DJP
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DJP
ParticipantAn relevant article in the FT today about Trump’s “Drill baby drill!”. It’s unlikely there will be an increase in oil and gas production under his term, the current dictates of the market mean it would be unprofitable to do so.
https://www.ft.com/content/3f4c07ee-7a75-467d-9cc7-53e81c579874
DJP
ParticipantMore on ‘fascism’ and Trump. Skip to 4 minutes for him to get to the meat.
January 16, 2025 at 5:59 pm in reply to: ICC international online public meeting, 25 January #256252DJP
ParticipantSo now ‘decadence’ has become not a theory of economic collapse, but a theory of an ecological one?
January 16, 2025 at 4:25 pm in reply to: ICC international online public meeting, 25 January #256248DJP
Participant“Also if there are irreconcilable contradictions then it stands to reason these will increase in severity over time, no?”
No, that doesn’t follow.
“120 years isn’t that long for a historic era though is it?”
If it’s supposed to be a period when things only get worse and worse then yes. How great were they before then!?
January 16, 2025 at 3:22 pm in reply to: ICC international online public meeting, 25 January #256246DJP
ParticipantIrreconcilable contradictions or antagonisms are one thing. But the idea of splitting the history of capitalist society into just two phases – with one of these being a long period of terminal decline (which so far has lasted 120 years!) – doesn’t look like it matches the empirical facts to me…
January 16, 2025 at 11:40 am in reply to: Marx and Republicanism. ‘Citizen Marx’ by Bruno Leipold #256240DJP
ParticipantAs well as Mau and Leipold, William Clare Roberts ‘Marx’s Inferno’ is another must-read of recent Marx scholarship. I’m not sure about his claim that Marx deliberately based the structure of Capital on Dante’s Inferno. But he does a good job of placing Capital within the theoretical debates that were taking place at the time of its publication. Roberts is another to highlight the republican element in Marx’s thought.
Soren Mau doesn’t seem to have come out of the republican revival. His PhD examiner was Michael Heinrich. Though of course another way of describing ‘Mute Compulsion’ would be ‘impersonal domination’.
January 15, 2025 at 12:21 pm in reply to: Marx and Republicanism. ‘Citizen Marx’ by Bruno Leipold #256231DJP
Participant“What is interesting is that academia is catching up with what we have been saying”
This is all just me speculating but perhaps the quality of Marx studies has been increasing due to the new generation having grown up in the post cold war era and so are more inclined to just read Marx on his own terms rather than thinking they have to attack or defend a particular state ideology that is supposedly ‘Marxist’.
Leipold says a partial influence for him beginning his project (the PhD thesis version was completed around 8 years ago) was a footnote in Quentin Skinners’ ‘Liberty Before Liberalism’. The revival of ‘republican freedom’ could be seen as something of a kickback against Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. An essay some describe as an event of the cold war rather than an event in the development of philosophy!
January 15, 2025 at 10:26 am in reply to: Marx and Republicanism. ‘Citizen Marx’ by Bruno Leipold #256210DJP
ParticipantWith regards to Marx’s “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” There’s a whole subsection in Leipold’s book about that.
January 15, 2025 at 9:33 am in reply to: Marx and Republicanism. ‘Citizen Marx’ by Bruno Leipold #256207DJP
Participant“One can hardly characterize Pankhurst as a “follower of Lenin,” as you originally claimed that all left communists were, when she wrote about how he and the Russian Communist Party had “banished communism and workers’ control” in Russia.”
When I was talking about following Lenin it was more in reference to following the idea of minority anti-democratic revolution, and I didn’t say *all* left communists.
Incidentally, if you’d like to see what the SPGB has written about Pankhurst see here. The article was not written by me:
“when they were very young, both ( Marx and Engels ) they were petty bourgeois liberals”
This is a mistake in the historiography. Their early position is better categorised as radical republican.
“I think they were more influenced by the French Anarchists in order to become socialists”
At this early stage, the Proudhonists called themselves mutualists. The Anarchist tag came later.
January 14, 2025 at 7:46 pm in reply to: Marx and Republicanism. ‘Citizen Marx’ by Bruno Leipold #256194DJP
ParticipantAs that Pankhurst article makes quite clear the “left communists” fell for both the mythology of the Russian Revolution and their own wishful thinking.
Council Communism is a little different and came later, ironically after the council idea had faded into obscurity.
January 14, 2025 at 7:36 pm in reply to: Marx and Republicanism. ‘Citizen Marx’ by Bruno Leipold #256193DJP
ParticipantHere’s something Marx actually said…
“Considering,
That this collective appropriation can arise only from the revolutionary action of the productive class – or proletariat – organized in a distinct political party;
That a such an organization must be pursued by all the means the proletariat has at its disposal including universal suffrage which will thus be transformed from the instrument of deception that it has been until now into an instrument of emancipation;
The French socialist workers, in adopting as the aim of their efforts the political and economic expropriation of the capitalist class and the return to community of all the means of production, have decided, as a means of organization and struggle, to enter the elections with the following immediate demands….”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm#n9
Not something you’d see a council communist write.
But of course just because Marx wrote something doesn’t mean it’s eternally correct.
The SPGB is different here in that it doesn’t stand on a platform of immediate reforms.
January 14, 2025 at 5:04 pm in reply to: Marx and Republicanism. ‘Citizen Marx’ by Bruno Leipold #256188DJP
ParticipantIs there any mention of how they see people making binding decisions? Or is there no need for a decision-making structure since everything naturally and harmoniously arises from the ‘communitarian’ “organic bonds of community”? Even anarchists such as Malatesta would have laughed at this stuff as hopelessly naive.
If you take ‘democracy’ to mean liberal representative democracy or simple majoritarianism then there is something you can say against these. But of course that is not the only thing that ‘democracy’ can mean.
January 14, 2025 at 1:21 pm in reply to: Marx and Republicanism. ‘Citizen Marx’ by Bruno Leipold #256183DJP
Participant“One in the eye, then, for those “left communists” like Internationalist Perspective who reject the whole concept of democracy as capitalist.”
So far I only scan read through it. Is their claim that you wouldn’t need democracy because socialism would be some kind of conflict-free, natural harmony of interests?
January 14, 2025 at 1:14 pm in reply to: Marx and Republicanism. ‘Citizen Marx’ by Bruno Leipold #256182DJP
Participant“One in the eye, then, for those “left communists” like Internationalist Perspective who reject the whole concept of democracy as capitalist.”
Yes, this is another good angle for demonstrating the differences between those who followed Lenin, which includes left communists, and what Marx actually wrote.
January 13, 2025 at 8:17 pm in reply to: Marx and Republicanism. ‘Citizen Marx’ by Bruno Leipold #256180DJP
ParticipantThanks that is an interesting looking book.
The thrust of “Citizen Marx” is that the republican influence on Marx’s thinking has been largely overlooked. Marx started his political life as a radical republican and when he came over to communism he kept hold of the republican idea of freedom as not being under an uncontrolled power. Because of this his communism was democratic in contrast to the anti-political communism of those before him.
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