue can see that, when Marx wrote “The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality,” he is referring to the “abstract and ideological views” expressed when they spoke on other subjects than their particular field of science, as when they expressed a view on political or economic matters, and not to their theory of “matter” (whatever criticisms he may also have had about that).
What Marx wrote in German would have been better translated as “abstract natural-science materialism” rather than “abstract materialism of natural science” since this latter could suggest he was criticising the whole of “natural science” as physics, chemistry and biology were then called.
Naturwissenschaftliche Materialismus was a position propagated under this name by a number of German “natural scientists”, mainly in the field of physiology and anatomy, from the 1850s, whose most prominent propagandists were Ludwig Büchner and Carl Vogt. They were keen to refute the religious view that the mind was something special created by god rather than a natural product and function, and endorsed the view that “the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile”. Ths might have scored a point, in fact did, against the religious view of mind (accepted by most other “natural scientists” of the time and who didn’t claim to be materialists; far from it) but was clearly inadequate as it offered no explanation of the content of thoughts or how these arose. Hence Marx’s description of it as “abstract”, for ignoring “history and its process.” It wasn’t a criticism of natural science as such. In fact this was a subject Marx took a particular interest in and followed closely.
Marx’s criticism of the views they expresed outside their specialist field was probably directed against Vogt, who was a critic of “communism” from a bourgeois-liberal standpoint and against whom Marx had published a searing polemic in 1860.
