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Jonny K. wrote:

When a Marxist Leninist, say (so, a Trot, a Stalinist, a Hoxhaite, a what-you-will), says 'state', they mean 'the mechanisms by which one class suppresses by force the interests of another class'. Expressed in these minimal terms, I find it difficult to see how any revolutionary communist, howsoever left- they may be, would not agree that, following the revolution, the proletariat would have to resist violent counterrevolution from the minority former ruling class. (I dearly wished there was an SPGB member present when I came to that point; because I'm putting words into the mouths of a movement I do not know enough about to analyze with any confidence. I'd be delighted if anyone can either correct me or confirm my proposition.)

Well, yes. Our position is that a democratically-demonstrated socialist majority would not/should not allow, should it occur, a "recalictrant minority" to impede the establishment of socialism by violent action and that, if they tried, they would have to be dealt with one way or another if necessary by arms. As the Chartists put it, "peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must". Whether or not a minority of anti-socialists would be prepared to take up arms against an overwhelming majority is another matter. There is no reason to think that it will necessarily happen.and some reasons to think that it might not. So your "would have to resist violent counter-revolution" should more correctly be "would have to in the event of…"In any event, we can't imagine the whole capitalist class and their hangers-on being prepared to do this, even though (peaceful) political power will be being used to dispossess them. That will be the action of one class (the working class) agains another class (them). Since this action need not involve violence the Leninist definition you give of the state as "the mecanisms by which one class suppresses by force the interests of another class" could be misleading unless it is explained that "force" doesn't necessarily mean physical violence and armed suppression. It just means the exercise of political power.  But of course Leninists don't envisage the working class as such imposing their will on the capitalist class. They envisage themselves, as the self-appointed "vanguard of the working class" doing this, a quite different matter.

Jonny K. wrote:

However, I argued, there is another function of the state, well, another function that a not-SPGB Marxist would, I think, have to ascribe to the post-revolutionary socialist state. The post-revolutionary state (which, let's be clear, doesn't have to mean a party, a subset of the (former) proletariat – it can mean the proletariat as a whole, acting in whatever suitably democratic way it sees fit) will have to subjugate not onlly the interests of the bourgeoisie as a class, but also the interests of individual (former) proletarians. Because, in a sense, we will not yet be former proletarians. As long as we do not have sufficient automation and superabundance to permit each person to work only as much as they voluntarily will work, and only on the things that they want to work on, it will be necessary to oblige people to work (perhaps in the same way people are obliged to work under capitalism; perhaps in a different, less morally repugnant way).

After the state has been used to dispossess the capitalist class then classes will have been abolished and the working class will become "former proletarians" just as the capitalist class will have become former capitalists. This being the case (even on the Leninist definition of the state you quote above: for one class to oppress another) there will be no longer any need for a state and it can be dismantled (i.e. the coercive aspects of the central administration lopped off). Socialism will have been established and there will no longer be a state.In fact, our view is that the term "socialist state" is a contradiction in terms ((like "Marxist-Leninist!"). There could be no physical coercion to get people to work since with no state there'd be no way of doing this. (if there was, then there wouldn't be socialism). Why should there be? People who had just carried out a socialist revolution (the dispossession of the capitalist class) would surely have done this in the knowledge that, this done, they would still have to work and would still want to work, if only to keep socialism going.

Jonny K. wrote:

So I end up at a position of thinking that this is a genuine sticking point between the two sides on the question of the state. And I cannot see how we can expect to be able to instantaneously have communism (no state, no classes, no private ownership of the means of production) under the socioeconomic conditions immediately inherited from dying capitalism. (….) But yeah… on questions of power structures and organization within the socialist movement and any future socialist society, I find a lot of merit in the positions of left-communists and anarchists (I see no value in vanguardism or democratic centralism or even the existence of a party at all; and I value participatory and/or direct forms of democracy); but on the need for transitional forms of society between capitalism and full communism, I'm with the Leninists.

You are right that the argument that as long as there is not (super) abundance there will therefore be the need for a necessarily coercive state is a Leninist argument put forward by both Lenin (who said it would be needed to enforce the "bourgeois right" of some receiving more than others for working more) and Trotsky (who said it would be needed to make people stand in line for their rationed supplies of consumer goods and services). There are two separate questions here:1. Will socialist society, even in its early days, really not be in a position to produce enough of the things people need to live and enjoy life? Given the end of the artificial scarcity (production stopping at the amount beyond which it is no longer profitable to go) and the organised waste (not just wars and preparations for war but also all the resources devoted to buying and selling and money shuffling including collecting and spending taxes), it should be possible to go over to free access very rapidly after the establishment of socialism. "Superabundance" is a red herring; all that is necessary is the ability to produce enough for all.2. Even on your assumption that this won't be the case, it doesn't follow that there would therefore be a need for a state to coerce people to work and stand in line for their food, etc as advocated (and implemented) by Leninists. There are various non-Leninist, non-State proposals of how to deal with this perceived problem: labour-time vouchers as advocated by the De Leonists of the Socialist Labor Party of America, the Dutch Council Communists and the advocates of Parecon. We don't think much of these blueprints but at least they don't envisage a State like the Leninists do.

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Oh dear, does this mean back to this?Shouldn't do normally as we're in a busy high street with CCTV not down a back alley.

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We know Healey loyalist Corin Redgrave of old: http://www.newstatesman.com/node/147017Pirani does raise the intriguing question of the psychological state of those who join hierarchical, Leninist organisations and their willingness to submit to the dictates of the Leadership.

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SWP members put themselves in this position of being summoned to explain themselves because in joining the SWP they accept a constitution which says that a member:

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works within and under the direction of the appropriate party bodies.

and

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Subject to the sovereignty of Conference, decisions taken by the Central Committee (CC), National Committee (NC) and Party Council are binding on caucuses, districts and branches, and individual members.

In other words, they agree to be foot soldiers carrying out the orders of "higher-ups" in the organisation.If we are going to issue a statement on the SWP's present troubles it is on its undemocratic nature that we should concentrate. Here, for instance, is how, according to Rule 5 of its Constitution, its supreme body, the Central Committee, is "elected":

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The CC consists of members elected by Conference according to the following procedure:The outgoing Central Committee selects and circulates a provisional slate for the new CC at the beginning of the period of pre-Conference discussion. This is then discussed at the district aggregates where comrades can propose alternative slates.At the Conference the outgoing CC proposes a final slate (which may have been changed as a result of the pre-Conference discussion). This slate, along with any other that is supported by a minimum of five delegates, is discussed and voted on by Conference.

No trade union has such an undemocratic constitution. As the draft statement proposed by JonD at the beginning of this thread puts it, the SWP's "organisational norms" go against "the norms of the labour movement for over a century" and are "contrary to the labour movement and its best interests".

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Zinovievism? Intrigued by the title I took a look at this one: http://internationalsocialismuk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/is-zinovievism-finished-reply-to-alex.html and found confirmation  that the SWP is modelled on the CPGB of the 1920s:.

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The model operated currently by the SWP is not that of the Bolshevik revolution. It is a version of the Zinovievite model adopted during the period of “Bolshevisation” in the mid-1920s and then honed by ever smaller and more marginal groups.

On the face of it "democratic centralism" seems reasonable: Conference votes for something; this is binding on all members and an elected executive body is responsible for carrying out the decision. This is how our party functions. But this is not how the SWP (and, let's not forget, other Leninist and Trotskyist groups) operate. As the author of the article points out, what the SWP Conference decides is what is proposed to it by its executive body and this executive body is "elected" as a slate and co-opts its successors and new members. This is certainly "centralism" but is not democratic.

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But merely invoking the term “democratic centralism” does not tell you anything about which level of decision get made by which people, how frequently decisions are made or what mechanisms should exist for review, let alone how to elect a Central Committee or of whom it should consist. Two examples will show how our current model is weighted towards centralism at the expense of democracy.The first is in relation to decision making. According to the theory, conference discusses and decides (democracy) and then comrades, including those who opposed the agreed position, carry out the decisions (centralism). Fine: but what does conference actually decide? It is presented with a series of general perspective documents which are usually so bland and platitudinous that it is virtually impossible to disagree with them: the economic crisis is not going to be resolved, times are hard but there are also opportunities, we must not be complacent over the threat of fascism, and so on. To agree with this kind of statement is not to make a decision over strategy or tactics, or anything specific enough for the CC to be held to account. The real decisions about actual policy – to establish united fronts, to join electoral coalitions – are almost always made by the CC itself between conferences, with conference asked to ratify them after the event.The second is in relation to the composition of the CC. The CC self-selects: it has an agreed political perspective; when someone dies or resigns it chooses as replacements comrades who agree – or who are thought to agree – with that perspective; at no point is the chain ever broken by open political debate. And if the perspective is wrong? The problems extend to the membership of the CC. What are the requirements of a potential CC member? There are apparently two: that they should live in or around London and that – with a handful of exceptions – they are full-time employees of the party. So – the comrades who are eligible for membership of the CC are those who until their selection have been paid to carry out the decisions of the previous CC and who, because they tend to have been students beforehand, rarely have any direct experience of the class struggle. How can a leadership this narrow be capable of forming an accurate perspective?

The trouble is that the author and many of the other critics still look back to the Bolshevik party that usurped power in November 1917 as their model. Hopefully, it will be a case of them learning one step at a time that Bolshevism and Leninism should not be regarded as models to follow.

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This news item (copied from a link a member has provided on one of our other forums) would seem to be relevant to any discussion on (true)  Leninism and the SWP:http://rt.com/politics/communists-power-lenin-zyuganov-971/

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Alaric wrote:

one of the textbook definition of economics along the lines of "The study of how societies use scarce resources to produce and distribute goods and services".

That's one definition of economics and, clearly, on it, "economics" will have existed since the Stone Age and before and will still exist in socialism. But that's not how Marxian socialists have traditionally defined it. We have seen it as the study, essentially of the production and distribution of goods and services in societies where exchange (trade, buying and selling) is widespread. In these societies forces come into operation which act like natural laws imposing themselves on people and which some economics textbooks teach actually are natural laws. When we criticise "economics" it is its claim to be studying eternal facts of human existence, instead of just what happens at the present, capitalist stage of human social development. On this definition where there are no markets there is nothing to study.But it's silly to argue over definitions. To have a meaningful discussion all those taking part need to agree on definitions. So, let's go with yours. Obviously, then, we can't be against this, as the study of the allocating resources to meet human wants. That will happen in socialism and we are interested in ways of doing this in a non-market way. That is why the article commented favourably on Alvin Roth's work. Others who have won the Nobel Prize for Economics and who have made useful contributions to this are Wassily Leontief (1973, for his work on input-output tables) and Leonid Kantorovich (1975, for his work on linear programming).Actually, in answer to the followers of Ludwig Von Mises who argue that it is impossible to organise production and distribution rationally without prices, markets and money (so that socialism would be impossible) we have done some thinking on how a socialist society would be able to work without these. See:Chapters 4 and 5 of our pamphlet Socialism As A Practical Alternative.The “Economic Calculation” controversy: unravelling of a mythThe Alternative to CapitalismYou are knocking at an open door.

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I don't think we can agree with this Historical Revisionist view of Lenin as merely a Leftwing Social Democrat that Louis whatever-his-name-is puts forward:

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Largely through the efforts of Lars Lih, it has become more and more difficult to ignore the historical record. The publication of his 808 page Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context was like Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the church door in 1517, except in this case it was the door of the Marxist-Leninist church. Unlike Peter Camejo or me, Lih was not interested in building a new left. He was mainly interested in correcting the record. As a serious scholar with a deep command of the Russian language, he was quite capable of defending his thesis, namely that Lenin sought nothing more than to create a party based on the German social democracy in Russia. There was never any intention to build a new kind of party, even during the most furious battles with the Mensheviks who after all (as Lih convincingly makes the case) were simply a faction of the same broad party that Lenin belonged to [emphasis added].

In the years up to WW1 Lenin may have toned down a bit what he had written in What Is To Be Done in 1902, but he returned to it with a vengeance after the Bolshevik coup of November 1917. If not, why did he insist on splitting the Labour Movement outside Russia and building up "Communist" parties as a "new kind of party" based on the top-down principles of "democratic centralisation" he had outlined in his 1902 pamphlet?The SWP in fact has consciously modelled itself, as far as both tactics and organisation are concerned, on the CPGB of the 1920s seeing itself as that party's modern equivalent. That's why the have an undemocratic constitution with an all-powerful Leadership "elected" as a slate and with no chance of being defeated, either in elections to it or over the "orientation" it puts before Conference. and with the power to order the membership to follow its line.These latter-day critics of "democratic centralism" should go the whole hog and throw Lenin out with the bathwater.

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Thanks for that link:http://www.marketdesigner.blogspot.se/2013/01/market-design-for-everyone-from.htmlPeople should have a look at it. We said that Alvin Roth may have deserved a Nobel Prize (if for non-economics) and he returns the compliment by providing a link to our article.Someone else takes up our point of how can you speak of a "market" when price and money are not involved.

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As 1 January was the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln in the US Civil War, the March Socialist Standard will cover this issue. There will also be a review of the Lincoln film.Even the official US government's archive site recognises its limitations in practice:

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President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free." Despite this expansive wording, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. It applied only to states that had seceded from the Union, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy that had already come under Northern control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union military victory.

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There are some people who want to replace a Marxist analysis of women’s liberation with one centred on patriarchy theory

The SWP are dead wrong about Leninism and so-called "democratic centralism", but not about this. We need to be careful about endorsing people who make the above sort of criticism of the SWP. In fact, perhaps the best thing that Chris Harman wrote was his refutation of the above view in his "Engels and the Origin of Human Society".I don't know who Donny Mayo is but this is the sort of criticism we should be backing:

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And in his article on why he is leaving the SWP, “Donny Mayo” (…) claims there is a “global crisis of old-style Trotskyist Leninism” and that the SWP is an example of a “historically outdated model” and that democratic centralism has become an “increasingly cultish mantra”.

Don't know about "has become", though. It always was.

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It's the other way round too. Some of the behaviour of non-humans also has to be learned. You might think that birds can fly by "instinct". Apparently not according to this video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI8yWl3AUOUIf even some birds need to learn to fly it's not surprising that humans, with our brain permitting adaptable behaviour, have to learn to do practically everything. In fact I can't think of any human social behaviour that does not have to be learned. Of course the biologically inherited capacity (such as prehensile thumbs,etc)  to engage in such behaviour has to exist — that's why we can't fly, except by constructing aeroplanes..

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I think Jack Conrad and the Weekly Worker are being excessively pedantic. When the SWP say that "the workers create all the wealth under capitalism" all that they are meaning to say is that the labour that today creates wealth by working on materials that orifinally came from nature is that of the working class. They no more mean to say that workers create the materials that originally came from nature than we do when we refer in Clause 1 of our Declaration of principles to "the working class, by whose labour alone wealth is produced".But let's be pedantic. Conrad is claiming that Marx's statement in the Critique of the Gotha Programme denying that labour is "the source of all wealth" refutes the SWP statement. But does it? Does saying that labour "creates" or "produces" all wealth mean that it is "the source" of all wealth too? I wouldn't have thought so. Labour is not the source of all wealth. It is just that without labour wealth can't be produced, i.e nature can't be transformed.And when Conrad raises the point that peasants and artisans also produce wealth (by their labour) this is the sort of objection that we expect pedants to raise against what we say in our Declaration of Principles:

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when visiting Greece, I enjoy drinking the rough village wines sold along the roadside by small farmers; I buy newspapers from my local British-Muslim newsagent; and I get my shoes repaired by the British-Bengali cobbler over the road. Such little businesses produce use-values and therefore, by definition, wealth too. With such examples in mind, it is surely mistaken to baldly state that “workers create all the wealth under capitalism”.

But even he seems to think he's gone too far here since he adds:

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In theoretical terms, forgetting or passing over petty bourgeois commodity production is a mote, a mere speck of dust, in the eye of the SWP’s ‘Where we stand’ column.

What does he want them to say: that "workers create the great bulk of wealth under capitalism" or us to say "by whose labour most wealth is produced"?And, to end on a really pedantic note, what wealth does his "local British-Muslim newsagent" produce?

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Jonathan Chambers wrote:

Some people, for example, are very averse to risk-taking whilst others display a gung-ho attitude to personal danger.  Is it not possible that such behaviour is due to a genetic predisposition and therefore susceptible to modification?

Yes, perhaps, in fact it probably will have something to do with genes, but these are ways in which one part of their body, their brain, tends to work. As to specific behaviour they are a bit vague. You could say the same sort of bad eyesight. In other words, human genes govern the make-up and functioning of the body, not the way humans behave in society.

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Bartlett's comments echo what Tory MP Douglas Hogg (later Lord Halisham) said in the debate on the Beveridge Report in the House of Commons in 1943 and quoted in our pamphlet Beveridge Re-Organises Poverty:

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Mr. Quintin Hogg, M. P. (Conservative) in the Debate on the Report. He said“Some of my hon. Friends seem to overlook one or two ultimate facts about social reform. The first is that if you do not give people social reform, they are going to give you social revolution….Let anyone consider the possibility of a series of dangerous industrial strikes following the present hostilities, and the effect that it would have on our industrial recovery….” (Parliamentary Debates, 17th February, 1943, Col.1818.)

Our pamphlet went on to make an interesting point against those who think that a growing socialist movement will inevitably be met by repression:

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In passing we would draw attention to the implications of the first part of Mr. Hogg’s remarks. It will be noticed that Mr. Hogg, in face of what he considers to be a threat of social revolution, does not, as has often been suggested to us, advocate such measures as closing down Parliament or rendering socialist organisations illegal, but hopes by offering sufficient bribes in the way of social reform to be able to keep away the evil day.

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