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More Labour, Tory, Same Old Story. Ten years ago the then prime minister David Cameron notoriously called to cut “the green crap”. Now, the would-be next prime minister, Sir Keir Scammer, has declared that he “hates tree huggers”:
If Sir Keir does become prime minister, his first meeting with the king could be embarrassing. He might even be guilty of lèse-majesté.
I think Ojeili means that we stuck rigidly to Marxian economics and the materialist conception of history, and were “intransigent” about advocating political action for socialism and nothing else (no reform programme). The Bordigists were more super-Leninists as they were “intransigent” that Lenin was right about the workers only being able to evolve a trade Union consciousness under capitalism and that therefore they needed to be led by a vanguard party. They also argued that the “communist programme” hadn’t changed since the 1848 Communist Manifesto.
The full passage has some relevance to Chris Wright. It reads:
“For many Marxian libertarian socialists, the political bankruptcy of socialist orthodoxy necessitated a theoretical break. This break took a number of forms. The Bordigists and the SPGB championed a super-Marxian intransigence in theoretical matters. Other socialists made a return ‘behind Marx’ to the anti-positivist programme of German idealism.”
The last sentence describes precisely Wright’s position.
Incidentally, Ojeili knows our position well through his contact with the World Socialist Party of New Zealand.
Thanks for this, ZJW. I think he has a valid point when he says that up till 1917 Lenin, like many others, was an anti-revisionist Social Democrat who held Kautsky in high regard, even though he felt that conditions in tsarist Russia did not permit socialists to organise in a mass, democratic party; that in fact he wanted to overthrow Tsarism in order to create the conditions for this. Some of the general theoretical stuff Lenin wrote in this period wasn’t too bad. For instance:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/granat/ch04.htm
But the rest of Wright’s article degenerates into this sort of thing:
“Marx (and Hegel) put the ontological into its proper place, as part of the process of becoming. Being and its negation (Nothing) form the ground for Becoming and are interlocked moments, although not in a general sense in capital, but in the historically and socially specific modes of existence of the value-form and the form of labour as abstract labour. Being finds itself reified, objectified, under capital, and, as such, appears to be the primary category, when in fact the negation of Being in favour of the non-being of value brought on by the specific social relations of capital dominates. A ‘positive-ontological’ reading of Marx leads us back to the objectivism of the Second and Third Internationals.”
Why not simply say that Marx did not regard value as a thing but as a manifestation of a social relation that would disappear when that social relation did? More people might understand the point you are trying to make. And did the Second International go off the rails because it got its ‘ontology’ wrong?
His conclusion seems to be that “pro-revolutionaries” should simply describe and record working-class struggles:
“I think that a discussion of the ideas of C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya’s ‘full fountain pen’ idea, that an organisation of revolutionaries provide a medium or multiple media, for the workers to say what they want in their own words, to allow them to hear each other and debate, would have been both useful and appropriate.“
The opposite mistake to Leninism — that left to themselves workers will evolve a socialist consciousness without needing any input from other workers who have already become socialists.
Yes, Borys has played a particularly sinister role in this war, rushing to Kiev in April 2002 Zelensky to order on behalf of NATO to break off discussions with Russia on a peace deal, with the promise that if he did NATO would supply enough arms for Ukraine to fight to the last Ukrainian. And of course it is not at all surprising that he considers it no problem to ignore an international treaty.
He fancies himself as a latter-day Churchill. He may well turn out to be because the current Ukrainian offensive seems to have a similarity with Churchill’s disastrous Gallipoli campaign during the first world slaughter.
More leaflets were distributed on Friday. And more discarded leaflets from other parties collected. This time the manifesto of the Green Party candidate (who, appropriately enough, is actually called Green). She confirms that the Green Party wants to return to the small-scale capitalism (from which present-day corporate capitalism evolved):
“Vote Green Party for a Well Being Economy.
Public Money to be spent on Public Good not profits for the few.
The economy is not working for most people (. . .)
Society needs to transition to a sustainable economy urgently.
Introduce universal basic income to reduce dependency on economic growth. Revive and support the local economy, home based enterprises, local food production and reskilling.”She is right that the economy is not working for most people, but that’s the nature of the capitalist economy. It cannot be made to work for most people, not even by the reforms proposed by the Green Party. It is a profit-making economy that can work only in the interest of the profit-takers.
Just how universal basic income will “reduce dependency on economic growth” is not explained. You would have thought, rather, that it would be the other way round — that economic growth would be needed to sustain UBI. But we shouldn’t expect clear thinking on economic matters from the Green Party which believes that banks can and do create money from thin air.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-66142554.amp
When I heard this item on the bbc radio news just now I was ready to send a post admitting that I had been wrong to say that Britain wouldn’t criticise the US decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine.
Then I listened to the small print and saw that what he actually said was that Britain would not be sending any as it was a signatory to a convention that discourages their use in general. Nothing about Britain condemning the US decision. After all, you wouldn’t expect a poodle — or even an attack dog — to criticise its master.
It’s all very well being snooty about X-boxes but the late comrade Ron Cook used to argue that computer games were popular because it gave those who played them a sense of control that was lacking in their everyday life. If he was right, the underlining motivation is the same that will motivate the movement for socialism — except of course that socialism will give people actual control, not just a feeling of control.
I was about to say “fair enough” but unfortunately in the meantime you reverted to type !
But it is true that you don’t need to be able to read to want socialism. All that is required is an understanding that capitalism can’t be made to work in your interest and that socialism is the only way out.
It is also true that, because objectively socialism is the only way out, this will occur to people from their own experience and that they will seek to spread this conclusion.
Today, when we are so few and our task is to win the battle of ideas against those who defend capitalism or see no alternative to it, we socialists need to have a deeper understanding of why capitalism cannot be made to work in the interest of the excluded majority.
Trivial nastiness? No, they are a load of shits. Just as Labour politicians are desperate to get the fruits of office, so the Tories are desperate not to lose them. The only card they have to play is anti-immigrant prejudice and they are playing it for all it’s worth.
As Labour has stolen their clothes to become a Nasty Party too, the Tories have decided to become the Very Nasty Party.
Nor by self-styled aesthetes who enjoy fine books and who think that the rest of the working class are thickos.
Here’s the Uk government (under Borys) condemning Russia for using cluster bombs in Ukraine and declaring:
“The United Kingdom calls upon all those that continue to use such weapons to cease immediately, and calls upon all states that have not yet done so to join the Convention without delay.”
Let’s see if the UK government condemns “any use of cluster munitions by any actor” and calls on the US and Ukraine to“cease immediately” using them. Fat chances of that, exposing their hypocrisy and the Convention on Cluster Munitions as yet another scrap of paper. If they don’t they will be complicit in their use and in “the humanitarian consequences of these weapons, which have had a devastating impact on civilians in many conflict areas.”
What’s wrong with these people? Maximilian Rubel used to argue that the leaders of the nuclear-armed states must be psychopaths to even contemplate using them.
Most states have banned the use of cluster bombs, including leading NATO states like Britain, Germany and France because of the consequences especially on children after a war is over. but not the US (nor, for that matter Russia). Now the US is to supply them to the desperate politicians in charge of the Ukraine state who nobody knows what they will do if threatened with defeat.
The first socialist leaflets were distributed door-to-door yesterday in Yiewsley in the south of the constituency. This was also a chance to pick up discarded leaflets from the candidates (Labour, Tory, SDP and Rejoin the EU, but there are 13 other candidates).
After stating that “since the Conservatives came to power in 2010, real wages have fallen so far that we are now worse off by £1373 a year”, the Labour candidate Danny Beales, stated that “Labour has a plan to put money into the pockets of local people”.
Who (if you believed them) wouldn’t vote for someone who promised that? Actually, when you analyse what’s being promised, it’s not so much putting money into people’s pockets as not taking it out.
“A Labour government”, the promise reads, “would bring your energy bills down by £1400”. Which, if carried out, would just take people back to the position they were in when the Tories came to power 13 years ago.
The whole Labour campaign nationally is based on blaming the Tory government rather than capitalism. According to Labour, the fall in real wages is all down to Tory “mismanagement” as if a government is in a position to control the way the capitalist economy works.
We are being asked to believe that, if there had been a Labour government, this wouldn’t have happened. But experience shows that no government can control the way capitalism works. All they can do is react to whatever the vagaries of the capitalist economy throw at them, and that reaction is limited by the need to accept that capitalism is a profit-driven system and so to give priority to profits over everything else, including people’s standard of living.
As the leaflet we are distributing puts it, IT’S NOT THE TORIES OR LABOUR THAT’S THE PROBLEM. IT’S CAPITALISM.
I suppose you could argue that parliamentary parties are vanguard parties in that they are a minority that seeks to lead the workers. But then we would need a new word to distinguish the structure of a reformist parliamentary party and a Leninist party, even though both are manipulative to get and obtain political power.
Anyway, here’s the Socialist Standard’s obituary of Kautsky:
