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LBird wrote:

'Materialism' is, yet again, seen to be unable to be defended against the criticisms of workers who've seen through its nonsense.

I think you're exaggerating here a bit. "The criticism of workers" (plural)? As far as I know it's the criticism of just one worker unless you know of some others. Most workers couldn't care less about epistemology, materialism and other philosophical issues and as the majority can't be wrong. Can they? 

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LBird wrote:

The thread title is 'Can the workers ever be wrong?'To answer the question 'who determines 'wrong'?', we have to answer the epistemological question of who or what determines 'wrong'.Is it an elite minority?Is it 'reality'?Is it a social majority?Thus, since I argue that the latter is the correct epistemological and political answer, the answer to the title is 'No'.'Wrong' is a social idea, not a property of matter or the opinion of an elite.

That's better, i.e stopped the thread veering off track down a dead-end siding or, to be more charitable, on to another thread.I thought that was your answer.  So your slogan is "The Workers United Can Never Be Wrong!" whatever the view they are united on (eg war, discrimination) — and I thought you were among those who think that socialism is a moral as well as a class issue. The trouble is of course they never are united, not even in supporting wars or governments or even capitalism in general. Some support one view, others another, others yet another. So how do you decide what is the workers view that can never be wrong?

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LBird wrote:

The rest of your post, YMS, is nothing to do with the epistemological question of 'knowledge'.

That sounds good as that's not what we are discussing here as there's another long-running thread on this which (just checked) has 233 new messages unread by me on it since I stopped following it a few weeks ago.

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LBird wrote:

I've just chosen to focus on the dangers of 'Leninism', rather than 'spontaneism', because I think the former is the one being espoused by some here, with talk of elites, experts, academics, etc. in science.

Actually, the traditional SPGB position (or one SPGB tradition) has more in common with "spontaneism" than Leninism. Early Party members considered socialism to be inevitable. It's rather more difficult for us, over a century later, to maintain this view (it also explains why the view that socialism is a moral as well as a class view has surfaced).Eve so, we do in fact hold that capitalism "spontaneously" throws up socialist ideas in the sense that it does so even if we had never existed (though I don't like the word "spontaneous" in relation to human ideas since none are; all have to be conscious and spread by argument, even Lenin's "trade union consciousness" is not "spontaneous"). Our argument here is that what we, as an organised group propagating socialist ideas, are doing is not creating socialist consciousness but merely speeding up its spread and, as YMS says, avoiding workers having to re-invent the wheel.So, accuse us of "spontaneism"  if you want but not Leninism !

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Anyway, to keep the new ball in play, I don't agree that the kind of crude"materialism" you are criticising (that sees consciousness as a mere reflection of material conditions) leads to Leninism (that requires the additional premise that some can have this reflected in them more or better than others). It can equally lead to an anti-Leninist position, i.e to "spontaneism" and the view that there is no need to try to spread "socialist consciousness" as it will spread automatically anyway out of material circumstances, i.e. material conditions reflecting themselves as consciousness in the whole class not just a select part of it.One example is the iconic 1969 ani-Leninist text  The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement by Gilles Dauvé and François Martin. Here's how they end the first article on "Capitalism and Communism" (their emphasis):

Quote:

Those who already feel the need for communism, and discuss it, cannot interfere in these struggles to bring the communist gospel, to propose to these limited actions that they direct themselves towards "real" communist activity. What is needed is not slogans, but an explanation of the background and mechanism of these struggles. One must only show what they will be forced to do.

and

Quote:

The communist party is the spontaneous (i.e., totally determined by social evolution) organization of the revolutionary movement created by capitalism. The party is a spontaneous offspring, born on the historical soil of modern society.

I don't agree with this and I don't suppose you do either because it denies the need for any propagation of socialist ideas or reduces the activity of socialists/communists to merely analysing what happens and is inevitably going to happen. It replaces so-called "abstract propaganda" with abstract theorising and passive waiting.

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LBird wrote:

You started this new thread, with a quote from me, and accuse me of 'going over this again'?I'm forced to ask, if there's 'no point', what was your point in starting it?

Hey, stop shooting the messenger ! I only started this thread because the moderator asked one of us to move off the Piketty thread and merely selected something you had written to start the ball rolling. A new ball, that is

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LBird wrote:

Elitism is arguing that the minority should have the power to impose their minority opinion on the majority.

Of course, but nobody here is arguing this. All we are arguing as democratic socialists is that the socialist majority have the right and should have the power to impose its will on the pro-capitalist minority. Which is not the same as having the right to impose its opinion on them. I think this is the issue between you and YMS (and twc). Not that you can impose opinions.We know your views on what you define rather narrowly as  "materialism" and have argued about this to a standstill. So no point in going over this again.

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Now it's Brand and Owen Jones:http://www.theguardian.com/membership/2014/sep/19/guardian-live-with-russell-brand-broadcasting-live-around-the-ukMight go and watch in Kingston. You don't have to be in London according to the list of cinemas.

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LBird wrote:

gnome wrote:

Although this particular individual claims to be a communist he insists that the class struggle alone will be the basis for the change without the need for education by an external 'elite', by which he means, in this instance, the SPGB.What would your response to this person be?

My response would be: "Communist workers are not an 'external elite' ".

Exactly. Those of us who have become socialists/communists are just members of the working class arguing the case for socialism with our fellow workers. We are not an elite from outside the working class, not even those of us who have got together in a separate organisation to do this more effectively.What in fact we are doing is trying to ensure that hearing the argument for socialism is part of the "experience" of the working class since (as all of us here know) there is no such thing as experience without thought. So the Trotskyists (and others) are wrong to argue that the working class can learn to be against capitalism through mere struggle or by the experience of failure to achieve some reform without them also hearing the case for socialism argued. Which they reject as casting pearls before swine.

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Police intelligence must have got in  wrong again. There were no anarchists on the march and so no danger of any  "incident" as they were all at an obscure event in Mile End contemplating their navels.

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gnome wrote:

Actually I did. Comrade J.W. introduced himself to us at the literature stall there.

Apologies. By way of reparation I will recount your remark on a demonstration organised across the road outside MacDonalds by the bakers union in pursuit of this campaign.  Bakers demand more dough.

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Fair enough. It was just an example. Maybe penal taxation on the rich isn't really an unrealisable "transitional demand" but a practicable reform under certain circumstances. It still remains true, though, that if the working class was strong enough to impose this it could also be strough enough to abolish capitalist ownership of the means of production altogether. All the effort to get the working class to demand that the rich be taxed till the pips squeak would have been better directed to get them to abolish capitalism. Certainly the socialist movement should built itself up on this basis not of demanding reforms, unrealisable or no.

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alanjjohnstone wrote:

Could you elaborate on this so i can whinge on Libcom 

Personally I don't think that's a good idea because we'd come across as, well … whingers. If they don't want us, fair enough. Fuck 'em.

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That article puts the classic, absurd case for "transitional demands", where a vanguard party campaigns on a demand that it knows is unrealisable so that the workers can learn this through experience (of failure). But, as Joan Robinson is quoted in the article as saying, if a government (that's her term, we'd say the working class) is strong enough to impose, say, heavy penal taxation on the rich it (they) would also be strong enough to abolish the whole capitalist system. So why not campaign directly for this (socialism) in the first place? Trotskyist answer: because the mass of workers are incapable of understanding the direct case for socialism and can only follow such slogans as "tax the rich".But, to return to Piketty, after listening to this talk he gave earlier this month (it's 40 minutes from the 8th minute on) I see that he is now saying that the r (rate of return), in his "fundamental structural contradiction of capitalism" that where r is greater than g (rate of growth of GDP per head of population) then the inequality in the ownership of wealth will increase, is the rate after tax.  The book gives the impression that it was before tax.But that changes everything. It means that he is no longer trying to state a basic economic law of capitalism but that his formula already includes provision for the reformist political measures he proposes of an increase in taxes on returns from capital as a means of stopping the "economic law" he claims to have discovered from operating and of overcoming the "contradiction of capitalism" he thinks he has identified. Talk about begging the question (in its proper sense) !

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Gnome, there was a 14th member who you probably didn't know about: a comrade from the North East down with his trade union and who said hello to us at Marble Arch.The Parks police have adopted the same policy as the Anarchists: not allowing stalls inside Hyde Park as one previous occasions (even though this was technically against the regulations). So all the stalls were outside the main entrance at Marble Arch. Apart from us, there were Militant (under various disguises), the SWP and the Revolutionary Communist Group (still banging on about imperialism and the imperialist Labour Party).Most of the time we had to put up with the Trotskyists using a loudspeaker to try to raise trade union consciousness. Not that theirown  understanding was all that high since at one point one of their leaders Linda Taafe actually said that it was "even nnecessary for employers that we get a pay rise so we can have more money to spend".  I can't remember how many times we heard the call go up for "decent wages" (apparently a £10 an hour minumum wage satisfies this). "Decent jobs at decent pay" was how it was often put. Not much change since Marx in 1865 criticised the call a "fair day's wage for a fair day's work".There's nothing wrong with demanding and struggling for better wages and conditions but this should be accompanied by an understanding that there's nothing "decent" or "fair" about wages and the wage system and of the need to abolish them altogether by making the means of production the common property of everybody.To make Speakers Corner more of a tourist attraction the Park authorities have erected a number of columns giving the history of the place. One of them has on it the iconic picture of a Party speaker (Steve Ross) speaking from one of our platform's on which is written Marx's alternative call "Abolish the Wages System".Pity not many of the marchers would have stopped and seen it, but quite a few did get our leaflet.

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