Lew
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
The string of assertions by Ben Lewis do not in themselves show that Kautsky was mistranslated or misrepresented. The fact is that Kautsky never supported working class self-emancipation; it was always the leading role of the party.
If Kautsky was so sure that the working class couldn’t achieve socialism on their own means why was he so keen on democracy, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly etc? If he was a vangardist like Lenin why would he have been critical of the Bolshevik seizure of the state?
Kautsky was keen on democracy, freedom of press, etc, and he was critical of Bolshevik suppression of them. There was no contradiction, as you appear to believe, between that and his poor opinion of the working class.
Only the SPGB and Kautsky take self-emancipation seriously.
You have provided no evidence that Kautsky took working class self-emancipation seriously, or at all.
Here is Lenin quoting Kautsky approvingly from an article in Neue Zeit:
Modern socialist consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge. Indeed, modern economic science is as much a condition for socialist production as, say, modern technology, and the proletariat can create neither the one nor the other, no matter how much it may desire to do so; both arise out of the modern social process. The vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia [Kautsky’s emphasis]: it was in the minds of individual members of this stratum that modern socialism originated, and it was they who communicated it to the more intellectually developed proletarians who, in their turn, introduce it into the proletarian class struggle where conditions allow that to be done. Thus, socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without and not something that arose within it spontaneously.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm
I think that anyone interested in this debate about Marx’s epistemological views, will find the article at this link very informative:
“Marx’s epistemology and the problem of conflated idealisms”
It is to be noted that in what purports to be an analysis of Marx’s theory of knowledge there is only one citation from Marx, a fleeting reference to “uncritical idealism”. The article is based on what the author, and various other commentators, thought Marx meant. Regular readers of this forum, and LBird’s regular pronouncement on this topic, will recognise the methodology.
Is the position on “law” one that is fully worked out?
It can’t be fully worked out because we can’t lay down the law about what “laws” will exist in socialism, if any. Ultimately, it will be up to the people in a socialist future to democratically decide.
I do not think that Lenin book The Renegade Trotsky is fair
It’s The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/Incidentally, Hal Draper has argued that Lenin’s vanguardism was implicit in the Second International generally and Kautsky in particular, and all Lenin was doing was making it explicit.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1990/myth/myth.htmIf this is correct it would bring out another point of departure from the Second International and Kautsky. All the SPGB histories do not bring out the fact that we took the self-emancipation of the working class seriously, whereas the left did not. And this remains true today.
… what you are describing as anarchism seems to have more to do with Stirner than Bakunin, Kropotkin or Malatesta. Contrary to what is written in a lot of the commentaries Stirner was not a founding influence on anarchism…
Marx certainly thought that Stirner, Proudhon and especially Bakunin were a founding influence on anarchism. He wrote extensively against them for that reason.
There isn’t a single “anarchism”, and this very much comes down to what you mean by “external authority”.
I didn’t say there was a single anarchism, and by “external authority” I meant external to the individual.
In my experience people who call themselves communist-anarchists or anarcho-communists use the “anarchist” label to differentiate themselves from “authoritarian” tendencies. A more accurate label sometimes used is libertarian communism. In other words, they are not anarchist at all in any meaningful sense of the word.
I have yet to see a successful marrying of anarchist and communist thought, without the one negating the other. Perhaps you know of one?
“The anarchist position […] is based on individualism”
While there are people that call themselves “anarchist” that are definitely individualists, this isn’t the case at all for the communist anarchists.
I think it is. The common denominator of anarchism is opposition to external authority, and not the simplistic anti-state position often ascribed to it. That is why all anarchists – to a greater or lesser extent – have a problem with democracy (see the blurb above, from the book which started this thread).
Anyway. This probably wants a new thread.
<em class=”d4pbbc-italic”>So it cannot be said that workers generally have nothing against capitalism, and there is no demand for socialism because workers are mostly unaware of it.
You reckon? Thousands, if not millions, must have heard about socialism (as defined by the SPGB) over the course of its 120 year history, yet it still has fewer than 300 members and receives only double-digit votes in elections.
It is probable that a few thousand understand capitalism and socialism. But not millions. That is an exaggeration which feeds your cynicism.
It appears to me that the working class in advanced capitalist societies has nothing against capitalism so long as it is relatively prosperous, and it has been sufficiently prosperous thus far to ensure there is no great demand for socialism.
This assumes that the working class has considered and understood what capitalism is and what socialism will be. But there never has been more than a tiny number of workers who have done this. So it cannot be said that workers generally have nothing against capitalism, and there is no demand for socialism because workers are mostly unaware of it.
It’s not a question of whether predictions in some fields are easier than in others but rather a case of whether they are falsifiable or not. For any hypothesis to have credence, it must be inherently disprovable before it can become accepted as a scientific hypothesis or theory.
For a critique of this view see “Popper” in An A-Z of Marxism:
“still no socialist revolution in sight”
There is a difference. The anarchist position (about which you say nothing) is based on individualism and can never lead to socialism. Instead of regularly posting your counsel of despair, why don’t you tell the SPGB what it is doing wrong? Just repeating that there is no socialist revolution in sight in itself does not show that it is wrong.“Not that there’s anything to disagree with”
If the blurb is accurate, there’s plenty to disagree with.
“… as people engage in activity, they simultaneously change the world and themselves… the means that revolutionaries propose to achieve social change have to involve forms of activity which transform people into individuals who are capable of, and driven to, both overthrow capitalism and the state and build a free society.”
This hasn’t worked in the past, it isn’t working now and there’s no reason to suppose that it will be more successful in the future.
Or, to put it another way, Palestinians kill two Israeli settlers and the settlers go on a rampage:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/27/israeli-settlers-rampage-after-palestinian-gunman-kills-two-west-bank
