rhh1
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
What a wonderfully written article. Crisply expressing Marx's vision of what is wrong with modern society and what putting that right truly involves: "socialism is the only framework in which ‘more democracy’ can be meaningful".
I'm afraid Binyay's criticism of Chattopadhyay in the linked article is pretty hopeless. To start with Binyay should read some up to date work about Kronstadt and the ideas that were in the minds of those sailors (Getzler's and Avrich's books for a start). At times Binyay's piece reads as though it could have popped out of Socialist Worker – "You cannot achieve socialism without an exclusively clear-cut socialist goal and class-wide revolutionary organization", and "the Leninist “party-state” was a form of ruthless state capitalist dictatorship. But that doesn‟t necessarily lead to the conclusion that party and state are of no use for the working class. Both are necessary and useful even during the “political transition” ". We have moved on sufficiently from Engels's time to see the danger of such a formulation, of the view that the state might be some kind of class neutral structure that socialism could use until the day the state withered away – "the government of persons . . . replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production." That sentence from Engels seems to me to refer less to the socialism we strive to build but more to Fukuyama's 'end of history', the idea of non political public administration that we see in the EU and in modern Toryism, the role of the state sold to us as no more than the prudent ordering of public affairs. Binyay's comments about the WSM are depressingly petty. Chattopadyay's article is about why the word 'socialism' has come to mean the totalitarian rule of a brutal police state. I'm afraid that, in the history of ideas, the Comintern and the Red Army, both of the Red Armies, have rather dwarfed the contribution the WSO has made to the meaning of the word 'socialism' in the popular imagination, precious beacon though the SPGB has been.
