ALB
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Of course. That’s the main purpose of this forum — to provide resources for putting over the case for socialism.
Leaving a country where there’s a war on is of course another good way to avoid getting killed for nothing.
In the meantime isn’t there this?
There’s a good one here:
When Russia first invaded Ukraine two cities negotiated to allow the Russian army to take over without armed resistance – Kherson on the Black Sea coast and Kupiansk near Kharkov and the border with Russia. This saved the places from destruction and their population from being killed in any crossfire and was obviously, as we pointed out here at the time,the sensible thing for the local authorities to have done.
But it wasn’t to last. Last year the Ukrainian nationalists recaptured Kupiansk and later the Russian army withdrew from Kherson. They were “liberated” but were now in the front line and both have since been bombarded and large parts of them reduced to ruins.
Only crazed nationalists think that it is better to be dead than not under their rule. Ordinary people don’t agree but don’t have a choice in the matter.
Here’s what I was going to argue on the other thread before it became scatological.
If the term “epistemological idealist” means anything, it ought to mean that the only world that exists is the world of ideas. But it doesn’t seem to be being used in that sense. Apparently, you can be an “idealist” even if you accept that there is a world that exists outside the mind.
Academic philosophy draws a (valid) distinction between those who hold that “observable characteristics exist in the observed object, independent of the observer” (which they call “epistemological realism”) and those who hold that “the characteristics exist in the mind of the observer independent of the object” (so-called “epistemological idealism”) but I would have thought that these were two different types of materialism (since both accept that there is an “object” outside the mind).
I think it will have been Lenin in 1908 who first called the second view “idealist” (and argued himself into a corner of having to say that the mind was like a mirror). Which would have made Bertrand Russel and AJ Ayer and the Logical Positivists. staunch atheists all, philosophical “idealists”. I think in fact that was CP line on them.
An “epistemological idealist” ought to be someone who thinks that “objects” only exist in the mind (whether of a god, collective humanity, or an individual human). If you accept that there is an objective world (whatever it is like or whether or not it can be known) that exists independently of the mind then you are a materialist. In any event, you are not an idealist in the classical sense.
If saying that the mind has a role in understanding the world makes you an “idealist” then, as Engels pointed out, everybody is an idealist:
“The influences of the external world upon man express themselves in his brain, are reflected therein as feelings, impulses, volitions — in short, as “ideal tendencies”, and in this form become “ideal powers”. If, then, a man is to be deemed an idealist because he follows “ideal tendencies” and admits that “ideal powers” have an influence over him, then every person who is at all normally developed is a born idealist and how, in that case, can there still be any materialists?”—[Ludwig Feuerbach, Part 2, Materialism]
(Quoted by twc in a draft of his post that appeared on Testing2).
In that passage Lenin quotes, Kautsky is not just saying that socialist consciousness will not develop out of the elemental day-to-day workers struggles. He goes further and says that the idea of socialism first originated in the minds of (bourgeois) intellectuals who communicated it to “the more intellectually developed proletarians” who in turn communicate it to the rest of the working class.
Is this historically correct? The “members of the bourgeois intelligentsia“ Marx and Engels may have clarified socialist theory but they learnt socialist ideas from German and French artisans.
Lewis may have satisfactorily shown that Kautsky (and Lenin) held that socialist consciousness would not emerge spontaneously and automatically out of the elemental workers’ struggles, but not the different proposition that the idea of socialism itself first arose outside the working class. I haven’t read his book so I don’t know whether or not he defends this proposition too.
Actually, the (English translation of the) passage from the draft programme of the Austrian Social Democratic Party that Kautsky criticises does not seem that bad (or to necessarily bear the interpretation Kautsky puts on it):
“The more capitalist development increases the numbers of the proletariat, the more the proletariat is compelled and becomes fit to fight against capitalism. The proletariat becomes conscious of the possibility and of the necessity for socialism.”
What’s wrong with that?
Yes, I think the difference will be that while we agree that socialist consciousness comes from outside the day-to-day economic struggle we would say that this comes from other workers and not from outside the working class (as by Lenin’s professional revolutionaries recruited mainly from the Russian intelligentsia).
Also, the political consciousness that Lenin had in mind in 1901 was not a socialist one but a consciousness of the need to overthrow the Tsarist regime and establish a bourgeois republic in Russia.
The really big difference came when, after seizing power, the Bolsheviks including Lenin himself apllied their theory of the need for a vanguard party to lead the political struggle for bourgeois democracy to the political struggle for socialism.
Ironically perhaps, this is how the Socialist Standard first interpreted,in 1933, what Lenin was saying.
It gets better.
Capitalism doing our job for us.
Yes, this photo of a (Ukrainian) rag on the end of a pole placed on top of a bombed-out building surrounded by utter destruction well sums up the futility, not to say obscenity, of it all. Probably a couple of days earlier it was a Russian rag on a pole that was there:
Labour rules out a tax on wealth or any more taxes in businesses as it emphasises its pro-capitalist-business position:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66634187.amp
Can there anybody who thinks that a Labour government would mean any more than a change of personnel in charge of ministries?
These days they are not even claiming to be a reformist party, redistributing wealth, increasing benefits, etc.
In the 1950s they used to talk of Butskellism to bring out that there was no difference between the policies of the Tory Butler and the Laborite Gaitskell. What shall we call it today Sunarmerism or Starmnakism? Or maybe just stick to Labour Tory, Same Old Story.
I see SPEW, through their front organisation TUSC, are thinking of contesting the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election. But so is the “Scottish Socialist Party” (of Tommy Sheridan fame), another product of the old Militant Tendency. I wonder whether in the end they will agree on a single Trotskyite candidate.
Actually the figures are not as good (or as bad) as they might seem. We are not just sitting on a large sum of money and doing nothing, as not even the BBC reporter claimed.
For a start, half of the £2.6 million is the notional value of the premises we have owned since 1951. This £1.3 million cannot be spent. In fact owning property costs money, as on maintenance and taxes.
And we don’t do nothing. In fact our spending as on publishing the Socialist Standard, elections, meetings, publicity, etc. is, and has been for a number of years now, more than the income we get from what members pay and income from the sale of pamphlets and subscriptions to the Socialist Standard. This used to be covered from the money we hold in bank accounts.
But when we received a couple of large legacies (normal in an organisation that has been going for so long) we decided to invest some of the money and use the interest to cover our ordinary deficit. This hasn’t yet done so but may well in the next few years with the higher interest rates now being paid. It might even become enough to employ somebody.
I don’t think that article does us harm. Comrade Cox was able to get over that we stand for a stateless world society based on common ownership where money will be redundant. And he neatly dealt with the issue of so-called “ethical” investment by pointing out there is mo such thing.
I see the conspiracy theories, or more accurately the conspiracy rumours, have started already. This could be an interesting case study of how these originally start and spread.
Confirmation of our argument that the inevitable failure of reformist parties to make capitalism work in the interest of the majority class of workers paves the way for the growth of ‘right wing’ populist parties. An ‘anarcho-capitalist’ president opposed to abortion and sex education does sound a bit of contradiction. Of course he, too, would fail but he and his cronies might be able to line their pockets before being kicked out like Trump and Bolsonaro.
