jondwhite
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Good question. Don't know why (or if) the IMT have abandoned entryism.Either the Labour party took some action against them (which could have been years ago), and they've held a grudge, orsheer incompetence has led them to take a turn shortly before Corbyn's election as leader when they were expecting Kendall / Burnham / Cooper etc.Or have they been really sneaky and abandoned entryism because they couldn't do the Labour party leader betrayal routine when Corbyn might well nationalise the railways / top hundred companies etc. and they might lose IMT members to the left wing of the Labour party? Hatton has tried to rejoin Labour. Corbyn a threat without realising it to the IMT enterprise lol?
For what it's worth, a few hundred usually attend conference and I've attended dozens of meetings never encountering a CPer except for one meeting which I don't think he usually attended anyway.What better place to publically advocate 'Marx's idealism-materialism' and put it to the test?
Yep, this is the Grantites or as they might say the 'Marx-Engels-Lenin-Trotsky-Grantites'.In particular these were the good passages;
Quote:I have always believed that this basis of unity needs to be political and around the goals that we all strive for. If people share the fundamental socialist goal (a world free of classes where production is organized on the basis of need not profit) and basic strategies and stances of a political group in any given period, they should be encouraged to join.As members of IMT would concede this isn’t the real basis of unity for this organization. To be a member of the IMT, you’d need to share in an article of faith that I’ll try to honestly summarize as such: “IMT [with a membership that is today probably around 2000 worldwide, at most] is the only genuine Marxist organization on the planet. It alone has the “correct ideas” [an astonishing term that even the Catholic Church doesn’t use with such certitude], which are encapsulated in the ideas of Marx, Lenin, Engels and Trotsky [maybe, a book or two by Rosa Luxembourg] and those continued by Ted Grant and the IMT. It alone can offer the workers the revolutionary leadership that is needed to win power and build socialism.”and especially
Quote:It also follows that work of no Marxist writer or theoretician after Trotsky’s death in 1940 is worth considering, except for the few fellows that have had the honor of working with the IMT. I remember asking a leading member of the Italian section if he could he recommend any good Italian Marxist writers? Surely, with such a strong communist party with millions of members and the allegiance of the majority of the country’s intelligentsia, there should be some bright names. The response was shocking: None. No one. He jokingly said: Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky!This is Sectarianism 101. Instead of defining your political identity and basis of unity around goals and ideals in which others can share, you define it in a way that is akin to a narrow religious organization. Every organization will have some traditions and some historical identity of which it is proud. Every organization should believe in its own unique ability to do grand tasks and great things (otherwise, why bother?) But it is all a matter of degree. Are you flexible enough to concede that not all the truth might rest with you? Will you keep yourself current by taking in the developments in the world around you? Are you ready to grow and change, while keeping true to your basic goals, by embracing the new membership that each generation brings? Are you able to keep yourself intact after you reach a certain number?One of his answers in that thread
Quote:I've been a DSA member for almost a decade. At first it was just a kind of default — it had very low requirements on members, I was embraced by some good folks there, and I felt like I would rather be on the left-wing of a broad tent than in a harder cadre organization. Right now though there's a lot of energy and enthusiasm around the organization, it's growing fast and I think the political trajectory of its younger members is a good one. It's also a truly democratic organization, in structure, so its future is wide open for these new people to shape.I would say just talk to people wherever you are, just feel out the local chapters of active socialists organizations. It might be that a different organization is a better choice. I would say that I think it's important that socialists in America be active in organizations, but without having their political and intellectual activity be confined with just a single narrow tradition. You also don't want to spend too much time just within "organizational life," meeting to decide when the next meeting is. I think Jacobin is very good for fostering that cross-pollination (there aren't enough socialists yet to do it any other way).ISR Winter 2016 cover Labriola herehttp://isreview.org/issue/103/critical-communism-antonio-labriola
Sunkara is answering questions today herehttps://m.reddit.com/r/socialism/comments/5mgusk/bhaskar_sunkaras_ama_saturday_january_7th_2017/
Thanks for that but Marx as a Christian inspiration was just an example, I was looking for more obscure interpretations
Quote:Michel Henry wrote an important work on Karl Marx, whom he considers, paradoxically, as one of the leadingChristian thinkers and one of the most important western philosophers,[47][48]due to the weight he gives in his thought to living work and to the living individual (praxis) in which he sees the foundation of economic reality.[49] One reason why Marx's genuine thought has been so misunderstood is the complete ignorance of his fundamental philosophical writings during the development of the official doctrine of Marxism, due to their very late publication — for example, The German Ideology only appeared in 1932.[50] But the real reason for ignorance of Marx's philosophical texts is Marxism's negation, from its earliest days, of subjectivity, because Marxism is nothing other than a repetition of Hegelianism, which is a philosophy of objectivity which reduces the individual to the effective becoming of the Absolute and its manifestation in the light of ek-static exteriority.[51] This work on Marx was published in two volumes entitled respectively Marx I. Une philosophie de la réalité and Marx II. Une philosophie de l’économie, translated in English as Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality.As repetitive as this point being made by you on materialism gets, Happy New Year nonetheless! Perhaps its time for the SPGB to address this point other than on the forum?
Vin wrote:Very good. There are some very good videos out there but none mention the SPGB.IMHO I think we should produce something introductory, that explains how we are diffirent and dispels the myth that socialism has existed and failed.Are there any good party talks along those lines?There's The Historical Place of the SPGB, and What is Socialism: Debate with the Labour Party.
Here's a ten minute whiteboard animation I hadn't come across before, again based on an existing talk delivered without thought to animationhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdbbcO35arwI came across via the reading sessions page of talksocialism.com, so was a bit surprised to read
Quote:At the other end of the political spectrum is Karl Marx. With the collapse of communism, people have come to dismiss Marx as an irrelevance, but this is wrong. I don’t have much time for Marx’s utopian vision of socialism nor his labour theory of value, but his understanding of capitalism was superior in many ways to those of the self-appointed advocates of capitalism. For example, when free-market economists were mostly against limited liability companies, Marx saw it as an institution that will take capitalism on to another plane (to take it eventually to socialism, in his mistaken view). In my view, 150 years after he wrote it, his analysis of the evolution of labour regulation in Britain in Capital vol. 1 still remains one of the best on the subject. Marx also understood the centrality of the interaction between technologies (or what he called the forces of production) and institutions (or what he called the relations of production), which other economic schools have only recently started to grapple with.
