ZJW
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The PLP liked ‘Sorry to Bother You’ but its 2010 split did not. What split? The split says of itself: ‘The International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP) was formed from a split with the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in order to mobilize the masses for communism and to reject PLP’s reformist line.’ And what did the split say of the movie? In an article titled ‘Sorry To Bother You” Is A Ruling-Class Trojan Horse’ , it said:
[start of quote]
[The] May 27, 2018 New York Times (NYT) Magazine [says] that Riley has been a self-described Communist since his teens when he joined the Progressive Labor Party.
What are the convictions of this self-described Communist? In the NYT article, Riley says that he aims “to help build a mass movement that can use withholding of labor as a strategy for social change.”
What is that social change? The NYT article lists his involvement in some political/social movements: Palestinian rights, Occupy, and Oakland renters’ protests against evictions. Riley says nothing in the article about getting rid of capitalism, the source of the injustices and miseries depicted in his film. The activism and film of this self-described Communist actually support reforming capitalism and thereby maintaining it.
No fight for Communism here.
[end of quote]
Well yes, ‘Sorry to Bother You’ might well be described as simply propagating a rather harmless and unradical labor-solidarism + capitalists-need-not-be-so-greedy-ism. Right, it’s no Communist Manifesto. But Riley’s later ‘I’m a Virgo’ is much better on that score.
‘I’m a Virgo’ (2023) was a seven-episode television series. About 3.4 hours in all. I watched it all and was bored or irritated part of the time during the non-political content. But two things made it well worthwhile:
1) Depiction of the ‘crisis-of-capitalism’/exploitation (à la Riley) presented in a spectacular-surrealist manner. That’s in episode 4 from 14:20 to 17:26 or so.
2) just as spectacularly, how crime and violence is an inevitable and necessary outcome of capitalism.
That’s in episode 7 from 18:30 to 25:10.This latter gave me piss-shivers.
There is also implicit condemnation of vanguardism/leaderism and/or propaganda of the deed running through the story. For example in episode 3 from 11:56 to 13:33, the conversation-dispute between Jones and protagonist’s mother over tactics. (This dialogue contains at one point, the line ‘Look, I’m a communist. I want the people to democratically control the wealth we create with our labor’.)
You can watch it for free (selecting separate episodes) here: https://watchseries.id/tv/im-a-virgo-vqw64/1-1
Here’s something pretty good written (in 1999) about the PLP:
https://www.angelfire.com/pop2/pkv/plp.html
(Especially compared to, for example, relying on the Wikipedia article about it.)
‘Sorry to Bother You (2018)’: a film variously described in conventional reviews like this: ‘an absurdist comedy with touches of magical realism’ … ‘an anti-capitalist surreal film’… ‘a wild dystopian satire’… ‘a commentary on capitalism and class struggle’ … ‘surrealist black comedy’.
Here’s a serious/political review by a …. marxo-autonomist or something of that sort.
https://notesfrombelow.org/article/sorry-to-bother-you-tech-worker-organising .
After reading that, if you’d like to see the film, you can do so for free here:
https://fsharetv.io/watch/_uid02092023-sorry-to-bother-you-episode-1-tt5688932
It’s directed and written by musician/’marxist’ Boots Riley. He is a past member of the Progressive Labor Party. Probably only Almamater will know of the rather bizarre PLP.
(If I’d watched the trailer before watching the movie, I would not have wanted to watch the movie. So don’t.)
Robbo —
Re your #246587:
Both my Firefox and Chrome just show a white blank where the book-cover image ought to be. So you’ll have to tell me the book’s name.
Lauren Collee: ‘Marxist Astronomy The Milky Way According to Anton Pannekoek’:
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/marxist-astronomy-the-milky-way-according-to-anton-pannekoek
Almamater:
‘I participate in the internal forum of some left communists groups […].’
I am interested to know what groups these are. (Anglophone or otherwise.) I only know that the ICC used to have an online forum but then got rid of it.
(But you say *internal* forums … I’m not quite sure what that means. It sounds like something limited to participation by members of that organisation, closed to outsiders. But if you are a participant, obviously that can’t be so.)
Under title of ‘Degrowth and Marxism: A Critique’, here is the CWO’s review of Kohei Saito’s ‘Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism’ (2023):
https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-07-25/degrowth-and-marxism-a-critique
(I see there are at least three different threads on this forum where Saito’s name comes up. I suppose this one is as good as another.)
For what its worth, Engels to Bebel in March 1875 —
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_03_18.htm
— in which,
” ‘We would therefore suggest that ‘Gemeinwesen’ [“commonalty”] be universally substituted for ‘state’; it is a good old German word that can very well do service for the French “Commune.” “
[Trigger warning: possible linguistic trivia]
ALB asked:
‘Are you sure that in this context Zukunftsstaat means the future “government machine, or the state in so far as it forms a special organism separated from society through division of labour”, as Marx referred to the state in his Critique of the Gotha Programme?’
No, I am not in the least sure (which is why I said ‘significant or not’). At one point I wondered if ‘-staat’ here meant ‘state’ in the English sense of the ‘condition’ of something, ‘water has three states’ etc. But it seems German ‘Staat / -staat’ is not so used. (For that meaning, ‘Zustand’ or something else is used.)
Using the marxists.org ‘Cross-Language Section — Selected Marxist Writers’ (https://www.marxists.org/xlang/selected-marxists.htm ) and clicking to Kautsky in French, it is seen that chapter IV in that language is titled ‘La Société future’. Unfortunately none of the other selectable languages there have this book (even if they contain any of Kautsky’s writings at all).
But elsewhere, here is the image-file of a Russian translation: http://e-heritage.ru/Book/10089962 (electronic page 3) and there the chapter-heading translates to English as ‘State of the Future’, using the same word for ‘state’ as Lenin did in the book-title ‘The State and Revolution’.
Have we not someone on this site with the linguistic (native language) and presumed political competence to speak to the matter of ‘Zukunftsstaat’? Lizzie, who I’d have thought is a zealous reader of all posts?
It may be misleading (divorced from the marxist late 19th century usage-context), but here is what the Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache says about ‘Zukunftsstaat’: https://www.dwds.de/wb/Zukunftsstaat . (‘State’, not ‘society’, which would be ‘Gesellschaft’.)
Of significance or not, Kautsky did not use a German term corresponding to ‘commonwealth’ in ‘The Class Struggle’ (i.e. the Erfurt Program). That is a liberty some translator took.
In English the title of chapter IV is has been rendered as ‘Commonwealth of the Future’. But as you can see here in the German, what he has is ‘Der Zukunftsstaat’, that is, ‘The Future State’). https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/kautsky/1892/erfurter/index.htm .
I have hardly ever looked at spopen (or that other forum not open to posting by non-SPGB or WSM members) but just now I did read through the spopen thread on reforms and reformism caused by that Paula-comment that Lizzie linked to, and I have two observations:
1) Yes, a clarification on reforms/reformism is necessary.
2) More rashly:
Spopen — in this instance anyway — seems to be considerably better than *this* forum usually is (or has come to be). A big reason would seem to be that there are members that will not deign to post (or even read, I’d guess) in *this* one, which is, for them, it seems, strictly for the ‘plebs’.
KAZ –
I have just pm’d you via moderator.
(If you don’t get it, then there is something fishy with https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/contact-forum-admin . Used to be you could pm people that way. )
In connection — somehow or another — with the NWBCW Initiative, let us take a look back at the Martov-Luxemburg-Lenin resolution of 1907 at the Stuttgart Congress, how it came about and what it was up against.
It’s here in this Bordigist document titled ‘Anti-militarism in the Second International’. Search for and read from ‘ At the Stuttgart Congress in 1907, 4 motions were presented ‘.
That’s at https://www.international-communist-party.org/English/REPORTS/WARS/Antimiitarism2ndInternational.htm
After that, resolutions at Copenhagen (1910) and Basle (1912) are discussed.
Replying to this part of of ALB’s #182772:
‘The difference between us and the CWO would be (1) they argue that the working class should smash the existing state in an armed insurrection and […]’
It seems to me that the fundamental difference with ‘the insurrectionalists’ (which includes not just the CWO etc but anarchist communists as well I’d think) is not this. After all, the WSM logically can not and does not propose capture/use of legislatures in states where that avenue is not available. In those cases (even if the word goes discreetly unsaid when when the matter comes up, which is not often) what else then than insurrection in some sense or another?
In my view, the fundamental difference with ‘the insurectionalists’ is rather over this: For successful socialist/communist revolution to happen, must socialist consciousness be arrived *before* the revolution (forming in fact one of its pre-conditions)? Or can it *only* come about *in the process* of revolution (insurrection)?
Compared to this, I think that vanguardism vs propagandaism vs spontaneism (as per the mention of 1930s Mattick vs Pannekoek/SPGB, and then Wright … or Kamunist Kranti), though related, are second order differences with other groups.
Unrelated to the above: Do I understand KAZ to be an ex-SPGB member who is now an ACG member?
I think point (c) in my #183320 is far too seldom mentioned. (For example is it anywhere in the ‘An A to Z of Marxism’?)
And lack of its mention contributes toward the ease of caricature of the WSM position. (Or one aspect of the caricature anyway.) This caricature: a population-majority of convinced socialists elect a socialist parliament that then through a myriad of decrees, enacts socialism into being onto a population in all respects passive other than that act of voting.
