ALB
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Jonny K. wrote:It's not necessarily the case that democratic forms are needed in our revolutionary organization if our postrevolutionary society is to be democratic (as it must be),.
I know you're making a logical point here (and that there are organisations that want communism but are not organised democratically, "Left Communists" and the Zeitgeist Movement for instance) while agreeing that in practice a revolutionary organisation should be democratically-organised, but this assumes that there is/can be/should be a permanent distinction between the "revolutionary organisation" and the movement of the working class.OK, at the moment, when there are only a relative handful of revolutionaries, there is clearly a distinction, but as the revolutionary movement takes off surely the "revolutionary organisation" will become an increasing section of the working class organised for socialism/communism and, both in logic and in practice, the working class can only organise themselves for socialism/communism democratically without leaders (if they don't they won't end up with socialism)?
Since we've veered off topic and until called to order, here's something that the Socialist Labor Party of America said on the "right to bear arms" (see page
:http://www.slp.org/pdf/thepeople/mar02tpP.pdfIt seems sensible, i.e. that the right to bear arms against the threat of an oppressive regime has been replaced by the right to vote and the right to organise industrially, which could be far more effective weapons under present circumstancxes.On the other hand, Leninists and others who still believe that capitalism can only be overthrown by armed insurrection ought to be committed to defending/demanding the right to bear arms (and organising weapon training for their members) but only those who publish the Weekly Worker seem to take this seriously, incorporating it into their programme:http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/654/workers-militia-and-burning-necessityWhich is one good reason for us, and the rest of the working class, not to take them seriously.Jonny K. wrote:it is perhaps incorrect to say the vanguardist position depends necessarily on a belief that the proletariat, special clever vanguardists aside, can't achieve the appropriate level of consciousness under capitalism..This is true. Leninism, and its derogatory view of the intellectual incapacity of the working class, isn't the only form of "vanguardism". There is a long anarchist tradition of "vanguardism", of justifying an "active minority" not being held back by the lower level of understanding of the rest of the working class but forcing the issue, e.g. in conflicts with employers, without the backing of a majority of the workers concerned.
Quote:It could be defended by arguing that in some situations. Let's say… A time-critical threat that the bourgeois state could develop authoritarian forms capable of protecting it dangerously robustly against proletarian revolution… And a majority of the proletariat is not yet won over to socialism… Perhaps then it would be correct, reluctantly and warily, to act as a vanguard, just because the proletariat hasn't yet, not because it cannot ever, achieve revolutionary class consciousness.You're talking about a future period when there will be a sizeable minority of socialists. Obviously that changes things as what the socialist minority decides to do will have an effect on the course of events. I'd have thought that, whatever they decide to do in any situation, they should still do so democratically and still seek to act democratically.
In a sense we could be said to be a "vanguard" but only in the sense that we have become socialists before the rest of the working class. But, words and their connotations apart, the question is what should socialists in this position do. How should they analyse their situation and what should they do?Should they seek to lead the rest of the working class judged incapable of understanding socialism by offering reforms or should they seek to spread socialist ideas amongs more of their fellow workers whose socialist understanding is considered an essential condition for the establishment of socialism (as a stateless, classless, moneyless, wageless society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production)?The Leninist/Trotskyist "vanguardists" choose the first of these. We choose the second.
Ozymandias wrote:Reminds me of a front page from the Standard from a couple of years ago which stated "You ain't seen nothing yet".As this is not something we would normally say in the context of a capitalist economic crisis, I checked and the phrase does occur in an article the Scottish comrade's blog Socialist Courier republished in 2010 from the Socialist Standard of 1981. The article, about language, ends:
Quote:Becoming multilingual in this way would be the best way of becoming a true citizen of the world socialist community. Socialist society will mean the liberation of all mankind, without distinction of race, sex or language. We ain't seen nothing yet.So in a quite different context.As to the Daily Sheeple people, yes, they do seem to be "survivalists" who are preparing to take to the hills with their guns and boxes of tinned food when the collapse of the economic system they anticipate occurs. Another doomsday scenario just as credible as that of those who said that the world ended last Friday.
Actually, come to think of it, I was a teenage Russia-lover, reading Soviet Weekly and listening to Moscow Radio. I suppose this was because I accepted what both sides said: that Russia was the opposite of capitalism. I don't think I called myself a Communist (but everbody else did). Then when I was 16 I read the book The New Class by Milovan Djilas who had been vice-president of Yugoslavia whose title said it all: Russia wasn't a classless society.
emily_chalmers wrote:I am conducting some research into attitudes towards the Soviet Union. Having questioned some Stalinists already, I am now trying to get the other side of the story. I would be very grateful if anyone could answer the following questions: When did you decide you were a communist? What turned you against the Soviet Union?This suggests that you are assuming that "communism" existed in Russia, but as far as we're concerned it never did. As a Party and most of us as individuals we never were "for" the Soviet Union. Having said this, we will have some members who were in the so-called Communist Party or its youth section, the YCL, before they became socialists. I don't know if there are any of them here who could answer this part of your questionnaire.
gnome wrote:Seriously though, the use of a photo would contravene an instructed Conference resolution….."That this Conference instructs the EC to ensure that in future no photograph of the candidate appears on the election material." (1989)That resolution has always been interpreted as applying to the election material we put out ourselves. It arose from Swansea branch putting the photo of a candidate on their manifesto (that manifesto is now a collector's piece as it's the one and only time it has happened). We have long supplied photos to the local press when they ask. It's a way of giving the fact that we have a candidate more prominence than a mere footnote would. I wouldn't have thought that it makes a difference either way to the number of votes a candidate gets. I agree, though, that it's a bit of an innovation the council doing it. Anyway, what about this? Should it have only been an audio recording!http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/video/big-smoke-interview-danny-lambert
This discussion of the views expressed and the attitudes displayed in the third SWP pre-Conference document in last week's Weekly Worker shows just how far anti-democratic sentiments and practices are entrenched in the SWP:http://cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/942/internal-bulletins-crazy-contortions-of-swp-central-committeeIn particular, the slate system of electing (in effect co-opting) the "leadership". This was the practice of Communist Parties everywhere, including those in power. As far as I know, it is still practised in China, Cuba and North Korea.The thing is of course that for the SWP this would still continue after "the revolution", a recipe for the sort of state capitalism they rightly criticise in the old USSR. But then they always did support state capitalism in Russia under Lenin and up until Trotsky was exiled in 1928.
Two more items to add to the file.First, there was an article in yesterday's London Evening Standard by Anthony Hilton entitled "Peer-to-peer lending is here to stay" which opens:
Quote:Travel agents put people who want to go on holiday in touch with tour operators and airlines who will take them there. Insurance brokers take people with vehicles they have to insure and find them companies willing to take the risk. Banks gather up the savings of individuals and lend their money to people or businesses who want loans. All three are intermediaries, and they come into existence because individuals could not easily learn about or get access to the services they needed other than by going through them and paying them a commission.Peer-to-peer lending is not lords lending to each other. It's people with savings lending directly to people or businesses who want money without going through the intermediary of a bank. Note the way Hilton automatically assumes that banks are intermediaries that lend other people's savings.Second, is a report in today's Metro on a study by the New Economics Foundation which claims that the lower interest rates at which the Big Four banks can borrow money because they are considered as too big to fail (and so will be bailed out by the government) amounts to a subsidy of £34bn from "taxpayers". Actually, this is not really a subsidy but a notional figure based on what these banks would have to pay in higher interest on what they borrow if they were not considered too big to fail. Coming from the NEF (which has published a booklet Where Does Money Come From? which endorses the view thar banks can create credit out of nothing by a mere keyboard stroke), one of the criticisms they make of this is curious as well as revealing. Metro reported:
Quote:Lylia Prieg, a researcher for the Foundation, said the figures hughlighted the 'privileged position' of the big banks. 'There is no good economic rationale for allowing over-sized banks to benefit from subsidised borrowing costs, as this encourages reliance of short-term and more risky funding instead of funding their activities with customer deposit,' she said.So, when it comes down to it, the NEF accept that banks do need to borrow the money they lend, whether short-term from the more risky money market or from customer deposits. They can't have it both ways: arguing that banks can create money to lend from nothing and arguing that they have a privileged access to the funding they need for their loans.
According to comrade Keith Scholey's pamphlet on The Communist Club, there was another condition for joining the Communist League:
Quote:… in the summer of 1850, that Wilhelm Liebknecht, the founder of the German Social Democratic Party, met Marx. The latter commented to him that membership of the League depended on a thorough examination by the group's phrenologist (bump reader), Karl Pfaender. (p. 10)Another piece of information that will help you score in pub quizzes is that Victoria Beckham is said to be a direct descendant of Karl Pfaender:http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/565243/Victoria-Beckham-is-descendant-of-comrade-of-Marx
Mike Ballard who was associated with Subversion confirms that the change of title from "The End of Anarchism?" to "The End of Anarcho-Syndicalism?" was not made by Subversion and was not in the original. So, it was made by the Anarchist Federation, a bit out of order I'd have thought. He also says that the author was Mark Shipway, author of Anti-Parliamentary Communism and of the chapter on "Council Communism" in Non-Market Socialism in the 19th and 20th centuries.
There was a rumour that the LibDem candidate might be clown and former MP Lembit Opik, who lives in Lambeth, but that turned out not to be true. Pity in a way as that would have raised the profile of the election
International Review was not edited by Paul Mattick (he just wrote the occasional article for them) nor could it be described as "council communist". It was basically more "anti-Bolshevik Marxist" and published the first English translations of Luxemburg's Reform or Revolution and Martov's The State and the Socialist Revolution.There's another good article on Spain here that was first published in Wildcat in 1986:http://www.af-north.org/Subversion/subversion_18.htm#spainIt was originally published under the title "Spain '36; The End of Anarchism?" This version republished in Subversion and put on the internet by the Anarchist Federation (ex Anarchist Communist Federation) has the title to "Spain 36, the End of Anarcho-Syndicalism?" I don't know whether it was Subversion or the AF who changed the title (probably the AF). From our point of view of course the original title was better.It's been translated into French (in issue No 30 of our then French-language publication Socialisme Mondial) and Portuguese so we already have a ready-to-hand introduction in these languages to our criticism of "self-managed capitalism" (revived today by such groups as Michael Albert's Parecon).
I see things haven't changed since we published our educational document on the SWP in 1995. Here's an extract on Conference Procedure from section III:
Quote:The main item on the agenda is a report by the Central Committee on the political “perspectives” which is usually a document of pamphlet-length. The Central Committee also submits other reports – on work in special areas of activity (industry, students, women), internal organisation, finance – for the Conference to discuss. In the SWP, branches still have the formal right to submit motions, but they are strongly discouraged from doing so. As an explanatory note intended for new members, accompanying documents submitted for the party’s 1983 Conference put it:“Branches can submit resolutions if they wish and these may [sic] be voted on. But in recent years the practice of sending resolutions to conference has virtually ceased” (Socialist Review, September 1983).What this means is that it is the Central Committee – the leadership – which quite literally sets the agenda for the Conference. The branch delegates meet, therefore, to discuss only what is put before them by the Central Committee. Not that the delegates are delegates in the proper sense of the term as instructed representatives of the branches sending them:“Delegates should not be mandated . . . Mandating is a trade union practice, with no place in a revolutionary party”.Since voting on motions submitted by branches is dismissed as a “trade union practice”, another procedure, more open to manipulation by the leadership, is operated:“At the end of each session of conference commissions are elected to draw up a report on the session detailing the points made. In the event of disagreement two or more commissions can be elected by the opposing delegates. The reports are submitted to conference and delegates then vote in favour of one of the commissions. The advantage of this procedure is that conference does not have to proceed by resolution like a trade union conference”.No branch motions, no mandated delegates, what else? No ballots of the entire membership either. In the first volume of his political biography of Lenin, Cliff records in shocked terms that “in January 1907 Lenin went so far as to argue for the institution of a referendum of all party members on the issues facing the party”, commenting “certainly a suggestion which ran counter to the whole idea of democratic centralism” (Lenin, Building the Party, p. 280)In fact no official of the SWP above branch level is directly elected by a vote of the members. One power that the branches do retain is the right to nominate members for election, by the Conference delegates, to the National Committee, but, as over presenting motions, they are discouraged from nominating people who do not accept the “perspectives” espoused by the Central Committee. So elections do take place to the National Committee but on the basis of personalities rather than politics. However, it is the way that the Central Committee is elected that is really novel: the nominations for election to new central committee are proposed not by branches but . . . by the outgoing central committee! Once again, in theory, branches can present other names but they never do.It is easy to see how this means that the central committee – the supreme leadership of the organisation – is a self-perpetuating body renewal in effect only by co-optation. This is justified on the grounds of continuity and efficiency – it takes time to gain the experience necessary to become a good leader, so that it would be a waste of the experienced gained if some leader were to be voted off by the vagaries of a democratic vote. Choosing the leadership by a competitive vote is evidently something else “with no place in a revolutionary party” any more than in an army.This, incidentally, is how the Politburo was (s)elected in the USSR which the SWP admits was state-capitalism.
