[ALB]

Actually we did consider putting in the detailed results but decided not to on grounds of space. To have just published the votes of our candidates would have given a misleading impression. To have published the full results for 10 constituencies with a total of 74 candidates would have taken up too much room. In any event, results are readily available elsewhere and mention of one in a thousand did give a general idea (even though all our candidates bar one did better than this).

[ALB]

The Minutes of the Outreach Department's meeting on 23 May to review the election campaign are included in the Election Committee's report to the EC on the election that has now been uploaded to the files section of Spintcom. It's Annex 2.

[ALB]

You could say he's hedging his bets but I don't recognise the Marx he's saying is right:

Quote:

He saw that there would come a day when capitalism would exhaust its potential and collapse.

Quote:

as Marx warned, there is a limit to an economy built on scaffolding of debt expansion. There comes a moment, Marx knew, when there would be no new markets available and no new pools of people who could take on more debt.

Quote:

The hoarding of wealth by a tiny capitalist elite, Marx foresaw, along with the exploitation of the workers, meant that the masses could no longer buy the products that propelled capitalism forward.

Capitalism collapsing through underconsumption and debt crises? That's not in Marx.The man's a bluffer.

[ALB]

Wolff exposed herehttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/subject/richard-wolffBlanqui didn't think much of cooperatives either. Good article here on him, and his "Revolution (= Insurrection) Not Reform" theory and practice (in a sense we're also descended from Blanqui but in a different line from Lenin):http://links.org.au/node/4115

[ALB]

Just seen that McNair suggests a better translation of what Luxemburg said:

Quote:

…it is an illusion to believe that the proletariat could win economic power for itself within current bourgeois society; it can only win political power and then transcend capitalist property.

That's an even better statement of the case.

[ALB]

Here's Rosa Luxemburg's take on this question, her speech at the 1899 Congress of the German Social Democratic Party in Hanover. It's actually a summary of her Reform or Revolution pamphlet:https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1899/10/11.htm

Quote:

…it is an illusion to believe that the proletariat could create economic power for itself within current bourgeois society; it can only take political power and then replace capitalist forms of property.

But she goes on to say that this doesn't mean she is against trade unions (but she doesn't think much of cooperatives).No wonder she was held in such high regard by the early members of the party.Incidentally, Mike McNair of the Weekly Worker criticises this passage in one of his recent articles on the "maximum programme":

Quote:

Luxemburg’s argument – “it is an illusion, then, to think that the proletariat can create economic power within capitalist society. It can only create political power and then transform capitalist society” – is flatly contrary to Marx’s actual policy in relation to trade unions, cooperatives and the struggle for a workers’ political party within capitalism, which are abundantly documented from both the young and the old Marx. It is, in fact, a version of Ferdinand Lassalle’s ‘iron law of wages’ argument against trade unions.

He doesn't seem to have read the whole of her speech, at least not the part on trade unions. In any event,  improvements within capitalism don't mean that the workers have "economic power".

[ALB]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

ALB, i don't think the debate can be so easily defined as you say….SP's position is very much to have the  administrative parts of society such as the Department of Agriculture continue,  but he has stated that they have stand-alone autonomy and are not the same as the coercive features of the State that requires to be politically captured and disarmed …(SP, forgive the oversimplification and paraphrasing and if i am wrong , please correct me). Hud has explained that there is no case for re-constructing in parallel those parts of the state but that the intent is to democratise and re-organise the administration of them to make them more responsive and responsible to society.

I have nothing against the positions expressed here by SP and Hud. Obviously, as that's what I've been trying to say.  But there is at least one participant who thinks that the Department of Agriculture, the NHS, etc cannot be democratised or adapted and should be completely replaced.:

LBird wrote:

Or Harold Shipman? Or Beverley Allitt? John Stonehouse? T Dan Smith? There are thousands of criminals, psychopaths, liars, corruptors, elitists, snobs, etc., sown throughout the management of institutions that you name, and they created and structured those institutions for bourgeois purposes, just as they did academia and science.The case is, we need new revolutionary institutions for revolutionary purposes.

.

[ALB]

Vin wrote:

No mention of 'workers councils'  in the November 37 Socialist Standard. It has never been our case that socialism will involve soviets . Production will be under the democratic control of  the whole community.

I wasn't using the term "Workers Councils" in the narrow sense of "soviets" but in the broader one of any organisation — committee, council, union, association — to further their economic interest. In this second sense, trade unions are a species of "workers council". But let's not get too bogged down in arguing over mere terminology.  The point is that, to establish socialism, workers will need to organise economically as well as politically even if, as you emphasise, political organisation is paramount since until workers get control of political power they can begin to reorganise society. Once socialism has been established these workers economic organisations formed under capitalism would likely become part of the democratic structure of society.. We don't and can't know of course but will have to wait and see.

[ALB]

LBird wrote:

I think this post, containing Hud's and ALB's positions, is the most illustrative of the two stances being taken on this thread.I think that these can be summed up as "Workers' Councils" versus "Democratic Parliament".

No, that's not the division of opinion here. It's between (a) those like yourself who seem to want to abolish all the institutions of the machinery of government, including essentially administrative ones, and create a completely new administrative structure from scratch, and (b) those who don't see the point of this and favour adapting, fully democratising the useful administrative parts of the existing machinery of government. Between, if you like, the utopian system-builders and the pragmatists.Being pragmatic myself, I can accept that some of the democratic organisations thrown up in the course of the struggle for socialism will no doubt be merged with the democratically-reformed existing structures to create the democratic administrative structure of socialist society.Nobody has yet made out a case as to why the health service, the postal service, local government, etc should be completely destroyed as part of the socialist revolution and replaced by newly-created institutions to perform the same functions.

[ALB]

Vin wrote:

ALB wrote:

I, too, am not against workers organising "councils" (even "industrial unions"!) to take over and run workplaces. 

Tell me more!  What about the non-workers? Will they have a say?

It's the Party Case, comrade, and always has been! We've always said that, to establish socialism workers should organise economically as well as politically, i.e to keep production going as well as to capture the State. We've always stressed that, of the two, political organisation is the more important and rejected the basically syndicalist idea that future society should be run by industrial unions (or by work-based "workers councils") even though of course workplaces too will be democratically organised. As you say/imply, to involve everyone whether they work or not the democratic running of society will have to be community-based  not industry-based,More here.From November 1937 Socialist Standard:

Quote:

The Socialist Party, therefore, whilst holding that the working class must be organised, both politically and economically, for the establishment of Socialism, urges that the existing unions provide the medium through which the workers should continue their efforts to obtain the best conditions they can get from the master class in the sale of their labour-power. That the trade unions must inevitably accept the Socialist theory as the logical outcome of their own existence, and as such will provide the basis of the economic organisation of the working class to manipulate the means and instruments of wealth production and distribution when the capitalist ruling class have first been dislodged from political power. The essential conditions for obtaining Socialism must never be underestimated. At the very moment that the workers have gained control of the State machine provision must be made simultaneously for the economic requirements of the community. The Socialist working class of the future will, no doubt, see to this as one of its supreme functions.

[ALB]

I, too, am not against workers organising "councils" (even "industrial unions"!) to take over and run workplaces. Something like this will obviously have to happen.  My point was what was the point of trying to build from scratch organisations to run "national" services and local democracy and administration when structures exist that can be adapted. It doesn't make sense. Anyway, it's not how social (as opposed to merely political) change takes place — it's evolutionary and adaptive.

[ALB]

Hud955 wrote:

Government machinery could be restructured to provide the administrative needs of a new society, though I suspect that would not be easy.  It might be just as easy to set up a new administrative system altogether. 

It might be theoretically possible but hardly "just as easy".  Just as easy, for example, to set up a system of local government from scratch than to take over and democratise and reform the existing structure? Just as easy to set up a new health service from scratch? "Pretty pointless" is the alternative description that comes to mind.

[ALB]

Dave B wrote:

I thought were going to have a discussion on Blanqui?I thought the following was well ahead of the game for 1834 predating Karl and Proudhon somewhat anyway.https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/blanqui/1834/soupe.htm

I see that this is the source of the passage Hedges quote to try to make Blanqui a miserablist Protestant like himself but that he has truncated and distorted it (even if he is using a better translation).  The full passage reads (he only quoted the parts in italics):

Quote:

Yes! The right of property is in decline. Generous spirits prophesy and call for its fall. The Essenian principle of reality has slowly sapped it over the course of eighteen centuries through the successive abolition of the various servitudes which served as the basis for its power. It will disappear one day, along with the last privileges that serve as its refuge and nook. The past and the present guarantee us this resolution. For humanity is never stationary. It either advances or goes back. Its progressive march led it to equality. Its backward march climbs, by all of privilege’s steps, to personal slavery, the final word in the right of property. To be sure, before returning there, European civilization would have perished. But through what catastrophe? A Russian invasion? To the contrary, it is the north that will itself be invaded by the principle of equality that the French bring in the conquest of nations. The future is not in doubt.

Blanqui has gone up in my estimation again, even if he was a proto-Leninist or, rather, even if Lenin was a latter-day Blanquist.  Blanqui took the view that the people had been kept in such ignorance, mainly thanks to the Catholic church, that they had to be liberated from above by a revolutionary minority which once in power would educate them into communism. Understable perhaps in 1834, less so in 1870, but not in 1902 and certainly not today.

[ALB]

Sounds as if Bookchin's article (which can be found here) has some relevance to the other thread on the need to win control of political power.  The case for this is unanswerable and it's good to see a former anarchist renouncing anarchism and coming round to realising this.

[ALB]

There's not really a contradiction. The word I used was "switch off". This suggests something sudden. Certainly, as long as people support capitalism, they can be persuaded to support measures that the capitalist class of their country favour, e.g war and measures aimed at "extremists" and "scroungers" (as groups they don't identify with).It is true that over time as the older generation dies off a particular lesson learned by the working class can recede, e.g perhaps trade union consciousness. But this would be a very gradual change. It would have to be the same with a regression in democratic consciousness. This is today very well entrenched in the working class in this country and it doesn't just apply to right to vote, etc. It also applies in non-political contexts as over how to run clubs and voluntary associations. I still say this democratic consciousness cannot just be switched off. I don't think the working class could be manipulated out of it either, even if the ruling class tried or wanted to.

[Author]

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