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As was to be expected on the last weekend before polling day, everybody was there, including Goldsmith himself being interviwed (and heckled by someone calling him a racist because he played the anti-Muslim card in the London mayor election). This time the three of us were outnumbered by his supporters and by those of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign who had a stall opposite ours. Also present were Compass, a Labour leaning group, campaigning in effect for the LibDem candidate and again the Vote for Europe group doing the same more explicity (only this time the Union Jack was above the EU flag on their flagpole). Pastor Stockford, the Christian Alliance candidate, was there handing out a leadlet supporting a new airport in the Thames Estuary (God moves in a mysterious way).We handed out a few hundred leaflets and had a few conversations about socialism. We were interviewed by an author writing a book on "Brexit Britain" (see: http://www.brexitbritain.org.uk ). He wanted to know why we didn't support Jeremy Corbyn and John  McDonnell. We said that while their policies were different from the Labour Party's in recent years they were a throwback to Old Labour, which had also failed. In any event they didn't control the Labour Party (the Labour candidate here has a photo of Sadiq Khan not Corbyn on his manifesto). And of course that no government can control the way capitalism works, even less make it work in the interests of the wage and salary earning majority. We had to make the same point in a discussion with a Compass leafletter who challenged the claim on our leaflet that "the problem is not the Tories". We asked one of Palestine Solidarity people how they were going to vote. She said she was going to write "Support Palestine" across her ballot paper as none of the candidates did. Fair enough if that's what you think is most important. We said we'd be writing "World Socialism" on ours.We still have a couple of hundred or so left but we'll distribute these door-to-door, probably in the Kingston part of the constituency. That won't take long. And that'll be the end of our leaflet with Cameron on the front.

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Young Master Smeet wrote:

I'd argue freedom of information, expression and association come well above voting, and the right for minorities to try and become majorities (and for majorities to not enforce their will unless necessary): voting is just a means to assist the discursive process.  Sometimes we need to weight the strngth as well as quantity on a question: a minority that strongly holds it's opinion compared to a lightly held majority needs to be taken into account.  The conversation never ends.

Here's former Prime Minister Sir John Major's contribution to this debate (from yesterday's Times):

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I hear the argument that the 48 per cent of people who voted to stay should have no say in what happens. I find that very difficult to accept. The tyranny of the majority has never applied in a democracy and it should not apply in this particular democracy.

As concerns the principle of democratic decision-making he's got a point.

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On another forum discussing the by-election some train-spotting psephologist (not me) has worked out how many votes each of the candidates standing for the South West constituency in May's Greater London Assembly elections got in the wards in Richmond and Kingston that make up the Richmond Park constituency:Cons 24564 51.0%Lab  8395 17.4%LD   7462  15.5%Grn  5436 11.3%UKIP 2126  4.4%SPGB  180 0.4%It would be nice to think that there really were 180 socialists in the constituency but there will be some. Anyway, 2 or 3 of us will be out in the centre of Richmond wuith a literature stall tomorrow morning. We can't miss this chance of not putting our view across when there's more interest than usual in political issues.

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The book has arrived and it's a big disappointment. It shows the same degeneration from promoting the idea of a world without money to promoting small-scale local schemes to do without money within the present system (even if as a way of demonstrating the feasibility of living without money) as exhibited by the Zeitgeist Movement..It also introduces the distraction of veganism.

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Here's Lukacs the Leninist:

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If there is one commonplace which cannot be too strongly emphasized, it is that the communist party is the organizational expression of the revolutionary will of the proletariat. It is therefore by no means bound to embrace the whole of the proletariat from the very outset; as the conscious leader of the revolution, as the embodiment of the revolutionary idea, its task is rather to unite the most conscious sections, the vanguard, the really revolutionary and fully class-conscious workers. The revolution itself is brought about necessarily by the natural laws governing the economic forces. The duty and the mission of communist parties everywhere is to supply the revolutionary movement – which to a large extent arises independently of them – with a direction and a goal and to lead the elemental outbreaks sparked off by the collapse of the capitalist economic order on to the only viable path of salvation, on to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Pure Leninist Vanguardism — the conscious vanguard leading the merely discontented masses, a perfect echo of What Is To Be Done?  But I wouldn't be so illogical as to try to argue that because A shares Lukacs views on epistemology and because Lukacs was a Leninst, therefore A is a Leninist.

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It's more about the past ("history") than an analysis of the present. But this other book from India does analyse the present-day world economy:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Marxian-Economics-Globalization-Adam-Buick/dp/819025295XThere may be some copies at Head Office.

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mcolome1 wrote:

George LukacsAntonio Gramsci

Good point and not at all off topic. Two dyed-in-the-wool, die-hard supporters of the Vanguard Party (Lukacs was even worse than Lenin in arguing that the party could/should substitute for the class) and Russian State Capitalism quoted favourably while we dyed-in-the-wool, die-hard opponents of the Vanguard Party and State Capitalism are called Leninist.  The world turned upside down.

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Thanks Dave. That passage from Lenin deserves highlighting as it brings out the essence of Leninism and why we've nothing in common with it.:

Lenin wrote:

V. I. Lenin The Trade Unions, The Present Situation And Trotsky’s MistakesSpeech Delivered At A Joint Meeting Of Communist Delegates To The Eighth Congress Of Soviets, Communist Members Of The All-Russia Central Council Of Trade Unions And Communist Members Of The Moscow City Council Of Trade Unions December 30, 1920But the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised through an organisation embracing the whole of that class, because in all capitalist countries (and not only over here, in one of the most backward) the proletariat is still so divided, so degraded, and so corrupted in parts (by imperialism in some countries) that an organisation taking in the whole proletariat cannot directly exercise proletarian dictatorship.It can be exercised only by a vanguard that has absorbed the revolutionary energy of the class. The whole is like an arrangement of cogwheels. Such is the basic mechanism of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and of the essentials of transition from capitalism to communism.http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/lenin/works/1920/dec/30.htm

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mcolome1 wrote:

I can also say that Marx stand supporting certain bourgeois revolution and his wrong conception on the national question is also an excuse used by the Leninist to approve their own nationalism, can we say that Marx was a proto-Leninist ?

I remember giving a talk on just this at the 1998 SPGB Summer school:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/audio/did-lenin-really-distort-marxThe text is also in our pamphlet Marxism Revisted.I've just checked and the answer was:

Quote:

So, we can say, in answer to the question "Was Marx a Leninist?", that he did flirt with Leninist-type ideas for a while but then abandoned them and always thereafter opposed them in favour of a long and protracted process of working-class self-organisation which would eventually lead to them being ready to win political control and establish socialism.

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Here's what the Socialist Standard  had to say in 2003 about Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism:

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In any event, whatever criticisms may be made of Pannekoek's approach, to treat Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism as a serious contribution to the philosophy of science, as Richey does, is ridiculous. As anyone who has tried to read it knows, it is just a rant against some of Lenin's opponents within the Bolshevik Party in 1908 who he accuses, quite unjustly (but quite typically), of harbouring or condoning religious views just because they rejected his crude and untenable view that the mind merely reflects and photographs (as opposed to mentally reconstructs) the external world.

Book Reviews

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Yes, the working class can achieve some things without organising themselves as a party. This article from 1990 attributes those in Russia a role in bringing down the state capitalist regime there:

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It was inevitable that the oppressive forms of state capitalism in Russia and Eastern Europe would degenerate into chronic inefficiency. It is impossible to allocate such vast resources to repression, to engender corruption, cynicism, low morale and outright lack of enthusiasm and at the same time expect to be well ahead in the world league of rates of productivity and industrial growth. However, it would be wrong to say that the pressures for changes have originated at the top. Leaders like Gorbachev have reacted to a situation created by Russian workers through their many forms of passive resistance including their unwillingness to apply themselves conscientiously at work.

Editorial: The Lessons of East Europe

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robbo203 wrote:

Marx did say apparently that ‘the proletariat can act as a class only by constituting itself a distinct political party’. (D. McLellan, The Thought of Karl Marx, London 1971, p. 177.)

I think that what he meant by this was that the working class "party" was the the working class self-organised to win political control, i.e that he wasn't drawing a distinction between "party" and the "class for itself". What we refer to in clause 6 of our Declaration of Principles as "the working class …  organise[d] consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government". Rather different from Lenin's idea of a "vanguard" party,  a minority distinct from and above the rest of the working class and seeking  lead them and to rule on behalf of the class.

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Bollocks.

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mcolome1 wrote:

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1990s/1998/no-1128-august-1998/anti-imperialist-delusionThis is another important  element of Leninism that we have never supported and it was developed by Lenin in 1914The concept of Imperialism was also developed by Nikolai Bukharin and Lenin wrote the preface of his book.https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1917/imperial/

I think Bukharin's book on imperialism is better than Lenin's, if only because he discusses the idea and development of state capitalism. Here's the review in the Socialist Standard when it first came out in English.https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1930s/1930/no-310-june-1930/book-review-imperialism-and-world-economyActually, it was only after the Bolsheviks had seized power (and required outside support to protect their rule from being overthrown) that Lenin added the bits about a section of the workers in the "imperialist" countries living in part off the proceeds of colonial exploitation and that nationalist, anti-imperialist movements should be supported as a way of making the workers in the imperialist countries revolutionary. This wasn't in the original 1916 version. It was only added in the 1920 Preface to the French and German editions. It wasm't in Lenin's 1915 preface to Bukharin's book either. Nor, as the review in the Socialist Standard points out (and as noted by Bukharin's Stalinist critics) in Bukharin's book.This is the passage in the 1920 Preface where he introduces the idea that a section of workers in the imperialist countries shares in imperialist exploitation:

Quote:

Obviously, out of such enormous superprofits (since they are obtained over and above the profits which capitalists squeeze out of the workers of their “own” country) it is possible to bribe the labour leaders and the upper stratum of the labour aristocracy. And that is just what the capitalists of the “advanced” countries are doing: they are bribing them in a thousand different ways, direct and indirect, overt and covert.This stratum of workers-turned-bourgeois, or the labour aristocracy, who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their entire outlook, is the principal prop of the Second International, and in our days, the principal social (not military) prop of the bourgeoisie. For they are the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class, real vehicles of reformism and chauvinism. In the civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie they inevitably, and in no small numbers. take the side of the bourgeoisie, the “Versaillese” against the “Communards”

Quite wrong of course both in theory and reality. Even so, of the three works of Lenin we're discussing here the one on Imperialism, without the 1920 Preface, is the least objectionable.

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What is Leninism (contrasted with Marx's views)?  I suggest there are three basic positions that are not found in Marx.1. The theory of the need for a top-down, hierarchical vanguard party to lead the workers and seize power supposedly on their behalf.2. The distinction bewtween "socialism" and "communism" where "socialism" is defined as a society where everybody is an employee of the State and where money, markets, banks, wages, production for sale, etc continue to exist, i.e that state capitalism is"socialism" and a necessary step on the way to socialism/communism.3. The theory that a section of the workers in the "imperialist" countries are given a share in the super-profits of imperialist exploitation and that this is why they aren't revolutionary; and that support should therefore be given to anti-imperialist movements as, if successful, this will deprive workers in the imperialist countries of their share of super-profits and so make them amenable to following the lead of the vanguard party.We, in the Socialist Party, have always opposed these three positions (both as wrong in themselves and as not representing Marx's view either) and so are anti-Leninist. OK, Lenin accepted the Labour Theory of Value and the Materialist Conception of History and we do too, but if that makes us Leninists it would make a lot of others too. But it's the logic fallacy of A is x, B is x, therefore B is A.

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