ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Young Master Smeet wrote:Fetishising workers councils is as sensible as fetishising the chairs in the meeting hall, they're just how it's happened sometimes. The point is that the working class will need a democratic forum in which to organise. Within that, I would also note that local councils and other elective bodies would do just as nicely, except they can't be as exclusive. 'Worker' isn't a definite category on which to base a franchise, so we will continue to need universal suffrage and the free association of self-identified workers to ifnluence it.
This question came up at the recent discussion we had in Birmingham with the Midlands Discussion Forum. One of them took on board the criticism that "workers councils" excluded workers who weren't actually at work and suggested they could be supplemented by "neighbourhood councils".In discussing with him during the break I asked him what's the point of duplicating the already existing local councils structure (why set up a rival rubbish collection service, for example), but I couldn't get through to him. He wasn't prepared to exclude local councils from the destruction of the state; they too had to be "smashed". But if there's a majority of socialists in an area why can't they simply take over control of the council via the ballot box and use its existing structure to keep local services going during the changeover from capitalism to socialism? I could have mentioned the Paris Commune as an example of this but there had already been enough exchanges in the meeting about what Marx said or meant or didn't say or didn't mean (which, in the end, is irrelevant).I can sort of understand why they might want to destroy the central state with its coercive functions, but why local councils which are already purely administrative bodies? Why abolish the wheel and then re-invent it? The "workers council" fetishists seem to want to reconstruct everything from scratch, but what's the point and, anyway, that's not how social change occurs.
I think an "uneconomic" pit was defined as one where its income did not cover its costs, but there were other pits where this only just happened and others where it was below average. So it would have been possible to draw up a list of pits which did cover their costs even if only just in some cases. In fact, I would even say that if Scargill and some of the other NUM leaders had not have had the political aim of bringing down the Thatcher government they might have been able to have reached a deal to keep more pits open for longer as well as to obtain better redundancy terms. But what happened happened and one lesson would be that, if a government is determined enough, it can defeat any strike and that only political not industrial action can overthrow capitalism (or even one of its governments).
Today's Times reports that Bob Crow's union, the RMT, has given him £35,000 to stand as head of the No2EU list (a sort of leftwing UKIP) in the Euroelections in May. I have to confess to having to agree with the Tory quoted in the article as saying:
Quote:Trade union leaders should be using their money to defend members' interests, not for their political hobby horses.I dare say quite a few non-Tory RMT members will agree too.
Brian wrote:See if Swansea can attend this.Hope so. By 5 April the Euroelection campaign will be about to begin, so this will be a chance to hand out some leaflets about us standing in Wales (looks as if we will since the video for the election broadcast seems to be coming along ok). Maybe also to sell some copies of our Strike Weapon pamphlet It's out print but Kent & Sussex Branch reprinted a few copies for a miners' event in Kent. I wonder if there are any left or whether they could do some more?
I'm still inclined to believe that those throwing Molotov cocktails at the police in Kiev will be ultra-nationalist quasi-fascists from that part of the Ukraine which was annexed by Russia from Poland in 1940 and which had previously been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and which supplied Nazi Germany with concentration camp guards and non-German members of the Waffen SS. So, no sympathy for them. The last thing they wanted is political democracy. Mind you, the government side is just as bad. Some choice, fascism or stalinism.
I still think that social, political and economic conditions in Russia a hundred or more years were so vastly different from those that exist in Britain, most other European countries, North America, Australasia, Japan, etc that tactics derived from Tsarist Russia are not relevant for us today (and weren't then in Britain or North America either). So, discussing them is interesting but largely of historical or academic interest.Incidentally, in 1905 both Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg saw mass strikes organised by workers' councils as a means of bringing about a "bourgeois revolution" in Russia, i.e political democracy. The "soviets" (which is merely the Russian word for "council") arose as representative organisations for workers as there was then no other means for expressing their views (no constitution, no parliament, no elected local councils, no votes for workers).Let's talk instead about the conditions for a social revolution from capitalism to socialism in the light of present-day political and economic circumstances.
Here's the ICC's crackpot solution to the problem raised by Robbo — world-wide civil war.And here's the CWO's admission that what would exist in the areas under the control of the "workers state" (with or without inverted commas) would be capitalist:
Quote:A so-called ‘workers’ state’ or the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is, in the first instance, a political category. Nevertheless, a ‘workers’ state’ will take measures for the improvement of the conditions of life of the working class (reduction in the working-day, free access to the health and education system, etc) and try to direct production for the needs of society. But these measures are, in any case, milestones for a socialist future (. . . ) As long as capitalist commodity production in the rest of the world continues to exist, the diktat of the law of value holds (p.38).Socialists shouldn't have too much difficulty in refuting these ideas on the various forums where and when they appear. I think Robbo's point is that the last sentence above isn't necessarily true. One major reason why the CWO think it is is that they don't envisage a majority of the population in the areas where capitalist rule has been overthrown being or having to be socialist-minded and so can't think of any means of dealing with it other than the old capitalist forms plus a few reformist "milestones". If, on the other hand, there was a socialist majority there then the population could understand and adopt other measures which did not reflect "the diktat of the law of value", certainly production directly for use and the direct distribution of products for use without money (even if not full free access).
This has been translated into French. The translation can be read here:http://www.critique-sociale.info/855/emparons-nous-de-la-politique/
Yes, in the March 2012 Socialist Standard here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2012/no-1291-march-2012/book-reviews
Recently Life Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies has been digitised and is now available as an ebook. Not only can you now buy it for your Kindle or other e-reader but also, for a limited time (until 31 March 2014), it is on sale via the Kindle Store, Kobo and Nook at a special introductory discount price of just £10 (Pluto’s RRP):Kindle — http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GGOELIQ/Kobo — http://store.kobobooks.com/en-au/books/life-without-money/Nook — http://www.nook.com/gb/ebooks/life-without-money-building-fair-and-sustainable-economies-by-anitra-nelson/9781783711000
I think this cartoon sums up the position our "Left Communists" friends would find themselves in if ever a revolution was attempted on the lines they envisage:
Pity you weren't at the meeting as the points you make against the view that "(mere) struggle leads to class consciousness" is precisely the point we were trying to make.In fact this was the only point at which the discussion became heated. After somebody accused us of accepting Lenin's view in What Is To Be Done? that left to itself the working class is capable of acquiring only a trade union consciousness and that socialist consciousness had therefore to be brought to them from outside the class struggle by "educators", one of our members retorted that it was them who were being Leninist as they assumed that while they were able to reach a socialist consciousness under capitalism the rest of the working class couldn't. (This exchange can be heard towards the end of the recording).In the end, they seemed to accept that this was not our position but didn't seem too keen on our view that hearing "the case for socialism" from other workers was, besides being forced by material circumstances to struggle, an equally essential "experience" in leading workers to a socialist consciousness. It's a matter of the interaction between the two. Having said this, we don't see ourselves as "creating" socialist consciousness, only hastening its emergence (well, that's our rationale for what we do and don't do).We could have been even more philosophical and made more of the point (oft discussed here) that humans can't experience anything except via the mind. But I did discuss this with one of the visitors on the train back, who was a student of philosophy, who said he'd been tempted to make the same point.
Interesting — and revealing –thread on the ICC's forum. Here's their Alf virtually admitting that they are opposed to elections in the course of the socialist revolution as they know they wouldn't win them:
Quote:there is a total opposition between working in parliament and working in the autonomous organs created by the class struggle, and this opposition will reach its zenith during a revolutionary situation when the choice will be starkly posed between keeping the bourgeois state standing, and demolishing it. The last ideological prop of the political power of the ruling class will be 'the democratic vote of all citizens' as opposed to the horrible threat of a bloodthirsty class dictatorship.Why oppose participating in an election, or even holding in it, if you think you are going to win? After all, if you do win, then you can claim that socialism represents "the democratic will of the people", so depriving the pro-capitalists of the "last ideological prop" of being able to claim that they do. That the ICC opposes such an election so vehemently confirms that they stand for a revolution in which only a minority are socialists, a recipe for disaster and from which socialism could not be the outcome.Notable is LBird's valiant efforts to put over a case similar to ours making the simple point that there is in fact no "total opposition" between participating in elections and "working in the autonomous organs created by the class struggle". But I don't think he's going to be able to convince the dogmatic anti-parliamentarists there to abandon their dogma and take a more reasonable approach.
The recording of this meeting is now on the internet here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NH97bFQPz7QWhat was a bit disappointing was that the advocates of "workers' councils" harked back to Russia in 1905 and 1917, which meant that the first part of the meeting was spent discussing this rather than the situation of workers today. In the second half they did emerge from their time warp a bit and recognise that, unlike in St Petersburg in those days, most workers today no longer work in huge factories and industrial complexes. They coped with this by adding "neighbourhood councils" to the original factory-based "workers councils", to take account both of those workers without a job (whether unemployed or retired, etc) and of those working in jobs or workplaces which would have no place in socialism (for the so-called financial services sector). This concession to modern reality rather undermines the original idea of workers councils as work-based workers councils deriving their economic and political clout from the fact that they controlled actual production.The question of how socialist class consconsciousness arose also came up. At one point one of them came close to saying that workers had no need to hear or consider arguments for socialism as this would spontaneously arise from their experience of struggle at work. He later backtracked from this when it was asked why then did they publish a journal and pamphlets and hold meetings and conceded that an organisation putting over the case for socialism was necessary to hasten the growth of socialist (they call it communist) class consciousness.They still insisted, though, that the revolution would start off without explicit majority support for socialism but with workers merely discontented with capitalism and that this would develop in the course of the struggle. This of course is the real basis of their opposition to using the ballot box in the course of their conception of the socialist revolution: they might not win the election. They would in fact vehemently oppose holding an election because of this and is why the ICC (who were not present but posted a comment on libcom accusing us of being counter-revolutionaries for being likely to support one). But staging an anti-capitalist revolution without majority support could lead to a position where the workers councils would end up administering production for the market and the wages system (as the CWO but perhaps not some of the others present openly acknowledge).I don't think that we (there were 6 of us out of a total attendance of 16) convinced them that elections and parliament could and should play a role in the socialist revolution, but we may have convinced them that we are not the pure-and-simple "parliamentary socialists" of their caraciture and that we have always held that workers need to organise both politically and economically to establish socialism.
More on this meeting here including what the introductory speakers argued:http://www.freecommunism.org/introductory-texts-from-the-meeting-the-role-of-workers-councils-in-socialist-revolution/The discussion was also recorded and will be available later.
