Am I a member of a bourgeois party? [Archive]

Charles Xavier

26th March 2009, 05:03

Yes.

I don't think it's possible to 'fix' the CP's.

You personally are not a member of the bourgeoisie. You are your party however constitute the political left-wing of capital.

What determines the class nature of a party or political organisation is not the class or sociological composition of its membership or support base (one only needs to look at the Fascist, Liberal and Social-democratic parties to see this). Even the origin from where it draws its funding is not a litmus test for the class nature of an organisation (though this is very often the case, I am using this example to prove a point). Finally, the class nature of an organisation is certainly not determined by the rhetoric it employs.

What fundamentally determines the class nature of any political organisation is the programme of that organisation and its actions taken in accordance with it. A party which sabotages the political independence of the proletariat in tying it to a faction of the ruling class at election time or in the fight against fascism, supports the police tactics and double dealing of the unions, and most fundamental of all, supports the butchering of the working class in imperialist wars (including the so-called national liberation struggles) in defence of one or another national capital, is nothing other than a bourgeois party, a party which serves the needs and interests of the bourgeoisie against the workers.

Something that might be of interest to you is “The Counter-revolutionary character of the ‘workers’ parties’ (http://en.internationalism.org/node/618)” from the ICC Platform.

So how does a party not become bourgeoisie? Or only the ICC and left communists are not bourgeoisie organizations?

Because my party doesn't support police tactics or class collaboration in trade unions, or supports the butchering of the working class in imperialists wars and actively and sometimes as in ww2 illegally campaigned against it. And we don't support defending capital in any form so If my party doesn't do all those things we are still bourgeoisie? Even if our program, rhetoric, membership, funding all come from working class sources.

What about the don't vote faction of the bourgeoisie who try to prevent people from voting especially minorities and poor communities, are they progressive because they don't want people to vote? By not voting are you also supporting the don't vote faction of the bourgeoisie?

Is the only way I can not be a left-faction of the bourgeoisie agree 100% with left communists on every single position?

As for that website you posted it absolutely clear that you don't even read what you post, because it is referring to parties that turned reformist after the fall of the soviet union and have absolutely no bearing on what we are talking about.

Your ideology wants to replace the bourgeoisie with a new ruling class of government officials.

So what does that have to do with the topic at hand? I am talking about this ultra-left calling communist parties left factions of the bourgeoisie.

Devrim

26th March 2009, 09:10

Because my party doesn't support police tactics or class collaboration in trade unions, or supports the butchering of the working class in imperialists wars and actively and sometimes as in ww2 illegally campaigned against it. And we don't support defending capital in any form so If my party doesn't do all those things we are still bourgeoisie? Even if our program, rhetoric, membership, funding all come from working class sources.

I think this is a rather dishonest approach, but that should surprise us from somebody who has already admitted to lying to defame the ICC. Personally, I find his obsession with a tiny political organisation rather bizarre, but never mind.

We don't have to look very far to find out the real history of the Canadian Party during World War II. In fact Wiki even tells us:

The Communist Party opposed Canada's entry into World War II (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II) until the 1941 invasion of the USSR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barbarossa) and the collapse of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov-Ribbentrop_Pact). During the Conscription Crisis of 1944 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_Crisis_of_1944), the CPC set up "Tim Buck Committees" across the country to campaign for a "yes" vote in the national referendum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendum) on conscription (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription). Following the vote, the committees were renamed the Dominion Communist-Labor Total War Committee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Communist-Labor_Total_War_Committee) and urged full support for the war effort, a no-strike pledge for the duration of the war and increased industrial production.
The party's first elected Member of Parliament (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_of_Parliament) (MP) was Dorise Nielson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorise_Nielson). Nielson was elected in North Battleford, Saskatchewan in 1940 under the popular front (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_front) Progressive Unity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_%28Canada%29) label.

This is what is referred to as 'illegally campaigning against the war'.

Devrim

JimmyJazz

26th March 2009, 09:53

“The Counter-revolutionary character of the ‘workers’ parties’ (http://en.internationalism.org/node/618)”

All the so-called ‘revolutionary’ currents – such as Maoism which is simply a variant of parties which had definitively gone over to the bourgeoisie, or Trotskyism which, after constituting a proletarian reaction against the betrayal of the Communist Parties was caught up in a similar process of degeneration, or traditional anarchism, which today places itself in the framework of an identical approach by defending a certain number of positions of the SPs and CPs, such as ‘anti-fascist alliances’ – belong to the same camp: the camp of capital.You mods have got a lot of restricting to do! :ohmy:

Better get on with it! :lol:

Devrim

26th March 2009, 09:57

Jimmy, we aren't the ones who argue for restricting people. It is not the way we work. We believe that there should be open discussion. Personally, I don't think that I have ever voted to restrict anybody on here.

Devrim

the-red-under-the-bed

26th March 2009, 10:06

Because according to the ICC, my party is the left-faction of the bourgeioisie. And if My party is a bourgeoisie party what can I do to make it not a bourgeioisie party?

I think your biggest mistake here is presume the ICC as reasonable people

Devrim

26th March 2009, 10:12

I think your biggest mistake here is presume the ICC as reasonable people

If you check the reputation bars in the top right hand corner of the posts, I think you will see that many people here obviously do regard ICC members as 'reasonable people'.

Devrim

the-red-under-the-bed

26th March 2009, 10:25

If you check the reputation bars in the top right hand corner of the posts, I think you will see that many people here obviously do regard ICC members as 'reasonable people'.

Devrim

Dev mate- thats riddiculous.

I couldnt give two shits about anyones reputation bar. I will not judge the ICC or anyone else by their internet rep, rather on their actions.

If you check the very real revolutions that where historically carried out in Russia, China, Cuba and Vietnam, and the ongoing revolutions in Nepal, Bolivia and Venezeula- you SHOULD realise that whats important isnt in a computer screen.

you would also notice that those revolutions were all carried out by people very much outside of the ICC....

Devrim

26th March 2009, 10:46

Dev mate- thats riddiculous.

I couldnt give two shits about anyones reputation bar. I will not judge the ICC or anyone else by their internet rep, rather on their actions.

No, it is just a statement of how people view us. I image that more people see that the poster making continual ranting attacks on the ICC is, maybe, slightly more unreasonable.

If you check the very real revolutions that where historically carried out in Russia, China, Cuba and Vietnam, and the ongoing revolutions in Nepal, Bolivia and Venezeula- you SHOULD realise that whats important isnt in a computer screen.

I would say the idea that their is a revolution going on in Venezuela or that their was anything even remotely socialist about the Chinese revolution are much more unreasonable.

Devrim

the-red-under-the-bed

26th March 2009, 11:09

No, it is just a statement of how people view us. I image that more people see that the poster making continual ranting attacks on the ICC is, maybe, slightly more unreasonable.

Dev,

Mate, the ICC justifies its existance with continued ranting attacks on everybody.

As for how people view you? Well how does the international proletariat view the ICC? that all i care about.

Devrim

26th March 2009, 11:25

As for how people view you? Well how does the international proletariat view the ICC? that all i care about.

I would say about the same way they view any other organisation that claims to be communist at the moment, without that much interest.

Mate, the ICC justifies its existance with continued ranting attacks on everybody.

We argue for our politics. Please, read back on this thread, and read my posts then compare them with Túpac Amaru II's. Then come back and tell me who you think is ranting.

Devrim

Charles Xavier

26th March 2009, 16:49

I think this is a rather dishonest approach, but that should surprise us from somebody who has already admitted to lying to defame the ICC. Personally, I find his obsession with a tiny political organisation rather bizarre, but never mind.

We don't have to look very far to find out the real history of the Canadian Party during World War II. In fact Wiki even tells us:

This is what is referred to as 'illegally campaigning against the war'.

Devrim

You are a question dodger aren't you. Okay lets pretend our party's line during ww2 was the wrong thing to do (which I personally think was the right thing considering the circumstances)

And yes we were illegally campaigning against the war until the Soviet Union was involved. Its part of the Dialectics of struggle was was right now than may be wrong next week, dialectics you adapt to struggle but I don't want to be muddled into this discussion.

Okay say my party did wrong in ww2 and has apologize for its mistakes is it no longer a bourgeoisie party? Is the litmus tests on whether you are hardcore revolutionaries like the computer-bound armchair revolutions in the ICC whether or not is if you participated in ww2?

What makes a party hardcore revolutionaries like the ICC or left-factions of the bourgeiosie, such as anarchist, trotskyists maoists, marxist-leninists?

How can one show themselves to be true revolutionaries or bourgeoisie in disguise?

And then how can one be so sectarian to refuse to work with every last progressive movement or mass democratic struggle and still call themselves communists?

#FF0000

26th March 2009, 17:09

As for how people view you? Well how does the international proletariat view the ICC? that all i care about.

Don't know if you noticed, but every communist organization right now is just about equally insignificant.

So instead of getting hung up on these ridiculous arguments about who isn't communist enough, (this goes for the OP as well), how about you worry about, maybe, how to make yourself and your ideas relevant to the working class. I don't know about anyone else here, but the people I work with really don't care how correct your party's line was in 1940.

*PRC*Kensei

26th March 2009, 22:17

i'd rather worry about getting votes then about beeing bourgios mate :)

Engels owned a factory himself.

Charles Xavier

26th March 2009, 23:17

Don't know if you noticed, but every communist organization right now is just about equally insignificant.

So instead of getting hung up on these ridiculous arguments about who isn't communist enough, (this goes for the OP as well), how about you worry about, maybe, how to make yourself and your ideas relevant to the working class. I don't know about anyone else here, but the people I work with really don't care how correct your party's line was in 1940.

Lets not think lets not discuss lets not answer questions because theory is bullshit get to work now?

This forum is a forum of theory not of action.

I agree with the sentiment but these are not mutually exclusive. We can have discussions and we can have action.

the-red-under-the-bed

27th March 2009, 04:29

Don't know if you noticed, but every communist organization right now is just about equally insignificant.

So instead of getting hung up on these ridiculous arguments about who isn't communist enough, (this goes for the OP as well), how about you worry about, maybe, how to make yourself and your ideas relevant to the working class. I don't know about anyone else here, but the people I work with really don't care how correct your party's line was in 1940.

i coudlnt agree more. thats why im an activist when im at home and ive flown 10 thousand miles across the world to see learn from and spread solidarity with what could b the next revolution in the world.

im no rev left domgmaic hack

Samyasa

27th March 2009, 10:18

And yes we were illegally campaigning against the war until the Soviet Union was involved. Its part of the Dialectics of struggle was was right now than may be wrong next week, dialectics you adapt to struggle but I don't want to be muddled into this discussion.

So your party entered into the war once the imperialist state it did support was attacked? That's no different from any other bourgeois party.

Okay say my party did wrong in ww2 and has apologize for its mistakes is it no longer a bourgeoisie party? Is the litmus tests on whether you are hardcore revolutionaries like the computer-bound armchair revolutions in the ICC whether or not is if you participated in ww2?

What makes you think the ICC is computer bound? We spend time on the streets, distributing our press, leaflets, going to discussion groups, mass meetings during strikes, leafleting factories during wars and also during the most recent phase of economic crisis. We run regular public meetings in most of the countries where we're present as well as in some we're not. And our militants in some countries face real dangers in doing so - from the state but also from fascist and leftist groups, who tend to settle political debates with bullets. We've had death threats made against us, beatings, etc.

To cease being a bourgeois party, an organisation has to stop defending bourgeois positions and make a real critique of why it did so. Needless to say this happens very, very rarely. Of course, individuals can leave bourgeois parties and become revolutionaries - most members of the ICC came via that route.

What makes a party hardcore revolutionaries like the ICC or left-factions of the bourgeiosie, such as anarchist, trotskyists maoists, marxist-leninists? How can one show themselves to be true revolutionaries or bourgeoisie in disguise?

A revolutionary party is one that defends revolutionary positions. Most importantly, they are against all national flags, and call for the destruction of all nation states by the revolutionary action of the working class. They oppose any form of nationalism or defence of the nation state. They support the independent struggle of the working class: against "democracy", against unions. They recognise that these forms of struggle are obsolete and are not only useless to workers but actually hold back their struggle. They defend the true meaning of communism: a society with no state, no class, no national frontiers, no money, no commodity production, no wage labour. They don't call for nationalisation of the economy or state capitalism.

And then how can one be so sectarian to refuse to work with every last progressive movement or mass democratic struggle and still call themselves communists?

Because these sorts of struggles are no longer progressive and no longer defend the interests of the working class. Instead, they are used to tie it up and make it subservient to the capitalist state. If you look at the history of struggles since the 20th century, the worst enemies of the working class have been "democrats" and "progressives".

Devrim

27th March 2009, 11:23

I agree with our comrades post, but I wanted to make a few points myself:

You are a question dodger aren't you. Okay lets pretend our party's line during ww2 was the wrong thing to do (which I personally think was the right thing considering the circumstances)

And yes we were illegally campaigning against the war until the Soviet Union was involved. Its part of the Dialectics of struggle was was right now than may be wrong next week, dialectics you adapt to struggle but I don't want to be muddled into this discussion.

Without getting into the arguments that rage on here about dialectics, it is very clear that the vast majority of the time the term is used it is in order to cover up nonsense. What on Earth is 'dialectical' about following Soviet foreign policy? When a father tell a kid to go to bed is he behaving 'dialectically' by obeying him? This is absurd.

Let's look again at what the Canadian CP did:

The Communist Party opposed Canada's entry into World War II (http://www.anonym.to/?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II) until the 1941 invasion of the USSR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barbarossa) and the collapse of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov-Ribbentrop_Pact). During the Conscription Crisis of 1944 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_Crisis_of_1944), the CPC set up "Tim Buck Committees" across the country to campaign for a "yes" vote in the national referendum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendum) on conscription (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription). Following the vote, the committees were renamed the Dominion Communist-Labor Total War Committee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Communist-Labor_Total_War_Committee) and urged full support for the war effort, a no-strike pledge for the duration of the war and increased industrial production.
The party's first elected Member of Parliament (http://www.anonym.to/?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_of_Parliament) (MP) was Dorise Nielson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorise_Nielson). Nielson was elected in North Battleford, Saskatchewan in 1940 under the popular front (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_front) Progressive Unity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_%28Canada%29) label.

Basically they acted as recruiting sergeants for an imperialist war, campaigned for conscription, and worked against strikes. I don't know the details of the Canadian Party, but I know that the British Party actually organised scabbing. It would not surprise me if the Canadian one had too.

This is not a tactical mistake. It is a betrayal of everything that revolutionaries stand for.

In 1914, the communist condemned the so-called workers parties that supported the war as class traitors.

Over twenty years later, the remnants of the communist movement condemned all those who supported the war, mobilised workers to die for different imperialist powers, and worked with the bosses against strikes as class traitors.

It doesn't matter that by this time what had once been massive left communist organisations had been reduced to tiny groups. That merely reflected the weakness of the class and the defeat it had suffered in the counter revolution.

Okay say my party did wrong in ww2 and has apologize for its mistakes is it no longer a bourgeoisie party? Is the litmus tests on whether you are hardcore revolutionaries like the computer-bound armchair revolutions in the ICC whether or not is if you participated in ww2?It isn't a matter of making a wrong call in a strike or something. It is a matter of the adoption of the politics of the bourgeoisie, of becoming a bourgeois party. It is not just something that can be apologised for. The politics that led to that situation must be examined. It didn't come out of the blue.

Is it possible? Well theoretical, yes. I can't see the Canadian CP doing it though.

Devrim

Devrim

27th March 2009, 11:34

Is the litmus tests on whether you are hardcore revolutionaries like the computer-bound armchair revolutions in the ICC whether or not is if you participated in ww2?

I think all of this stuff about internet warriors says more about the people saying it than the people they are talking about. Members of our (illegal in this country) organisation are involved in strike and demonstrations public meetings, and producing and selling the (also illegal) press. But yes we also use the internet to argue. I think we would be stupid not too.

I will tell a short personal story. Twenty years or so I was working as a postman, and we were involved in a series of strikes building up to a three and a half week national strike of about 180,000 workers. It is the biggest strike that I personally have ever been involved in. At the time, we had our own magazine in the Post Office that was selling about 8,000 copies a month, but during the strike we couldn't get our magazine or leaflets out around the country because there was a postal strike. Now, you would just send it by e-mail and the comrades would produce it there.

The internet is very useful. More and more in big struggles in the west, we have seen workers setting up there own internet forums during strikes, two examples that spring to mind in the English speaking world are power station workers and postmen in the UK.

I think really those who go on about computer warriors, and generally they do it in posts on the internet, are probably talking like this because that is their experience. It doesn't apply to us.

Devrim

Charles Xavier

27th March 2009, 18:01

Okay,

So the Answers I got was if you didn't support anyone in WW2, you are against trade unions and are against the working class participating in politics, you are revolutionary, otherwise you are bourgeoisie.

So automatically the ICC are revolutionary but everyone else has to agree to be against trade unions, against defending any socialist state in a war, and tell workers to be apathetic to politics you are a true revolutionary.

I have another word that more commonly applies to what you consider revolutionary, Counter-Revolutionary!

black magick hustla

29th March 2009, 20:38

Charles Xavier

30th March 2009, 16:34

I guess Marx, like myself, represented the hopes and dreams of the bourgeiosie.

“The working class must not constitute itself a political party; it must not, under any pretext, engage in political action, for to combat the state is to recognize the state: and this is contrary to eternal principles. Workers must not go on strike; for to struggle to increase one's wages or to prevent their decrease is like recognizing wages: and this is contrary to the eternal principles of the emancipation of the working class!

“If in the political struggle against the bourgeois state the workers succeed only in extracting concessions, then they are guilty of compromise; and this is contrary to eternal principles. All peaceful movements, such as those in which English and American workers have the bad habit of engaging, are therefore to be despised. Workers must not struggle to establish a legal limit to the working day, because this is to compromise with the masters, who can then only exploit them for ten or twelve hours, instead of fourteen or sixteen. They must not even exert themselves in order legally to prohibit the employment in factories of children under the age of ten, because by such means they do not bring to an end the exploitation of children over ten: they thus commit a new compromise, which stains the purity of the eternal principles."

-Marx (Political Indifferentism, 1873)

being sarcastic

komintern

30th March 2009, 21:14

JimmyJazz

30th March 2009, 21:46

historically the communist left has been right on all major issues.

Frankly, this is tautological. The "communist left" is the name for whatever communist person, group or position happened to oppose those actions of the Communist parties which later on turned out to be mistaken. There is nothing theoretically unifying about the positions historically taken by the "communist left" except that they all stand in opposition to the Communist leadership.

There is of course the "internationalism" thing, but in my view that's more of an attempt to cram all the "left communist" positions into a theoretically unifying structure than an actual, thoughtful synthesis of these positions.

That's the impression I've formed, at least.

Anyway, I actually don't think the "communist left" has always been historical right just because it has been in opposition to the many failed positions of the Communist parties. The official Communist positions were the only ones that were put into practice, and therefore, the only ones which had a chance to fail. The "left communist" positions are pure speculation, and the "communist left" is a perpetual voice in the wilderness...which I think is a big part of the attraction for many people.

This I see as in contrast with anarchists, who are opposed to Marxism/Leninism on principle, and always have been (since before either one was tried).

Charles Xavier

30th March 2009, 22:55

I do not think that Comrade Devrim is suggesting we should rely on computer screen to realize what it is important. Even if I am not a big ICC fan we should agree that historically the communist left has been right on all major issues. Sometimes the presentation of the position could be rude, but nonetheless right. Also Comrade Tupac Amaru II, I do not even think CPC is referring to marxism-leninism (a creation of Joseph Stalin, isn’t it) anymore. CPC supported the theory of socialism in one country and give up its revolutionary heart when they supported the revolution through the ballot vote.

1. The Left Communists have not been right on anything. Their advocation that workers should not participate in politics or trade union is a blunder. They have not shown a specific theory or tactic that worked.

2. Marxism-Leninism to me and my party is Marxism with the contribution of Lenin. and we don't give any two shits who coined the phrase. And to me Stalin wasn't that bad of a guy, but to theory, Stalin contributed very little. He however did show a practical example of how successful socialism can be. We are openly marxist-leninists. Its in our program.

3. We do not advocate revolution through the ballot vote, that is a slander.

Devrim

31st March 2009, 03:02

Frankly, this is tautological. The "communist left" is the name for whatever communist person, group or position happened to oppose those actions of the Communist parties which later on turned out to be mistaken. There is nothing theoretically unifying about the positions historically taken by the "communist left" except that they all stand in opposition to the Communist leadership.

I don't think it is. The communist left is a specific political current with specific political positions.

There is of course the "internationalism" thing, but in my view that's more of an attempt to cram all the "left communist" positions into a theoretically unifying structure than an actual, thoughtful synthesis of these positions.

Which 'internationalism' thing? I have no idea what you are talking about here.

The "left communist" positions are pure speculation, and the "communist left" is a perpetual voice in the wilderness...which I think is a big part of the attraction for many people.

I think at the moment the communist left is weak because the class is weak. In the revolutionary wave after WWI it was strong. The strength of revolutionary groups reflects the strength of the class.

Devrim

manic expression

31st March 2009, 08:43

I don't think it is. The communist left is a specific political current with specific political positions.

I think at the moment the communist left is weak because the class is weak. In the revolutionary wave after WWI it was strong. The strength of revolutionary groups reflects the strength of the class.This is contradictory. Was Luxemburg a "left communist"? Liebknecht? No, they weren't, but the lefts try to claim their efforts as their own. I've seen left communists claim Luxemburg to be one of them, and in their next breath claim left communism hadn't developed as a tendency at the time of her death. After all, vague phrases like "the revolutionary wave after WWI" don't exactly help.

The communist left is and was weak, even when the working class was strong and ascendant; that's not an accident. For instance, where were the lefts in the various working-class struggles throughout Latin America? That's the point.

On this thread itself, I think it's good to once again emphasize the fact that left communists fervently believe that everyone is bourgeois except for themselves, no matter what history or experience or all of Marxist thought says to the contrary. On a positive note, though, it's unlikely you'll ever encounter one in real life (perhaps because they regard real life as bourgeois, too).

I think all of this stuff about internet warriors says more about the people saying it than the people they are talking about.Or maybe it says that the ICC, along with "left communists" in general, has practically no presence outside the internet, which is true.

Devrim

31st March 2009, 09:03

I think the fact that various people feel some need to rant almost continually about the communist left probably says more about them than about us.

Devrim

manic expression

31st March 2009, 15:58

I think the fact that various people feel some need to rant almost continually about the communist left probably says more about them than about us.

And I think the fact that many left communists here are obviously unable to respond to those criticisms says quite a lot about them. The issue is that those so-called "rants" are true.

Black Sheep

31st March 2009, 16:18

If a party receives no funding from the bourgeoisie class, if a party has not even one bourgeoisie member, and if our position is that the bourgeoisie are our class enemy and their private property should be nationalized without compensation, Am I a member of a bourgeioisie party?
Well you very well could be.Political 'leftist' parties are very well at talking left, but vote for anti-working class reforms, have no solid program, distort the value & role of the parliament as a means for change, go to marches and protest with corrupt syndicates with lame,reformist demands..

I have no idea what your party is/does.But you have shown a good level of awareness in the forum,so i think you could very well judge on your own, :)

Charles Xavier

31st March 2009, 16:32

Well you very well could be.Political 'leftist' parties are very well at talking left, but vote for anti-working class reforms, have no solid program, distort the value & role of the parliament as a means for change, go to marches and protest with corrupt syndicates with lame,reformist demands..

I have no idea what your party is/does.But you have shown a good level of awareness in the forum,so i think you could very well judge on your own, :)

Our program is very solid and very long, We have never voted for anti-working class reforms, in any elected position we have been in. We do go to marches and protests with corrupt syndicates and also really solid ones, who have either lame demands or solid ones. But sure the CLC in Canada has shit ass social democratic leadership, we go to where the masses are, where the centre of working class organization is and show the workers the alternative to the reformists are. Our job is not to disrupt or harm the trade union movement but put it in a more progressive agenda that's biggest campaign in 20 years is to increase EI(unemployment insurance), instead of putting in solid reforms such as nationalize bankrupt manufacturing industries, or even a program of jobs. They don't because they are tied to then hip with the NDP, who has their own sectarian goal of getting in power, and is willing to sell out to do so.

JimmyJazz

31st March 2009, 17:59

I don't think it is. The communist left is a specific political current with specific political positions.

Might you be conflating the communist left with the ICC? Because of course the ICC has specific positions, being 35 years old, but the "communist left" is broader. I've had self-proclaimed left communists tell me that the Leninist idea of a party-led coup was thoroughly anti-Marxist and anti-communist, yet the ICC website praises it at length, saying that things only went wrong subsequently, when the rule of the party was established rather than the rule of the proletariat. (I somewhat agree with the ICC's position on that, btw, but for reasons just stated it cannot be considered the universal "left communist" position).

And as for the ICC, sure it has specific positions because it is fairly old, but these positions were all formed in reaction to the actions of real life revolutionary groups, mainly the Bolsheviks. It seems that the ICC, like other left communists, originally defined themselves by what they were in opposition to rather than what they advocated. Do I see the usefulness of criticizing past attempts at communism? Of course. Do I see the usefulness of forming a tendency around what you reject, rather than what you positively advocate? No. Do I see the point of calling millions of fervent communists - indeed the majority of communists around the world, historically and presently - the "left wing of capital"? Uh.....no. How much more insulting can you get?

I think at the moment the communist left is weak because the class is weak. In the revolutionary wave after WWI it was strong. The strength of revolutionary groups reflects the strength of the class.

That's not what I meant - I meant the fact that left communists, almost by definition, will never lead the working class to power, because they seem to be defined by what they are in opposition to. If they took power, they would cease to be left communists; but another group of dissenting communists, who thought that those who took power were still much too authoritarian for their tastes, would begin to call themselves the new left communists.

spritely

31st March 2009, 23:05

If communism is a molecule of the political body, "left communism" is an atom.

Charles Xavier

31st March 2009, 23:10

If communism is a molecule of the political body, "left communism" is an atom.
????????

Pogue

31st March 2009, 23:15

If communism is a molecule of the political body, "left communism" is an atom.

From what I've seen, left communism is an idea as less than a movement to be measured by how many people are in it. Anyway they're not that bad, the only thing thats pretty shit about them is the whole calling other leftists the left wing of capitalism and the whole 'People should have laid down and died for Hitler during WWII' thing.

But the whole left wing is pretty insignificant anyway so, throwing stones from glass houses really. What group are you active in?

Pirate turtle the 11th

31st March 2009, 23:16

If communism is a molecule of the political body, "left communism" is an atom.

Boasting about how small a group is within the communist movement is pathetic its like boasting about how small somone's cock is despite the fact that everyone else in the room including yourself requires tweezers to masturbate.

Pogue

31st March 2009, 23:18

Boasting about how small a group is within the communist movement is pathetic its like boasting about how small somone's cock is despite the fact that everyone else in the room including yourself requires tweezers to masturbate.

Hey! Its a serious condition and one I am very sensitive about!

spritely

31st March 2009, 23:31

I agree. Small peepees. We all need some sort of herbal remedy because none of us can provide pleasure. The left worldwide couldn't gang bang an artichoke.

spritely

31st March 2009, 23:31

The left is shit. Let's wipe and flush and be done with it then start on the next turd. That's what I'm saying.

Pogue

31st March 2009, 23:33

The left is shit. Let's wipe and flush and be done with it then start on the next turd. That's what I'm saying.

Yeh! Let all us working class peoples drop working class emancipation and move onto a new theory! Thats *just* what the world needs! I say we invent a synthesis of biology and motor mechanics with liberalism thrown in!

spritely

1st April 2009, 00:24

Marx put us on the right path clearly. People like Lenin and Joe Hill came up with a lot we can use. But we run around mimicking these people like monkeys and not even doing that right and it gets us nowhere but further in the hole.

What I'm saying is not that we need to stop fighting for communism but that we need to find an effective way of doing it. Can you admit that we've failed? It's hard. It means you've been doing the wrong thing for while. But it's the only way to figure out the correct thing!

spritely

1st April 2009, 00:27

If my grandpa started a business 100+ years ago and it took off a little then started to decline then I took over and ran things the same way as him and it continued to decline then my son took it over and ran things the same way and it existed with 1/100th the business that it had when my grandpa started in utter irrelevancy do you think it would be a good idea for my grand kids to emulate all of the previous owners when they take it over??

Change business to union and my family and I to members and you have the IWW.

You might be young and just discovering the left the IWW or whatever but these things have been around for DECADES and they've accomplished NOTHING. Why do you want to keep doing the same failing shit??

el_chavista

1st April 2009, 04:07

Well, one got to admit that the ICC is the heartiest attempt to create a chemically pure revolutionary party, the negation of all the leftist organizations but their workers councils. Now, who can say it's more than an intellectual exercise from a sectarian circle?

Devrim

2nd April 2009, 09:16

From what I've seen, left communism is an idea as less than a movement to be measured by how many people are in it. Anyway they're not that bad, the only thing thats pretty shit about them is the whole calling other leftists the left wing of capitalism and the whole 'People should have laid down and died for Hitler during WWII' thing.

the only thing thats pretty shit about them is the whole calling other leftists the left wing of capitalism

HLVS when you think about the thing about the left-wing of capital although it may be worded in a bit of an old fashioned manner, many other left wing groups have a similar general analysis.

Is the labour party a bourgeois party of a workers' party? I think that most anarchists for example would agree with us. Some Trotskyists manage to fudge the issue by calling it a bourgeois-workers party whatever they mean by that.

Now does this mean that every member of the Labour party is a member of the bourgeoisie? Of course not. There are still workers in the Labour party, and many workers still vote for them. But that isn't what determines the class nature of a party. There are lots of workers who vote for the Tory party too, and even the BNP.

Then we could extend this to groups that claim to be revolutionary, but are in the Labour Party. What is the objective result of their work. Is it to increase class consciousness, or is it to provide left cover for an absolutely rotten bourgeois party.

Now extend this question to the official CPs. What class does their politics represent? Do you see where I am going?

When we say that a party or political organisation is 'the left-wing of capital', it doesn't mean that we think that every member is some top hat wearing capitalist. Many honest militant workers are in these organisations.

Do you think that we should be dishonest about what we see as the role of these organisations?

I think although you may not agree with how we apply the method, the method itself is understandable.

The term isn't good in my opinion though.

and the whole 'People should have laid down and died for Hitler during WWII' thing.

But that is not what we say is it? That is the parody of what we say that others have created, and you know it.

Devrim

Devrim

2nd April 2009, 10:08

Might you be conflating the communist left with the ICC? Because of course the ICC has specific positions, being 35 years old, but the "communist left" is broader. I've had self-proclaimed left communists tell me that the Leninist idea of a party-led coup was thoroughly anti-Marxist and anti-communist, yet the ICC website praises it at length, saying that things only went wrong subsequently, when the rule of the party was established rather than the rule of the proletariat. (I somewhat agree with the ICC's position on that, btw, but for reasons just stated it cannot be considered the universal "left communist" position).

Yes, I see what you are saying here. I think that there are too 'problems here'. The first is that the terms 'communist left' and 'left communist' actually have historically different meanings. I know this is a bit of a semantic nonsense, but the council communists, for example, could be considered 'left communists', but not part of the modern communist left.

I think that exceptance of the Russia revolution as proletarian is a definging part of the communist left, but not of left communists.

The other thing is what does 'self-proclaimed left communist' mean. Are these people communist militants who are part of organisations or are they just individuals who have decided they are left communists?

And as for the ICC, sure it has specific positions because it is fairly old, but these positions were all formed in reaction to the actions of real life revolutionary groups, mainly the Bolsheviks. It seems that the ICC, like other left communists, originally defined themselves by what they were in opposition to rather than what they advocated. Do I see the usefulness of criticizing past attempts at communism? Of course. Do I see the usefulness of forming a tendency around what you reject, rather than what you positively advocate? No. Do I see the point of calling millions of fervent communists - indeed the majority of communists around the world, historically and presently - the "left wing of capital"? Uh.....no. How much more insulting can you get?

Yes, in my opinion the term is bad, and can be seen as insulting by many honest militants who are members of these groups. Maybe we can improve it. Some times in is necessary to say things that are insulting though. For example the Shinning Path are an anti-working class gang. You can't get around that however you phrase it.

That's not what I meant - I meant the fact that left communists, almost by definition, will never lead the working class to power, because they seem to be defined by what they are in opposition to. If they took power, they would cease to be left communists; but another group of dissenting communists, who thought that those who took power were still much too authoritarian for their tastes, would begin to call themselves the new left communists.

The left communist held the majority in the Russia and Italian parties, the two Countries in Western Europe that came closest to revolution,in the revolutionary period in those countries, but yes, I can see the tautological point to your argument.

Actually, there are things we are in favour of though.

Devrim

black magick hustla

2nd April 2009, 10:26

The other thing is what does 'self-proclaimed left communist' mean. Are these people communist militants who are part of organisations or are they just individuals who have decided they are left communists?"

or sympathizers.......

nyc is gonna be very fun

Charles Xavier

2nd April 2009, 13:50

Three posts by Left Communists not 1 question answered. Quite a sad state.

Our party here in Canada is an honest revolutionary party offering honest revolutionary answers, they are communist through and through, standing for workers against bosses.

Any such argument that says we are the left-wing of capital will show a complete bankruptcy here in Canada.

There is no left communists except the Trotskyites who form ultra-left and right opportunists lines depending on the group in Canada outside of Spartacus, who are the weirdest group of them all, who support NAMBLA and R. Kelly who peed on a 14 year old girl. But I guess they would be the left-wing of capital too since they are not the ICC according to the ICC, who claims they are the only true revolutionary group and all other groups are bourgeoisie.

My party produced two revolutionary leaders, one was if I'm not mistaken Maurice Bishop (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Bishop) of Grenada who was a student in Canada or his son.

Leo

2nd April 2009, 15:11

There is no left communists except the Trotskyites who form ultra-left and right opportunists lines depending on the group in Canada outside of Spartacus, who are the weirdest group of them all, who support NAMBLA and R. Kelly who peed on a 14 year old girl. But I guess they would be the left-wing of capital too since they are not the ICC according to the ICC, who claims they are the only true revolutionary group and all other groups are bourgeoisie.Trotskyists are not left communists, Sparts are not only left-capitalists and NAMBLA supporting weirdos but also the most tankie ones of all Trots. The headline of their paper when Russian imperialism invaded Afghanistan was "Hail the Red Army".

On the other hand, there actually is a left communist group in Canada called the Internationalist Workers' Organization (they publish Internationalist Notes: http://www.ibrp.org/en/taxonomy/term/55), which is a section of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party. Yes they aren't the ICC but we consider them revolutionaries and comrades, which sort of destroys the slander you love repeating about how we supposadely say all other groups other than us are bourgeois.

As for your questions, they were answered but if you want it repeated again, yes you are a member of a bourgeois party, one that has been a proletarian party only in the years of the Communist International and was destroyed as a party of the working class by the Stalinist counter-revolution.

Charles Xavier

2nd April 2009, 15:15

Trotskyists are not left communists, Sparts are not only left-capitalists and NAMBLA supporting weirdos but also the most tankie ones of all Trots. The headline of their paper when Russian imperialism invaded Afghanistan was "Hail the Red Army".

On the other hand, there actually is a left communist group in Canada called the Internationalist Workers' Organization (they publish Internationalist Notes: http://www.ibrp.org/en/taxonomy/term/55), which is a section of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party. Yes they aren't the ICC but we consider them revolutionaries and comrades, which sort of destroys the slander you love repeating about how we supposadely say all other groups other than us are bourgeois.

As for your questions, they were answered but if you want it repeated again, yes you are a member of a bourgeois party, and a disgustingly patriotic one that is.

The group you mentioned is a trotskyite group and a very small one at that.

Their worst enemies are other trotskyite groups, who they swear at during demonstrations (mind you a group that was bigger than theirs) rather than the boss class. Great pick as your Canadian representatives! Now this is a 2006 Iraq War demonstration I'm talking about.

You a member of a counter-revolutionary organization. Anti-Trade Union, Anti-Marxists, Pro-Apathy.

Samyasa

2nd April 2009, 15:27

The ICC does not (and never has) claim to be the only revolutionary group. For one thing, we acknowledge other revolutionary groups in the tradition of left communism such as the Bordigists and the International Bureau of the Revolutionary Party. Those currents have major disagreements with us on many issues but ultimately we see them as part of the revolutionary camp.

We also see revolutionary currents in certain parts of the anarchist milieu, especially those class-struggle anarchists that defend internationalism (it's more difficult to name groups here because of the heterogenous nature of anarchism but that the current exists is undeniable).

Leo

2nd April 2009, 15:33

The group you mentioned is a trotskyite group and a very small one at that.It is not a "trotskyite" group, it is a left communist group which is opposed to Trotskyism. Here's what the platform of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, of which the IWG is the affiliate, says: This process of degeneration was followed by Trotsky and his followers during the Thirties Trotsky’s policy of entryism into social democratic and labour parties (the so-called “French turn”), and Trotskyism’s support for the USSR’s imperialist ambitions wiped out Trotskyism as a potentially revolutionary current. (http://www.ibrp.org/en/platform)

The platform of the IWG itself says: All parties and groups that have claimed to be parties and organizations of the proletariat (Social Democrats, Stalinists, Maoists, Trotskyists, etc.) are enemies of the proletariat. They pose as defenders of the working class when in fact they are precisely the opposite.

In the same document, they clearly state that they claim tradition to the tradition of the communist left: Our theoretical positions arise from our historical experience as a political tendency. Organizationally we draw our experience from the Internationalists of the Italian Communist Left in its struggles against capitalist counterrevolution — Stalinism, fascism and democracy. (http://www.ibrp.org/en/articles/2002-11-01/platform-of-the-iwg)

You a member of a counter-revolutionary organization. Anti-Trade Union, Anti-Marxists, Pro-Apathy. As I told you before, as a militant of an international communist organization, I expect all sort of slanders, insults as well as possible physical attacks from nationalists and anti-working class defenders of union structures, hierarchies and bureaucracies such as yourself and do not care about and am not bothered by what you say. In fact the only reason I am spending time responding to things you have said is to expose your slanders to others reading this.

Samyasa

2nd April 2009, 15:37

The group you mentioned is a trotskyite group and a very small one at that.

When argument fails, blatant lies prevail. The IBRP comrades are not Trotskyists. By the way, are your posts an effort to satirize 1930s Stalinism, denouncing everything as Trotskyist?

Charles Xavier

2nd April 2009, 16:31

Okay seriously what the fuck does Stalin have to do with anything? this isn't the Soviet Union during ww2. I have not recieved orders from Stalin to purge you and we are not talking about Stalin.

If your Final argument is "Stalin" than please get the hell out. I am not interested in discussing politics with people's who's only purpose is to derail discussion to talk about Stalin. If you want to talk about Stalin join the millions of other threads dedicated to Stalin. Please stop trying to turn discussions that have nothing to do with Stalin into Stalin versus Aliens.

And I guess I was mistaken, I apologize, they were marching with other trotskyite groups. I see it is okay to blatantly pick the bones.and ignore the meat. If your biggest enemy is other leftists than you honestly are counter-revolutionaries. You share the same enemies with the boss class.

I on the other hand can work with Trotskyite groups, anarchists, social democrats and maoists on various mass democratic struggles as long as they aren't there to disrupt and split. I don't see how you guys can call yourselves communists, or internationalists, or a current.

You guys adopt every position that Marx ridicules.

“The working class must not constitute itself a political party; it must not, under any pretext, engage in political action, for to combat the state is to recognize the state: and this is contrary to eternal principles. Workers must not go on strike; for to struggle to increase one's wages or to prevent their decrease is like recognizing wages: and this is contrary to the eternal principles of the emancipation of the working class!

“If in the political struggle against the bourgeois state the workers succeed only in extracting concessions, then they are guilty of compromise; and this is contrary to eternal principles. All peaceful movements, such as those in which English and American workers have the bad habit of engaging, are therefore to be despised. Workers must not struggle to establish a legal limit to the working day, because this is to compromise with the masters, who can then only exploit them for ten or twelve hours, instead of fourteen or sixteen. They must not even exert themselves in order legally to prohibit the employment in factories of children under the age of ten, because by such means they do not bring to an end the exploitation of children over ten: they thus commit a new compromise, which stains the purity of the eternal principles."

-Marx (Political Indifferentism, 1873)

Crux

2nd April 2009, 17:09

Crux

2nd April 2009, 17:12

I could give you quite a handfull of critique of stalinist stageism being just a capitaulation to the bourguise though. And that's kind of worse than just being another bourguise party.

Charles Xavier

2nd April 2009, 17:25

I could give you quite a handfull of critique of stalinist stageism being just a capitaulation to the bourguise though. And that's kind of worse than just being another bourguise party.

What are you on about Stalin? Stalin has absolutely nothing to do with this thread. Do not derail discussion.

2nd April 2009, 21:42

What are you on about Stalin? Stalin has absolutely nothing to do with this thread. Do not derail discussion.

He was referring to your politics.

More Fire for the People

2nd April 2009, 21:47

Short answer: the ICC are fucking nutters.
Long answer: the ICC is a flank of bourgeois ideology opposing the interests of the oppressed from "within" the worker's movement.

Charles Xavier

2nd April 2009, 23:05

He was referring to your politics.

What do my politics have to do with Stalin?

JimmyJazz

3rd April 2009, 00:15

Yes, I see what you are saying here. I think that there are too 'problems here'. The first is that the terms 'communist left' and 'left communist' actually have historically different meanings. I know this is a bit of a semantic nonsense, but the council communists, for example, could be considered 'left communists', but not part of the modern communist left.

I think that exceptance of the Russia revolution as proletarian is a definging part of the communist left, but not of left communists.

OK. It is annoying to have to deal with semantics, but it's not nonsense - if there's an actual historical distinction then you have to recognize it if you want to get anywhere. And no, I was not really aware of the difference.

The other thing is what does 'self-proclaimed left communist' mean. Are these people communist militants who are part of organisations or are they just individuals who have decided they are left communists?

Good point. I don't know.

Yes, in my opinion the term is bad, and can be seen as insulting by many honest militants who are members of these groups. Maybe we can improve it. Some times in is necessary to say things that are insulting though. For example the Shinning Path are an anti-working class gang. You can't get around that however you phrase it.

It's not just bad, it's false. I mean, I have no problem calling certain guerrilla groups, certain students groups, and certain bureaucratic agencies "anti-worker". All of them most certainly can be anti-worker, and I can think of examples of each that were. But obviously, none of them are bourgeois. Not unless they own some capital and employ some workers. To call them bourgeois is just dishonest, insulting, analytical poor shorthand. And if the argument is that "they help the bourgeoisie therefore they are bourgeois too", well that kind of simplistic stuff is what makes average people look down on Marxism imho. Not everyone in society is proletarian or bourgeois; no intelligent communist (certainly not Marx) ever said this.

And the bulk of the ICC's website, despite some good stuff, just seems calculated to provoke. Superimposing Stalin's face on Che's, etc. It's very crude.

But I do want to point out that this is mostly a beef I have with the ICC website, not with RevLeft's ICC sympathizers.

The left communist held the majority in the Russia and Italian parties, the two Countries in Western Europe that came closest to revolution,in the revolutionary period in those countries, but yes, I can see the tautological point to your argument.

Actually, there are things we are in favour of though.

Devrim

I think my main disgreement with a left communist analysis, what it always comes back to, is the possibility for a truly revolutionary class solidarity across borders in the era of imperialism. I don't see it as possible. And I don't understand (though I have tried) why the ICC thinks we can simply ignore the fact that a certain group of countries has artificially inflated the living standard of its working classes to absurdly higher levels than the rest of the world, subsidized by various forms of exploitation of the rest of the world. To expect those living in the imperialist countries to just give that up strikes me as ridiculous. The 'third' world has to emancipate itself (and I'm thinking primarily of tarriffs and an underdeveloped trade bloc and a cutoff of all Western loans/aid...military struggle is secondary) before anything revolutionary can happen in the 'first' world. To me this just seems like common sense (although I have built up my theoretical knowledge around it as well). Currently, first world workers believe they have more to gain by lining up behind nationalism (a very specific kind of nationalism, namely that which is directed against weaker nations, aka imperialism) than behind a truly global class struggle.

Any other firm disagreements I have with the ICC more or less stem from that I think.

JimmyJazz

3rd April 2009, 00:20

the ICC is a flank of bourgeois ideology opposing the interests of the oppressed from "within" the worker's movement.

You could definitely make this argument. Not that I would, because it's too vague an assertion to be backed up and can only function as a slander, but it does beg the question of why they (their website) make it about everyone else.

Coggeh

3rd April 2009, 01:22

You do have a choice as a worker to participate in the electoral system or not, but it won't make much of a difference - the same people are voted in each and every time. In some countries such as the UK, for many people it won't matter who you vote for as it will only be an handful of consituencies which decide an election, due to those constituencies not being "safe seats" for one of the major political parties. The only thing we as workers can gain from the capitalist electoral system is the occasional reform.
Would you rather parties sat around and offered no real choice for people to voice their opposition . Most people believe in the electoral system (I don't) I dont think its a means of achieving real change .

But we must offer a real alternative and a mass workers party with trade union ties which is democratic and set on a socialist agenda could well do that.To a point where we don't need bourgeois elections to bring about change .

Matina

3rd April 2009, 01:35

But we must offer a real alternative and a mass workers party with trade union ties which is democratic and set on a socialist agenda could well do that.To a point where we don't need bourgeois elections to bring about change .

Don'tyou think this post is contradictory? In the beginning you say that you don't believe in bourgeois elections and you end an excellent post with the part I bolded.

Can you please clarify yourself? Also even if we had a mass party on a socialist programme we would still need to participate in bourgeois elections in order to agitate to the widest layers of the working class, while explaining that bourgeois elections cannot bring change.

Also I find it hard to have a mass revolutionary party on a socialist programme at all times. In certain material conditions, this future party would degenerate as a reformist tendency would emerge (due to a material basis for reformism), in times where reforms are possible for capitalism to carry out (obviously not in a financial collapse , but in a boom).

In short, I think mass working class parties on a socialist programme are temporary and emerging in a pre-revolutionary, revolutionary period, where it would be pointless to particiapte in bourgeois elections.

LOLseph Stalin

3rd April 2009, 01:41

In short, I think mass working class parties on a socialist programme are temporary and emerging in a pre-revolutionary, revolutionary period, where it would be pointless to particiapte in bourgeois elections.

Unless I misunderstood you, shouldn't we still be voting in Bourgeois elections to try to get Social Democratic parties into power? They could serve as a helpful tool to increase our organizations in size. We should be trying to educate people in these parties to better serve the working class. Some may sympathize unless they are total sell-outs or puppets of the Capitalist dictatorship we currently live in.

Matina

3rd April 2009, 01:46

Unless I misunderstood you, shouldn't we still be voting in Bourgeois elections to try to get Social Democratic parties into power? They could serve as a helpful tool to increase our organizations in size. We should be trying to educate people in these parties to better serve the working class. Some may sympathize unless they are total sell-outs or puppets of the Capitalist dictatorship we currently live in.

I assume you are reffering to a tactical vote. Vote the social democrats in order to expose their rottenness . That is a valid tactic taken from the Bolshevik "All power to the Soviets" call (when they did not control the Soviets, so the call was only to expose the Mensheviks).

Anyways I am saying that in revolutionary conditions, we should not participate in bourgeois elections. Because that would be stupid, the masses in revolutionary conditions have a lot more class consciousness than they have now. Ie they understand how pointless bourgeois elections are, just like communists understand it. Therefore we would call for a boycott and a setting up of Soviets, along with a call for revolution.

Sorry if all this is confusing, but Marxism is a science . Tactics depend on material conditions so they can be quite complex.

Coggeh

3rd April 2009, 01:51

Don'tyou think this post is contradictory? In the beginning you say that you don't believe in bourgeois elections and you end an excellent post with the part I bolded.

Can you please clarify yourself? Also even if we had a mass party on a socialist programme we would still need to participate in bourgeois elections in order to agitate to the widest layers of the working class, while explaining that bourgeois elections cannot bring change.

Also I find it hard to have a mass revolutionary party on a socialist programme at all times. In certain material conditions, this future party would degenerate as a reformist tendency would emerge (due to a material basis for reformism), in times where reforms are possible for capitalism to carry out (obviously not in a financial collapse , but in a boom).

In short, I think mass working class parties on a socialist programme are temporary and emerging in a pre-revolutionary, revolutionary period, where it would be pointless to participate in bourgeois elections.
I stated bourgeois elections can't be used to bring about real change.I said we must create a mass workers party with trade unions ties/links set about on a democratic socialist programme to bring about this change . Not by elections.The last quote I admit is very misleading and I apologise.Their is no real way to explain it , just lack of sleep i guess . My apologies .

We know elections aren't the be all and end all . But they can be useful for giving ours ideas a platform at a regional and national level .They can be used to create awareness of our ideas . But we must not change our ideas to create awareness if you understand what I'm saying ?.

You may have misunderstood my earlier point as I said it without really thinking too much , my intention was to say that elections aren't necessary and most likely aren't a viable way of creating a socialist state. But none the less we must part because it is a useful tool such as I've stated above .

Also a mass workers organisation would not have to be reformist in order to reach the widest layers ? why should it have to be ? we use our programme to convince others of our ideas , and through actions and propaganda of our ideas on issues of health care , education , poverty , racism etc we can do this .

Matina

3rd April 2009, 01:59

Also a mass workers organisation would not have to be reformist in order to reach the widest layers ? why should it have to be ? we use our programme to convince others of our ideas , and through actions and propaganda of our ideas on issues of health care , education , poverty , racism etc we can do this .

I think you misunderstood me. I said that in a mass revolutionary conditions under material conditions of social-peace and room for concessions, a reformist faction will take place. For example look at what happened in the SPD in Germany.
I certainly did not say that we should alter our principles in order to appeal to the working class, that is classic Beirnstenist opportunism :lol:
I just stated the impossibility of a mass party on a socialist programme at all times with no reformist tendencies. It's a law!

Anyways I agree on the question of participating in elections. I think you misunderstood me due to the lack of sleep. I also said that we should decide wether or not to participate according to the material conditions, ie if there is a revolutionary situation there is no point in participating . For example Lenin advocating the boycott of the Duma in 1905 due to the revolutionary conditions, but after the revolution advocating the entry in the Duma as a platform. Tactics change as conditions change.

LOLseph Stalin

3rd April 2009, 02:06

I assume you are reffering to a tactical vote. Vote the social democrats in order to expose their rottenness . That is a valid tactic taken from the Bolshevik "All power to the Soviets" call (when they did not control the Soviets, so the call was only to expose the Mensheviks).

Well yes. Maybe if the working class actually sees their "representative" party in action, failing then maybe they'll turn towards Marxism. They would realize that it offers a better solution.

Anyways I am saying that in revolutionary conditions, we should not participate in bourgeois elections. Because that would be stupid, the masses in revolutionary conditions have a lot more class consciousness than they have now. Ie they understand how pointless bourgeois elections are, just like communists understand it. Therefore we would call for a boycott and a setting up of Soviets, along with a call for revolution.

Of course not. In revolutionary conditions, we work towards making a revolution. This could include rallies, demostrations, etc. Basically tactics to intimidate the bourgeoisie. I'm sure they would begin to be a little more afraid if there were ten million workers going against them rather than just ten thousand, just to throw out an example. It would obviously be better for us too with more support. With support it would be pretty simple to form Soviets. From there we could proceed with revolution.

JimmyJazz

3rd April 2009, 02:28

I think my main disgreement with a left communist analysis, what it always comes back to, is the possibility for a truly revolutionary class solidarity across borders in the era of imperialism. I don't see it as possible. And I don't understand (though I have tried) why the ICC thinks we can simply ignore the fact that a certain group of countries has artificially inflated the living standard of its working classes to absurdly higher levels than the rest of the world, subsidized by various forms of exploitation of the rest of the world. To expect those living in the imperialist countries to just give that up strikes me as ridiculous. The 'third' world has to emancipate itself (and I'm thinking primarily of tarriffs and an underdeveloped trade bloc and a cutoff of all Western loans/aid...military struggle is secondary) before anything revolutionary can happen in the 'first' world. To me this just seems like common sense (although I have built up my theoretical knowledge around it as well). Currently, first world workers believe they have more to gain by lining up behind nationalism (a very specific kind of nationalism, namely that which is directed against weaker nations, aka imperialism) than behind a truly global class struggle.

By the way, I just want to clarify that this is not the simplistic analysis it might sound like.

I believe that "free trade" is the cover under which exploitation of the underdeveloped world takes place. But free trade means multiple things: movement of capital, movement of goods, and (less frequently) movement of people (labor).

Some forms of free trade clearly hurt the first world working classes as much as the underdeveloped-world working classes; for instance the movement of capital. When American-based capital relocates to third world countries, third worlders get sweatshop condition jobs, while first worlders see their good-paying union jobs disappear. Both groups lose, therefore international solidarity is a crucial and feasible ingredient in solving the problem. Union members and other conscious workers in the first world should to chase American-based capital wherever it goes around the globe, helping to unionize the workers it employs overseas, and driving up the price of labor there. That helps everyone. For the possibilities of international working class solidarity to solve this issue, I recommend the book The Global Class War by Jeff Faux. Supporting groups like the Zapatistas is another good way.

Other forms of free trade benefit the first world working classes even as they harm the third world; for instance the cracking of foreign markets for our manufactured goods. This fosters dependence and an inability of countries without advanced manufacturing abilites to ever develop them. They get relegated to the role of suppliers of raw materials and cheap labor, while the first world has a monopoly on being able to make all the things that people really want. For more on this issue read Bad Samaritans by Ha-Joon Chang. Gonzeau and Bobkindles can confirm that this is an awesome book.

So you have to look at it issue-by-issue, which is what I try to do. It's just that I think the days of the simplistic May Day stuff with "workers have no country" banners are dead and gone (for now). I also think the MIM stuff is super-simplistic. If you want to know who has revolutionary potential and who does not (and who might even be reactionary), you have to look at their different interests in the current global economy. That's the Marxist method and that's what he'd be doing if he were alive.

And I just wanted to clarify that I'm no "Maoist third-worldist" or whatever. People in the so-called third world don't live miserable shitty lives, they're perfectly capable of being happy, and they are. It doesn't mean I support their exploitation. But I sure as hell don't support any group flying a picture of Mao or a red flag either, for instance the Nepalese Maoists are doing the exact opposite of what I think they should be doing, by inviting foreign investment thinking that this time it will somehow, magically, foster development rather than dependence. But that's not how it works.

Bilan

3rd April 2009, 05:19

Short answer: the ICC are fucking nutters.
Long answer: the ICC is a flank of bourgeois ideology opposing the interests of the oppressed from "within" the worker's movement.

Short answer: One liners are not an appropriate form of debate. Don't do it again.
Long Answer: This is clearly not the case, and your poor, pathetic attempt to slander the ICC is undermined by your inability to say anything of substance against them.

More Fire for the People

3rd April 2009, 05:47

Short answer: One liners are not an appropriate form of debate. Don't do it again.
Long Answer: This is clearly not the case, and your poor, pathetic attempt to slander the ICC is undermined by your inability to say anything of substance against them.
Big shocker, an infantile leftist crying 'wah-wah'. So the ICC can accuse anyone of being bourgeois--unsubstantially--where I cannot? The ICC are bourgeois becomes they halt the advancement of the class interests of the proletariat in the name of puritanical fanaticism.

Charles Xavier

3rd April 2009, 07:10

Short answer: One liners are not an appropriate form of debate. Don't do it again.
Long Answer: This is clearly not the case, and your poor, pathetic attempt to slander the ICC is undermined by your inability to say anything of substance against them.

Shame the same treatment didn't get applied to those who were trying to derail the discussion to talk about Stalin on the last page.

And the ICC have not explained their reasoning other than my party supports trade unions which are working class institutions that fight the bourgeoisie albeit limited at times,(something any communist should support), and thus we are bourgeoisie. I haven't gotten a better explanation than that so I don't think you should be qualifying whats a good answer. I don't think More Fire for the Peopl (http://www.revleft.com/vb/../member.php?u=10073)e offers the correct answer, but rather is offering the same answer that the ICC are giving me but putting it back onto them.

I don't think the ICC are bourgeoisie, I think they are from academia, puritan, sectarian, ultra-leftists and if push came to shove, they will prove themselves to be counter-revolutionaries. Right now they are counter-revolutionary in words and not deeds.

If you want to talk about Slander, i think you should start over. The whole thread is about Slanderous words being leveled against communists and revolutionaries worldwide by the ICC.

So stop your selective reading skills and start something more comprehensive.

Bilan

3rd April 2009, 07:33

Big shocker, an infantile leftist crying 'wah-wah'.

Is there something wrong with you? Are you capable of debate, or are you such an obnoxious tool that all you can do is resort to is ad hominem?

So the ICC can accuse anyone of being bourgeois--unsubstantially--where I cannot?

Contrary to how you act, the ICC does not make a single claim and then do nothing to back up its statement. Furthermore, if you're going to critique something, a one liner is not acceptable. It is simply pathetic.

The ICC are bourgeois becomes they halt the advancement of the class interests of the proletariat in the name of puritanical fanaticism.

Can you substantiate this?

Devrim

3rd April 2009, 07:38

And the ICC have not explained their reasoning other than my party supports trade unions which are working class institutions that fight the bourgeoisie albeit limited at times,(something any communist should support), and thus we are bourgeoisie. I haven't gotten a better explanation than that so I don't think you should be qualifying whats a good answer. I don't think More Fire for the Peopl (http://www.revleft.com/vb/../member.php?u=10073)e offers the correct answer, but rather is offering the same answer that the ICC are giving me but putting it back onto them.

No, we did explain the reasoning. Your party is not a bourgeois party because it supports the trade unions. It is a bourgeois party because it takes sides in imperialist wars.

Devrim

Bilan

3rd April 2009, 07:54

Shame the same treatment didn't get applied to those who were trying to derail the discussion to talk about Stalin on the last page.

In my defence, I only came across this thread today.

And the ICC have not explained their reasoning other than my party supports trade unions which are working class institutions that fight the bourgeoisie albeit limited at times,(something any communist should support), and thus we are bourgeoisie.

That's not true, though, is it? The ICC have not said you are a member of a bourgeois party simply because your party support Trade Unions. That is only part of a general critique, and you yourself are reducing the critique to undermine their criticism. Which is absurd.
Infact, the ICC comrades in here who have criticised your party have done so on a series of issues. The first being the role of the CPC in WWII, in supporting conscripting workers into an Imperialist war, and of supporting the banning of strikes to increase the war effort.

In this instance, you played the exact same role as the bourgeois parties: You sided with the interests of the bourgeoisie and supressed the interests of the working class, by taking part and advocating workers dying in an imperialist war.

Now, the Trade Unions. You say above that these are geniune organisations of the working class. Following from this position, you are not in a bourgeois party. But the presumption which this rests on is false, as anyone who knows the history of Trade Unions, particularly in the post-80s period knows.

To give you an example, in Australia, the Trade Unions (ACTU) signed a deal with the Federal Government called the Accord, which, essentially, allowed for the Federal Government to put through waves of privatisation, etc. in Australia, and which was instrumental in the mass outsourcing of labour. This was done in compliance with the Trade Unions in Australia - not even compliance, willingness of the Trade Unions, who agreed to do nothing.

At the moment, in Australia, in the car manufacturing industry, the Trade unions have come out in support with the federal government and the bosses to allow wage cuts, etc. as a means of keeping people employed in the manufacturing sector, i.e. the trade unions have willingly accepted the working class paying for this crisis.

These are specific examples of the bourgeois role played by the Trade Unions.
If you take the time to read the ICCs pamphlets, or even just one, on the Trade Unions, your understanding of why they criticise you would be far more developed, and you'd actually be able to respond to it with far more clarity, which seems to be the opposite of what people are doing in here.
For example, see this pamphlet: Unions against the working class (http://en.internationalism.org/pamphlets/unions_chapter_01.htm).

These are only two examples which constitute only part of the basis for the general critique of your party, and others.

I haven't gotten a better explanation than that so I don't think you should be qualifying whats a good answer. I don't think More Fire for the Peopl (http://www.revleft.com/vb/../member.php?u=10073)e offers the correct answer, but rather is offering the same answer that the ICC are giving me but putting it back onto them.

You have been given much better explanations, but its a choice to read them. I've linked you on previous occassions to these papers, and devrim and others have given you indepth answers to your questions, but you have often begun your questions in an arrogant tone, though you don't know the answer yourself. This thread is a perfect example.

I don't think the ICC are bourgeoisie, I think they are from academia, puritan, sectarian, ultra-leftists and if push came to shove, they will prove themselves to be counter-revolutionaries. Right now they are counter-revolutionary in words and not deeds.

You said previously they were "Counter revolutionary", and then they are not bourgeois. That doesn't make sense. The revolution is of a proletarian nature. A reactionary alternative would be a return to bourgeois politics, whether the most extreme or liberal form (fascism or liberal democracy).
You have no basis whatsoever for any of your claims. They are without any substance.

If you want to talk about Slander, i think you should start over. The whole thread is about Slanderous words being leveled against communists and revolutionaries worldwide by the ICC.

The ICC critiques and criticises revolutionary and "revolutionary" organisations and politics. I think its concerning you'd be against this. The ICC maybe be blunt, but I'm waiting for someone to return the critique with some depth beyond "academia...counterrevolution...rah!

So stop your selective reading skills and start something more comprehensive.

Is this supposed to be ironic?

Devrim

3rd April 2009, 08:34

It's not just bad, it's false. I mean, I have no problem calling certain guerrilla groups, certain students groups, and certain bureaucratic agencies "anti-worker". All of them most certainly can be anti-worker, and I can think of examples of each that were. But obviously, none of them are bourgeois. Not unless they own some capital and employ some workers. To call them bourgeois is just dishonest, insulting, analytical poor shorthand. And if the argument is that "they help the bourgeoisie therefore they are bourgeois too", well that kind of simplistic stuff is what makes average people look down on Marxism imho. Not everyone in society is proletarian or bourgeois; no intelligent communist (certainly not Marx) ever said this.

And the bulk of the ICC's website, despite some good stuff, just seems calculated to provoke. Superimposing Stalin's face on Che's, etc. It's very crude.

This is what it actually says:

All the so-called ‘workers’, ‘Socialist’ and ‘Communist’ parties (now ex-’Communists’), the leftist organisations (Trotskyists, Maoists and ex-Maoists, official anarchists) constitute the left of capitalism’s political apparatus.

Let's go back to a question to try to start to clarify; What is the class nature of the UK Labour Party in your opinion?

I think my main disgreement with a left communist analysis, what it always comes back to, is the possibility for a truly revolutionary class solidarity across borders in the era of imperialism. I don't see it as possible. And I don't understand (though I have tried) why the ICC thinks we can simply ignore the fact that a certain group of countries has artificially inflated the living standard of its working classes to absurdly higher levels than the rest of the world,

Yes, I know what you think on this. I would like to discuss it, but on another thread, not here. Start it if you like:

Devrim

JimmyJazz

3rd April 2009, 09:24

This is what it actually says:

No, I was thinking of this:

All the so-called ‘revolutionary’ currents – such as Maoism which is simply a variant of parties which had definitively gone over to the bourgeoisie, or Trotskyism which, after constituting a proletarian reaction against the betrayal of the Communist Parties was caught up in a similar process of degeneration, or traditional anarchism, which today places itself in the framework of an identical approach by defending a certain number of positions of the SPs and CPs, such as ‘anti-fascist alliances’ – belong to the same camp: the camp of capital.

Samyasa

3rd April 2009, 10:15

Shame the same treatment didn't get applied to those who were trying to derail the discussion to talk about Stalin on the last page.

In what was was it a derailment? The title of this thread is "am I a member of a bourgeois party"? I think the history and politics of your party are of interest in an effort to answer that question. The Communist Party expelled the Troskyist faction in 1928. Later, it expelled the "Right Opposition" as Stalin made his "left turn". It supported the Soviet Union in World War II. In the 50s (as the Labour-Progressive Party, the CPC was banned) it expelled those members who criticised the state driven anti-semitism in Russia! All classic Stalinist politics. If it walks like a duck ...

Secondly, if you get exercised by my comment about Stalinism you might want to reconsider your blatant lie about comrades of the IBRP being "Trotskyist". You also use the term in exactly the same way that the Stalinists in the 30s did - as a club to beat anyone who disagreed with them. You also keep repeating the blatant lie about the ICC thinking it's the only revolutionary group despite several posts from different members showing that this is not the case. Another classic Stalinist tactic. If it walks like a duck ...

It's a pity really that - as far as I can see - your only aim in starting this thread is to discredit the ICC (and the wider communist left). But identifying the "false friends" of the working class is a vital task for revolutionaries. Marx was doing so as early as the Communist Manifesto. Lenin and the left-wing of the 2nd International spent a lot of their time exposing the "social chauvinists". Left communists who do the same today are in some good historical company!

black magick hustla

3rd April 2009, 10:44

Big shocker, an infantile leftist crying 'wah-wah'. So the ICC can accuse anyone of being bourgeois--unsubstantially--where I cannot? The ICC are bourgeois becomes they halt the advancement of the class interests of the proletariat in the name of puritanical fanaticism.

actually there are long articles about the issue of "left wing" of capital. I would not call that unsubstantiated. I agree the wording is not very good but I think it makes a lot of sense. The issue of "puritanical fanatism" has always been thrown at people with principles from the liberal left. The issue of imperialist war is very important and was the defining issue of the communist movement when it was born. In all honestly, I am a left communist and I think of myself a very level-headed man. slogans of "justice" and "bread" are unfortunately too vague to have a meaningful political connotation.

BobKKKindle$

3rd April 2009, 11:45

I'm not filled with moral outrage at the ICC because I don't care much about what Left Communists think of the SWP, or Trotskyism, but there is one thing I'd like to ask. Lenin gave enthusiastic support to many national liberation struggles, and even went to so far as to argue that a proletarian revolution would be preceded by nationalist revolts led by the petty-bourgeoisie and intended to achieve political independence without the abolition of capital, even though this would allow the imperialist powers to retain their dominance and continue to exploit non-imperialist countries through informal and non-territorial methods of control. He argued, as many Marxists have done, that political independence removes the most immediate source of oppression - the occupying power - and creates a space for the development of class struggle. Hence Lenin's comment that "whoever expects a pure social revolution will never live to see it", "pure revolution" here referring to a clearly-demarcated conflict between the proletariat and bourgeoisie without any elements of national struggle whatsoever. This seems to go against everything Left Communists believe, and Lenin appears to be part of the "left-wing of capital" in this instance, such was his willingness to support what Left Communists would see as a faction of the bourgeoisie in an inter-imperialist war during the Easter Rising in 1916. However, to their credit, Left Communists generally seem to support the Bolsheviks, and regard the October Revolution as a genuine socialist revolution. How can this be the case, when the organized vanugard of the proletariat, and the leader of that vanguard, Lenin, were part of the "left wing of capital", according to the Left Communist definition?

Samyasa

3rd April 2009, 12:26

An excellent question from Bobkindles.

When the ICC opposes things such as unions, parliamentarianism, national liberation etc. it's not on the basis of this being a truth for all time. Our position is that, at certain points in capitalism's development some of these things were actually progressive. Marx, for example, supported a particular side in certain national wars on the basis that they allowed capitalism to throw off the last restrictions of feudalism (the US civil war might be an example). Similarly, Marxists supported unions and parliamentary struggles. In the context of a revolutionary capitalist system that still developing, destroying feudalism and expanding the productive forces in a dynamic and progressive manner, and where world revolution was not yet on the agenda, all of this was worthwhile.

As capitalism began to enter its decadent phase, this began to alter. World War 1 was the capitalist system's announcement to humanity that its progressive phase had ended. As the Comintern put it, capitalism had now entered its period of "internal collapse" a "period of wars of revolutions". From now on, the progressive aspects of capitalism would be progressively overshadowed by the destructive, reactionary ones. War has become a way of life for capitalism. Two World Wars, a Cold War that lasted 40 years, and now the disintegration of continental areas into war is the real history of capitalism since the beginning of the 20th century. At the economic level, only the ever-growing state has stood between the bourgeoisie and permanent depression.

Unfortunately, consciousness tends to lag behind reality - previous generations weigh on the brain of the living and all that. So communists at the beginning of this period of decadence couldn't immediately grasp all its implications. Lenin recognised that the period of "national defence" was decisively over and grasped something had changed at the historical level (imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, etc.) but this never really went beyond an immediate, empirical analysis. He definitely made mistakes on the question of self-determination, even though his aim was internationalist. Luxemburg was clearer but she herself failed to grasp the dangers of democratism and parliamentarianism as could be seen with her support for a Constituent Assembly.

The whole revolutionary movement was struggling to grapple with all these questions and many mistakes were made. But the real nail in the coffin was the defeat of the revolution in Germany which then stalled the whole world revolution. As the masses began to retreat, revolutionaries struggled to find ways to keep them "engaged" and having failed to make a full critique of the social democracy began to slip back into those methods and tactics.

To begin with, these were forgiveable errors. Even the various groups of the communist left made many mistakes. The Italian Left supported unionism up until the Second World War (even though they condemned the existing unions) - they also supported the idea of the party taking power. The German Left came to the conclusion that the Russian Revolution was bourgeois and that even the idea of a political party was likewise bourgeois.

But it quickly became clear as time went on that many of the tactics of the old social democracy were not simply mistaken but tying the working class to the state and crushing its struggles. After years of one national liberation struggle after another basing itself on the exploitation of the working class it can no longer be open to question that all forms of nationalism are completely reactionary in a period where the historical task of the proletariat is to destroy all nation states.

As Lenin himself said: "During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes have visited relentless persecution on them and received their teaching with the most savage hostility, the most furious hatred, the most ruthless campaign of lies and slanders. After their death, attempts are made to turn them into harmless icons, canonise them, and surround their names with a certain halo for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping them, while at the same time emasculating and vulgarising the real essence of their revolutionary theories and blunting their revolutionary edge. At the present time, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement are cooperating in this work on adulterating Marxism"

This task is made much the easier when said revolutionaries commit real errors of theory and practice. Lenin's mistakes on the national question have been used to justify all sorts of counter-revolutionary practices ever since.

Hopefully, that will explain our position on the broader topic of bourgeois vs. proletarian politics but if you're interested in a bit more detail about our position on the national question specifically, our pamphlet can be found online at our website. Unfortunately, I don't have the rank to link to it yet :mad:

Devrim

3rd April 2009, 12:43

No, I was thinking of this:
All the so-called ‘revolutionary’ currents – such as Maoism which is simply a variant of parties which had definitively gone over to the bourgeoisie, or Trotskyism which, after constituting a proletarian reaction against the betrayal of the Communist Parties was caught up in a similar process of degeneration, or traditional anarchism, which today places itself in the framework of an identical approach by defending a certain number of positions of the SPs and CPs, such as ‘anti-fascist alliances’ – belong to the same camp: the camp of capital.

Well yes, maybe the bit about the camp of capital could be phrased a little better, but basically it is true. All of the groups it refers to supported imperialist wars, and took part in mobilising the working class for them.

Devrim

Pogue

3rd April 2009, 13:05

HLVS when you think about the thing about the left-wing of capital although it may be worded in a bit of an old fashioned manner, many other left wing groups have a similar general analysis.

Is the labour party a bourgeois party of a workers' party? I think that most anarchists for example would agree with us. Some Trotskyists manage to fudge the issue by calling it a bourgeois-workers party whatever they mean by that.

Now does this mean that every member of the Labour party is a member of the bourgeoisie? Of course not. There are still workers in the Labour party, and many workers still vote for them. But that isn't what determines the class nature of a party. There are lots of workers who vote for the Tory party too, and even the BNP.

Then we could extend this to groups that claim to be revolutionary, but are in the Labour Party. What is the objective result of their work. Is it to increase class consciousness, or is it to provide left cover for an absolutely rotten bourgeois party.

Now extend this question to the official CPs. What class does their politics represent? Do you see where I am going?

When we say that a party or political organisation is 'the left-wing of capital', it doesn't mean that we think that every member is some top hat wearing capitalist. Many honest militant workers are in these organisations.

Do you think that we should be dishonest about what we see as the role of these organisations?

I think although you may not agree with how we apply the method, the method itself is understandable.

The term isn't good in my opinion though.

But that is not what we say is it? That is the parody of what we say that others have created, and you know it.

Devrim

What excactly do you say on what should have been done in WWII then, by workers?

BobKKKindle$

3rd April 2009, 13:41

Samyasa, thanks for that post. Needless to say, I don't agree with a lot of that analysis. On the national question, if Left Communists believe that all wars between capitalist states after WW1 are inherently inter-imperialist conflicts, with no progressive option for the working class expect proletarian revolution directed against every faction of the bourgeoisie, then does that mean that Left Communists acknowledge the existence of conflicts between oppressed and oppressor nations prior to WW1, and would they/you have supported the struggles of workers against the oppressor nations in those conflicts, even if such struggles were not being conducted through socialist organizations - as in the case of the Indian Mutiny in 1857? This may seem like a purely academic question, given that Left Communism had not yet emerged as a coherent political force until the years immediately before WW1, but the reason I ask is that Left Communists often accuse Trotskyists of supporting the massacre of workers at the hands of the nationalist bourgeoisie, and this accusation would be weakened if Left Communists recognize that nationalist struggles were progressive during capitalism's pre-decadent phase. If this is the case, then it also means we can center our discussions on the issue of whether oppressor-oppressed conflicts still exist under contemporary capitalism.

What excactly do you say on what should have been done in WWII then, by workers? I think this was addressed in a previous thread entitled 'Left Communism'.

Samyasa

3rd April 2009, 16:02

On the national question, if Left Communists believe that all wars between capitalist states after WW1 are inherently inter-imperialist conflicts, with no progressive option for the working class expect proletarian revolution directed against every faction of the bourgeoisie, then does that mean that Left Communists acknowledge the existence of conflicts between oppressed and oppressor nations prior to WW1, and would they/you have supported the struggles of workers against the oppressor nations in those conflicts, even if such struggles were not being conducted through socialist organizations - as in the case of the Indian Mutiny in 1857?

The orientation that we believe Marxists of the time took was this: what is the best result for the progressive development of capitalism and the strengthening of the working class? Marx condemned the British exploitation of India not simply because of its brutality (which was horrendous) but also because of the fact that it was holding back the development of capitalism in India by destroying much of the indigenous capitalist formations that had begun to appear there. Similarly, Marx's support for the North in the US Civil War was based not just around a moral repugnance for slavery (which could equally appall any good bourgeois) but because the slave economy of the south was an archaic social formation preventing a full flowering of the proletariat in the US.

To take another example of "plunder capitalism", in the early days of the Franco-Prussian war, Marx said in a letter to Engels: "The French need a thrashing. If the Prussians win, the centralisation of the state power will be useful for the centralisation of the German working class. German predominance would also transfer the centre of gravity of the workers' movement in Western Europe from France to Germany, and one has only to compare the movement in the two countries from 1866 till now to see that the German working class is superior to the French both theoretically and organisationally."

We can see here clearly that his concern was for the development of the workers' movement and the way that the moribund French state was holding this back at a European level. In fact, the appearance of the Paris Commune forced Marx to change his mind and he later wrote that: "That, after the most tremendous war of modern times, the conquering and the conquered hosts should fraternize for the common massacre of the proletariat — this unparalleled event does indicate, not, as Bismarck thinks, the final repression of a new society up heaving, but the crumbling into dust of bourgeois society. The highest heroic effort of which old society is still capable is national war; and this is now proved to be a mere governmental humbug, intended to defer the struggle of classes, and to be thrown aside as soon as that class struggle bursts out into civil war. Class rule is no longer able to disguise itself in a national uniform; the national governments are one as against the proletariat!"

The era of progressive national wars in Europe was at a close, after the crushing of Commune showed that when it came to working-class struggles there was no longer any progressive faction of the bourgeioisie with which the proletariat could align.
I don't see that any of this "weakens" the left-communist critique of Trotskyism's support for national bourgeoisies. In fact, we would apply Marx's method in exactly the same way - but the crucial change is that because of its slide into decadence, the whole of capitalism is no longer able to develop without periodic plunges into imperialist war. As Luxemburg pointed out, imperialism is no a particular policy of governments it is a global historical condition. The necessity for imperialism as part of each national capital's expansion is posed at the level of the totality of capitalism. What this means at a practicaly level is that now every state is imperialist and cannot be otherwise. An "oppressed" nation somehow freed from its shackles immediately becomes an "oppressor" nation. Take Somalia, for example, which freed itself from British/Italian rule and joined the Russian bloc and then switched sides again in order to seize the Ogaden from Ethiopia, resulting in a pointless, bloody war.

Because of this historic change, support for any side in wars between states can only lead to support for a weak imperialism against a stronger one. Iraq is good case in point, concerning the contradictions Trotskyism gets caught up in. Was Iraq an imperialist power during the Iran-Iraq war? Of course it was! How then can it suddenly become a "oppressed" power when it got pulverised by its former allies? When posed in the framework of "oppressed" or "oppressor" nations, it simply becomes a question of backing the modern equivalent of "plucky little Serbia" or getting caught up in concerns of bourgeois legality.

To put the question another way. If I lived in a neighbourhood where the heroin dealers are at war, I don't care who wins. I want them all wiped out so they'll flogging smack to our kids. In the same way, the proletariat today has no interest in backing any national flag, no matter what the pretence. Our only interest is fighting against fractions of the bourgeosie in all countries.

Charles Xavier

3rd April 2009, 17:45

In my defence, I only came across this thread today.

That's not true, though, is it? The ICC have not said you are a member of a bourgeois party simply because your party support Trade Unions. That is only part of a general critique, and you yourself are reducing the critique to undermine their criticism. Which is absurd.
Infact, the ICC comrades in here who have criticised your party have done so on a series of issues. The first being the role of the CPC in WWII, in supporting conscripting workers into an Imperialist war, and of supporting the banning of strikes to increase the war effort.

In this instance, you played the exact same role as the bourgeois parties: You sided with the interests of the bourgeoisie and supressed the interests of the working class, by taking part and advocating workers dying in an imperialist war.

Now, the Trade Unions. You say above that these are geniune organisations of the working class. Following from this position, you are not in a bourgeois party. But the presumption which this rests on is false, as anyone who knows the history of Trade Unions, particularly in the post-80s period knows.

To give you an example, in Australia, the Trade Unions (ACTU) signed a deal with the Federal Government called the Accord, which, essentially, allowed for the Federal Government to put through waves of privatisation, etc. in Australia, and which was instrumental in the mass outsourcing of labour. This was done in compliance with the Trade Unions in Australia - not even compliance, willingness of the Trade Unions, who agreed to do nothing.

At the moment, in Australia, in the car manufacturing industry, the Trade unions have come out in support with the federal government and the bosses to allow wage cuts, etc. as a means of keeping people employed in the manufacturing sector, i.e. the trade unions have willingly accepted the working class paying for this crisis.

These are specific examples of the bourgeois role played by the Trade Unions.
If you take the time to read the ICCs pamphlets, or even just one, on the Trade Unions, your understanding of why they criticise you would be far more developed, and you'd actually be able to respond to it with far more clarity, which seems to be the opposite of what people are doing in here.
For example, see this pamphlet: Unions against the working class (http://en.internationalism.org/pamphlets/unions_chapter_01.htm).

These are only two examples which constitute only part of the basis for the general critique of your party, and others.

You have been given much better explanations, but its a choice to read them. I've linked you on previous occassions to these papers, and devrim and others have given you indepth answers to your questions, but you have often begun your questions in an arrogant tone, though you don't know the answer yourself. This thread is a perfect example.

You said previously they were "Counter revolutionary", and then they are not bourgeois. That doesn't make sense. The revolution is of a proletarian nature. A reactionary alternative would be a return to bourgeois politics, whether the most extreme or liberal form (fascism or liberal democracy).
You have no basis whatsoever for any of your claims. They are without any substance.

The ICC critiques and criticises revolutionary and "revolutionary" organisations and politics. I think its concerning you'd be against this. The ICC maybe be blunt, but I'm waiting for someone to return the critique with some depth beyond "academia...counterrevolution...rah!

Is this supposed to be ironic?

This is Canada not Australia, do we have uncritical support of trade unions? Of course not, we are of course against the Christian Labour Unions here in Canada who are mouth pieces of the boss, they are used in a way to represent the boss' interests in a workplace that where progressive unions may organize the boss will bring in these ones as an alternative.

We are completely against class collaboration in any form, making deals behind the backs of workers.

Has the main trade union movement in Canada always been progressive? Well not in the days of the AFL, which is why many communists supported the IWW an anarcho-syndicalist trade union. It wasn't until the CIO came to Canada we had a real trade union movement. And than political independence from the American Trade Unions bringing about the CLC. Industrial organizing over craft organizing.

Are our trade Unions the best in the world? No they have problems, some are as low as Minimum wage plus union dues such as the UFCW union, Our trade unions in Canada are weak, where its not one union per industry, its 5 unions per industries. Making it a lot harder to organize in an effective way. There are structures in some unions that make them very undemocratic. But a trade union is better than no union for working people. Post war we had an explosion of trade union activities, and the boss class was very careful up until the 1980s. The Trade union bureaucracy have become fat and unresponsive, and only moving when there is a massive call for action, and then its only half-ass.

And I doubt the trade union leadership will really move when they are making 200k a year. More than workers they represent are. A business-like approach to Union organizing rather than a class one. IE figuring out, is it worth us to spend all this money organizing when we will get so little back in dues?

And this was primarily at the fault not of right-wingers, who purged communists from the trade union movements and social democrats where more than willing to fill the gaps and offer little to no work.

So should we abandon this method of struggle? Of course not as our trade unions are fighting for working people and they can do a lot better. We don't abandon our efforts when things look bleak, we must struggle harder to put forward a better struggle.

As for WW2 this is an example of international interest being much more important than national ones. Was it in our national class interest as Canadians to fight in WW2? No it wasn't when the Soviet Union was attacked, it became a question of suppressing national interests for the interest of the international proletariat. And we communists actually did most of our work recruiting for Partisans, to be dropped in Yugoslavia and whatnot.

Did we have any illusions that the British/America bourgeioisie were better than the Italian/German ones, of course not. But it was our duty to defend socialism. Not in words but in deeds. Our class enemy our own bosses had an interest of controlling the world, our interests was to save socialism. We fought the same fight for different reasons.

And socialism came out much struggle after ww2 as a result to the status of a Superpower.

Have we supported other countries in other wars? Yes we supported Vietnam against the Americans and their puppet state, we supported Kim Il Sung in Korea, we supported, the FLMN in El Salvador, or the guerrillas in Cuba against Batista, we supported Palestine against Israel, we supported the numerous national liberation struggles across Africa and Asia.

Some were to establish socialism some were to establish a national bourgeoisie. Why do workers care which bourgeoisie, well it removes the cloth from the proletariat's eyes when it is the national bourgeoisie who's in charge and exploiting them instead of when its a British one. The oppression is much more acute when you are a colony.

Do we support all national liberation struggles? No, we also view that in some cases oppressed nations, (not colonial ones) can come together with the oppressor nation and form a federation. Examples being Canada with Quebec and Spain with Galicia, Basque and Catalonia. We of course support national rights to all nations, the right to succession included. But we take a class position on whether than is ideal or not. In the case of Quebec, it doesn't benefit the working class. It is the petty-bourgeoisie that are rallying for it. And some national liberation struggles are being waged by foreign bourgeoisie in an inter-imperialist conflict such as Tibet and Taiwan, or the break up of Yugoslavia we obviously do not support those ones either.

In what was was it a derailment? The title of this thread is "am I a member of a bourgeois party"? I think the history and politics of your party are of interest in an effort to answer that question. The Communist Party expelled the Trotsky faction in 1928. Later, it expelled the "Right Opposition" as Stalin made his "left turn". It supported the Soviet Union in World War II. In the 50s (as the Labour-Progressive Party, the CPC was banned) it expelled those members who criticized the state driven anti-semitism in Russia! All classic Stalinist politics. If it walks like a duck ...

Secondly, if you get exercised by my comment about Stalinism you might want to reconsider your blatant lie about comrades of the IBRP being "Trotskyist". You also use the term in exactly the same way that the Stalinists in the 30s did - as a club to beat anyone who disagreed with them. You also keep repeating the blatant lie about the ICC thinking it's the only revolutionary group despite several posts from different members showing that this is not the case. Another classic Stalinist tactic. If it walks like a duck ...

It's a pity really that - as far as I can see - your only aim in starting this thread is to discredit the ICC (and the wider communist left). But identifying the "false friends" of the working class is a vital task for revolutionaries. Marx was doing so as early as the Communist Manifesto. Lenin and the left-wing of the 2nd International spent a lot of their time exposing the "social chauvinists". Left communists who do the same today are in some good historical company!

Our party had a several Jewish clubs in those days. The Bolsheviks had a lot of Jews in their ranks, this whole talk about state-driven antisemitism in Soviet Union is false as it antisemitism in the Soviet Union was outlawed. And Canada isn't the Soviet Union get used to it. Maurice Spector had double loyalties, he belong to the Communist party and also was openly going against partyline. Jack MacDonald had formed a faction in the communist party in violation of the constitution of the party. We aren't going to let people violate the constitution just because they are a trotskyite.

I had assumed that the IBRP was trotskyist as they marched with the Trotskyist at every peace demo I had been in Toronto. I have never talked to the IBRP so I don't think they have disagreed with me. I had assumed they were trotskyist on that basis. I do not call social-democrats or bourgeiosie politicians, anarchists trotskyists. So think your grand standing should stop.

I don't see how Stalin has anything to do with me thinking that the ICC think its the only revolutionary group, as they have said they are revolutionary, and people who agree with them are revolutionary, and openly state that everyone else is bourgeiosie.

So I went around my documents and checked about Stalin, First of all, I just checked, my name isn't Stalin, second of all, I checked my date of birth, I wasn't alive when Stalin was around so I guess I didn't have secret conversations with Stalin on the ICC, then I checked my passport and birth certificate, turns out I never visited the Soviet Union or was born there. Now I look around my room, No books by Stalin, no pamphlets on Stalin, no pictures or busts of Stalin. Maybe you are psychic so I went and checked out my book on dialectical materialism and I read that that is metaphysical.

Now to the Idea that the ICC are the heirs of Marx and Lenin, they are anti-marxist, as they stand against Marxist theory, IE working with trade unions, political involvement of the working class, national liberation etc etc, and they are anti-Leninist something they are more open about.

Pogue

3rd April 2009, 18:17

This is Canada not Australia, do we have uncritical support of trade unions? Of course not, we are of course against the Christian Labour Unions here in Canada who are mouth pieces of the boss, they are used in a way to represent the boss' interests in a workplace that where progressive unions may organize the boss will bring in these ones as an alternative.

We are completely against class collaboration in any form, making deals behind the backs of workers.

Has the main trade union movement in Canada always been progressive? Well not in the days of the AFL, which is why many communists supported the IWW an anarcho-syndicalist trade union. It wasn't until the CIO came to Canada we had a real trade union movement. And than political independence from the American Trade Unions bringing about the CLC. Industrial organizing over craft organizing.

Are our trade Unions the best in the world? No they have problems, some are as low as Minimum wage plus union dues such as the UFCW union, Our trade unions in Canada are weak, where its not one union per industry, its 5 unions per industries. Making it a lot harder to organize in an effective way. There are structures in some unions that make them very undemocratic. But a trade union is better than no union for working people. Post war we had an explosion of trade union activities, and the boss class was very careful up until the 1980s. The Trade union bureaucracy have become fat and unresponsive, and only moving when there is a massive call for action, and then its only half-ass.

And I doubt the trade union leadership will really move when they are making 200k a year. More than workers they represent are. A business-like approach to Union organizing rather than a class one. IE figuring out, is it worth us to spend all this money organizing when we will get so little back in dues?

And this was primarily at the fault not of right-wingers, who purged communists from the trade union movements and social democrats where more than willing to fill the gaps and offer little to no work.

So should we abandon this method of struggle? Of course not as our trade unions are fighting for working people and they can do a lot better. We don't abandon our efforts when things look bleak, we must struggle harder to put forward a better struggle.

As for WW2 this is an example of international interest being much more important than national ones. Was it in our national class interest as Canadians to fight in WW2? No it wasn't when the Soviet Union was attacked, it became a question of suppressing national interests for the interest of the international proletariat. And we communists actually did most of our work recruiting for Partisans, to be dropped in Yugoslavia and whatnot.

Did we have any illusions that the British/America bourgeioisie were better than the Italian/German ones, of course not. But it was our duty to defend socialism. Not in words but in deeds. Our class enemy our own bosses had an interest of controlling the world, our interests was to save socialism. We fought the same fight for different reasons.

And socialism came out much struggle after ww2 as a result to the status of a Superpower.

Have we supported other countries in other wars? Yes we supported Vietnam against the Americans and their puppet state, we supported Kim Il Sung in Korea, we supported, the FLMN in El Salvador, or the guerrillas in Cuba against Batista, we supported Palestine against Israel, we supported the numerous national liberation struggles across Africa and Asia.

Some were to establish socialism some were to establish a national bourgeoisie. Why do workers care which bourgeoisie, well it removes the cloth from the proletariat's eyes when it is the national bourgeoisie who's in charge and exploiting them instead of when its a British one. The oppression is much more acute when you are a colony.

Do we support all national liberation struggles? No, we also view that in some cases oppressed nations, (not colonial ones) can come together with the oppressor nation and form a federation. Examples being Canada with Quebec and Spain with Galicia, Basque and Catalonia. We of course support national rights to all nations, the right to succession included. But we take a class position on whether than is ideal or not. In the case of Quebec, it doesn't benefit the working class. It is the petty-bourgeoisie that are rallying for it. And some national liberation struggles are being waged by foreign bourgeoisie in an inter-imperialist conflict such as Tibet and Taiwan, or the break up of Yugoslavia we obviously do not support those ones either.

Our party had a several Jewish clubs in those days. The Bolsheviks had a lot of Jews in their ranks, this whole talk about state-driven antisemitism in Soviet Union is false as it antisemitism in the Soviet Union was outlawed. And Canada isn't the Soviet Union get used to it. Maurice Spector had double loyalties, he belong to the Communist party and also was openly going against partyline. Jack MacDonald had formed a faction in the communist party in violation of the constitution of the party. We aren't going to let people violate the constitution just because they are a trotskyite.

I had assumed that the IBRP was trotskyist as they marched with the Trotskyist at every peace demo I had been in Toronto. I have never talked to the IBRP so I don't think they have disagreed with me. I had assumed they were trotskyist on that basis. I do not call social-democrats or bourgeiosie politicians, anarchists trotskyists. So think your grand standing should stop.

I don't see how Stalin has anything to do with me thinking that the ICC think its the only revolutionary group, as they have said they are revolutionary, and people who agree with them are revolutionary, and openly state that everyone else is bourgeiosie.

So I went around my documents and checked about Stalin, First of all, I just checked, my name isn't Stalin, second of all, I checked my date of birth, I wasn't alive when Stalin was around so I guess I didn't have secret conversations with Stalin on the ICC, then I checked my passport and birth certificate, turns out I never visited the Soviet Union or was born there. Now I look around my room, No books by Stalin, no pamphlets on Stalin, no pictures or busts of Stalin. Maybe you are psychic so I went and checked out my book on dialectical materialism and I read that that is metaphysical.

Now to the Idea that the ICC are the heirs of Marx and Lenin, they are anti-marxist, as they stand against Marxist theory, IE working with trade unions, political involvement of the working class, national liberation etc etc, and they are anti-Leninist something they are more open about.

I'd say its wrong to say that anti-semetism was not around in the USSR. Even supporters of the USSR achknowledged this, and its well known that in 1968, the leaders of the USSR refused to meet with some of the Czechoslovakian leaders because one or two of them were Jewish.

Paul Robeson, the singer and communist who was invited to the USSR, feared for the safety of the Jewish musicians in his contingent because of the anti-semetism practiced in the USSR.

Charles Xavier

3rd April 2009, 18:36

I'd say its wrong to say that anti-semetism was not around in the USSR. Even supporters of the USSR achknowledged this, and its well known that in 1968, the leaders of the USSR refused to meet with some of the Czechoslovakian leaders because one or two of them were Jewish.

Paul Robeson, the singer and communist who was invited to the USSR, feared for the safety of the Jewish musicians in his contingent because of the anti-semetism practiced in the USSR.

Completely off topic but,
I'd be interested in reading more about this, can you send me a link?

el_chavista

4th April 2009, 03:20

Samyasa

4th April 2009, 11:03

Our party had a several Jewish clubs in those days. The Bolsheviks had a lot of Jews in their ranks, this whole talk about state-driven antisemitism in Soviet Union is false as it antisemitism in the Soviet Union was outlawed.

Antisemitism was in the rise in Russia in the 50s and the Russian state backed it. I'm somewhat shocked you're not aware of this. However, I'm not shocked by the fact you don't seem aware of how your party at the time reacted. When a delegate of the PLP (the "legal" version of the CPC at the time) returned from Russia, he reported on the state-backed antisemitism. He was expelled as a result and, in response, most of the Jewish members left.

Charles Xavier

4th April 2009, 15:49

Antisemitism was in the rise in Russia in the 50s and the Russian state backed it. I'm somewhat shocked you're not aware of this. However, I'm not shocked by the fact you don't seem aware of how your party at the time reacted. When a delegate of the PLP (the "legal" version of the CPC at the time) returned from Russia, he reported on the state-backed antisemitism. He was expelled as a result and, in response, most of the Jewish members left.

Why don't you show your proof that the state backed antisemitism, which makes no sense since the Soviet Union saved millions of the Jews from the Nazis. Especially in Poland where they had a small tract of land where Polish Jews could escape persecution. Or the fact that the leading members of the Politburo of the Party were Jews. Such as Lazar Kaganovich. The Soviet Partisans defended the Jews from nationalist partisan groups, such as some in Poland who wanted to kill the Jews.

Hi I'm Samyasa's brain, here are your orders: When evidence fails, please resort to lying. And don't forget to mention Stalin or derail discussion to debate about the Soviet Union. Because why would talking about Canada be important to Canadians? Just load your discussions about Stalin and the Soviet Union because its obviously irrelevant but yours truly cannot stop talking about Stalin. I am so obsessed with Stalin. I think Stalin might be in my closet! I am going to check! Hmm no? Maybe under the bed? Stalin is everywhere!!!!!!!!!

Charles Xavier

4th April 2009, 17:32

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Russia#After_the_October_Re volution_.281917-1991.29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinism_and_antisemitism

Links on the topic^

Yeah thats what I'm saying those two links disprove antisemitism in the soviet union as a state policy. They show how completely inconsistant the policy was, Its based purely on speculation and not facts, and then half the article disproves it.

black magick hustla

5th April 2009, 09:32

In the Wiki's entry for Amadeo Bordiga ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeo_Bordiga ) we find this:

For Bordiga, the party was 'the social brain' of the working class whose task was not to seek majority support, but to concentrate on working for an armed insurrection, in the course of which it would seize power and then use it to abolish capitalism and impose a communist society by force. Bordiga identified 'dictatorship of the proletariat' and dictatorship of the party and argued that establishing its own dictatorship should be the party's immediate and direct aim.

Rejecting Pop Fronts and elections doesn't bring the Italian Bordigaist left communists very far from Stalinists, if we are to take for accurate the wiki's statements.

there are a few points here that must be adressed:

1) i dont think there is a single bordigist posting here. the few bordigists that exist are probably remnants of the old internationalist communist party when it imploded.

2) the reason why bordiga argued that line is that because he saw the party as organically springing out from the proletariat's organized struggle and therefore as some sort of "collective brain". the mayority of the italian communist party were workers. thus he saw no reason to differentiate between the party and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Bilan

5th April 2009, 14:29

This is Canada not Australia, do we have uncritical support of trade unions? Of course not, we are of course against the Christian Labour Unions here in Canada who are mouth pieces of the boss, they are used in a way to represent the boss' interests in a workplace that where progressive unions may organize the boss will bring in these ones as an alternative.

[QUOTE]We are completely against class collaboration in any form, making deals behind the backs of workers.

You are, but are the Trade Unions? I don't know, and would be surprised if Canada was the exception to the rule.

Has the main trade union movement in Canada always been progressive? Well not in the days of the AFL, which is why many communists supported the IWW an anarcho-syndicalist trade union. It wasn't until the CIO came to Canada we had a real trade union movement. And than political independence from the American Trade Unions bringing about the CLC. Industrial organizing over craft organizing.

Point of clarity: the IWW is not an anarcho-syndicalist union.

But a trade union is better than no union for working people. Post war we had an explosion of trade union activities, and the boss class was very careful up until the 1980s. The Trade union bureaucracy have become fat and unresponsive, and only moving when there is a massive call for action, and then its only half-ass.

The question here is not of individual workers, but of the interests of the class. The two differentiate quite substantially, even when the causes for individual disputes are inseparable from social issues.
A trade union can be appropriate in some situations, but it is neither revolutionary, nor is it a 'true' or 'authentic organ of the workers'. This is outdated, and in the current context, fictitious.

And I doubt the trade union leadership will really move when they are making 200k a year. More than workers they represent are. A business-like approach to Union organizing rather than a class one. IE figuring out, is it worth us to spend all this money organizing when we will get so little back in dues?

I don't understand what you're trying to say here. That the union bureaucrats have a bourgeois mentality, and are interested in making money off the working class?

And this was primarily at the fault not of right-wingers, who purged communists from the trade union movements and social democrats where more than willing to fill the gaps and offer little to no work.

I'm confused? That didn't make sense?

So should we abandon this method of struggle? Of course not as our trade unions are fighting for working people and they can do a lot better. We don't abandon our efforts when things look bleak, we must struggle harder to put forward a better struggle.

This rests on the idea that the trade unions strength grows due to volunteering of militants. It negates any relation between the openness and aggressiveness of the class struggle in different periods; it negates the rise and fall of crisis, and how that corresponds to trade union activity and demands; and it doesn't answer, or even address, why this method of working class organisation is still possible, still useful, or anything, considering that they've degenerated.
There is an interrelationship between the degeneration of the trade union leadership, and the openness of the class struggle; a corresspondence between all of these above raised points.
But you maintain this position of involvement in spite of this, which to me, appears as dreadfully unmaterialist.

As for WW2 this is an example of international interest being much more important than national ones. Was it in our national class interest as Canadians to fight in WW2?

We don't have "national class interests". There is class interests, and national interests. These are diametrically opposed. Always.
But even if we accept this fictitious position, you're still incorrect. Is it ever in the interests of the proletarian to die en masse in an imperialist war?
As a communist, I say, 'No, never'.

No it wasn't when the Soviet Union was attacked, it became a question of suppressing national interests for the interest of the international proletariat. And we communists actually did most of our work recruiting for Partisans, to be dropped in Yugoslavia and whatnot.

This doesn't make the slightest bit of sense.
1. You mention 'national class interests', and then here, suppressing national class interests for internationalist class interests. This implies a conflict of interest between the international proletariat, and the proletariat of a particular country beyond in the context of struggle - which is wrong. These 'national interests', whether draped in red or not, are bourgeois interests, purely and simply. The proletariat is international, and the struggle is always international.
2. An imperialist war is always against the interests of the proletariat, anywhere and everywhere. It is in the interests of the bourgeoisie.
3. You admit, above, that you took part, openly (and peculiarly proudly) in recruiting proletarians to die in a war for the bourgeoisie, under the façade of 'proletarian internationalism'.

Did we have any illusions that the British/America bourgeioisie were better than the Italian/German ones, of course not. But it was our duty to defend socialism.

As a Communist Party, you would presume it would be in your interests, but then, you took part in recruiting proletarians to be slaughtered by other proletarians in an imperialist war - so you naturally have negated this. Intentionally.

Not in words but in deeds. Our class enemy our own bosses had an interest of controlling the world, our interests was to save socialism. We fought the same fight for different reasons.

They had an interest of controlling it? Capitalism is global, it does 'control the world' because it dominates all corners of it. This is peculiar.
And you didn't save socialism. This is fictitious, pure and simple. Saving the USSR (even though it saved itself...) does not equate to 'saving' socialism. Socialism is not an imperialist war, it is class struggle. If you were really interested in 'saving' socialism (which is stupid anyway, that necessitates socialism existing), you would have taken part in fighting against the bourgeoisie, not having comrades killed for them.

And socialism came out much struggle after ww2 as a result to the status of a Superpower.

What on earth?

Have we supported other countries in other wars? Yes we supported Vietnam against the Americans and their puppet state, we supported Kim Il Sung in Korea, we supported, the FLMN in El Salvador, or the guerrillas in Cuba against Batista, we supported Palestine against Israel, we supported the numerous national liberation struggles across Africa and Asia.

Do we support all national liberation struggles? No, we also view that in some cases oppressed nations, (not colonial ones) can come together with the oppressor nation and form a federation. Examples being Canada with Quebec and Spain with Galicia, Basque and Catalonia. We of course support national rights to all nations, the right to succession included. But we take a class position on whether than is ideal or not. In the case of Quebec, it doesn't benefit the working class. It is the petty-bourgeoisie that are rallying for it. And some national liberation struggles are being waged by foreign bourgeoisie in an inter-imperialist conflict such as Tibet and Taiwan, or the break up of Yugoslavia we obviously do not support those ones either.

What? You just contradicted yourself.

Charles Xavier

6th April 2009, 02:22

[QUOTE=Túpac Amaru II;1402486]This is Canada not Australia, do we have uncritical support of trade unions? Of course not, we are of course against the Christian Labour Unions here in Canada who are mouth pieces of the boss, they are used in a way to represent the boss' interests in a workplace that where progressive unions may organize the boss will bring in these ones as an alternative.

You are, but are the Trade Unions? I don't know, and would be surprised if Canada was the exception to the rule.
.

Point of clarity: the IWW is not an anarcho-syndicalist union.

The question here is not of individual workers, but of the interests of the class. The two differentiate quite substantially, even when the causes for individual disputes are inseparable from social issues.
A trade union can be appropriate in some situations, but it is neither revolutionary, nor is it a 'true' or 'authentic organ of the workers'. This is outdated, and in the current context, fictitious.

I don't understand what you're trying to say here. That the union bureaucrats have a bourgeois mentality, and are interested in making money off the working class?

I'm confused? That didn't make sense?

This rests on the idea that the trade unions strength grows due to volunteering of militants. It negates any relation between the openness and aggressiveness of the class struggle in different periods; it negates the rise and fall of crisis, and how that corresponds to trade union activity and demands; and it doesn't answer, or even address, why this method of working class organisation is still possible, still useful, or anything, considering that they've degenerated.
There is an interrelationship between the degeneration of the trade union leadership, and the openness of the class struggle; a corresspondence between all of these above raised points.
But you maintain this position of involvement in spite of this, which to me, appears as dreadfully unmaterialist.

We don't have "national class interests". There is class interests, and national interests. These are diametrically opposed. Always.
But even if we accept this fictitious position, you're still incorrect. Is it ever in the interests of the proletarian to die en masse in an imperialist war?
As a communist, I say, 'No, never'.

This doesn't make the slightest bit of sense.
1. You mention 'national class interests', and then here, suppressing national class interests for internationalist class interests. This implies a conflict of interest between the international proletariat, and the proletariat of a particular country beyond in the context of struggle - which is wrong. These 'national interests', whether draped in red or not, are bourgeois interests, purely and simply. The proletariat is international, and the struggle is always international.
2. An imperialist war is always against the interests of the proletariat, anywhere and everywhere. It is in the interests of the bourgeoisie.
3. You admit, above, that you took part, openly (and peculiarly proudly) in recruiting proletarians to die in a war for the bourgeoisie, under the façade of 'proletarian internationalism'.

As a Communist Party, you would presume it would be in your interests, but then, you took part in recruiting proletarians to be slaughtered by other proletarians in an imperialist war - so you naturally have negated this. Intentionally.

They had an interest of controlling it? Capitalism is global, it does 'control the world' because it dominates all corners of it. This is peculiar.
And you didn't save socialism. This is fictitious, pure and simple. Saving the USSR (even though it saved itself...) does not equate to 'saving' socialism. Socialism is not an imperialist war, it is class struggle. If you were really interested in 'saving' socialism (which is stupid anyway, that necessitates socialism existing), you would have taken part in fighting against the bourgeoisie, not having comrades killed for them.

What on earth?

What? You just contradicted yourself.

I have no idea what you are talking about.

Bilan

6th April 2009, 07:12

Likewise. Your post was incoherent and contradictory. Could you please clarify?

Samyasa

6th April 2009, 11:39

Yeah thats what I'm saying those two links disprove antisemitism in the soviet union as a state policy. They show how completely inconsistant the policy was, Its based purely on speculation and not facts, and then half the article disproves it.

I suppose when Stalin made this statement in 1952 saying "Every Jewish nationalist is a potential agent of the American intelligence. Jewish nationalists think that their nation was saved by the USA", he was really welcoming Jews with open arms.

It's true that the anti-semitism of Stalinist Russia was of a different kind than that practiced in Nazi Germany in that it was a matter of policy rather than a matter of principle. Instead, the interests of the Stalinist state were driven by cynical pragmatism: which was why Stalin urged Molotov to purge the foreign service of Jews when they were negotiating the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with the Nazis. They also were deeply suspicious of the Jewish community in general for exactly the same reasons anti-semitism in general has maintained its currency in capitalist society: the notion that the Jewish community is not truly loyal to the national state (this is a different ideological meaning to the anti-semitism of the Middle Ages which had a specifically religious flavour). This is part of the reason why Communism and Judaism have often been regarded as one and the same by the extreme right. For the Stalinists, the worry was that this section of the population may not have complete loyalty to the Soviet state - the official term for these undesireables was "rootless cosmopolitans".

Nonetheless, when it was politically expedient, the Stalinists were the Jews' best friends. They mobilised many to fight in the anti-fascist brigades during the war - even though they refused to back the rising in the Warsaw Ghettos. They also backed the creation of Israel, believing the number of Russian Jewish communists could push the new state in the direction of the Soviet Union.

By the 50s, Stalin had clearly changed his mind again. We see the infamous "Doctor's Plot" where an international conspiracy of Jews (sound familiar?) was accused of being behind an assassination plot. Pravda recorded the following about the alleged perpetrators: "The majority of the participants of the terrorist group… were bought by American intelligence. They were recruited by a branch-office of American intelligence — the international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization called "Joint." [I]The filthy face of this Zionist spy organization, covering up their vicious actions under the mask of charity, is now completely revealed…"

We can quibble I suppose about whether "anti-semitism" is the best term to describe this sustained series of attacks on the Jewish community in Stalinism Russia but the end-result is pretty much the same.

And, back to my original point, your party expelled those members who questioned this policy of attacking the Jews. So far, your response has been pretty much the same as the Party's was then: outright denial and obfuscation. If it walks like a duck ...

Cumannach

6th April 2009, 12:02

You see Stalin was really just as bad as Hitler, and was actually even ten times worse. Don't let the fact that Stalin smashed the Nazis to pieces throw you in the wrong direction, rookie mistake. What that actually means is he was even more of a Jew-hater than Hitler. In fact Hitler wasn't such a bad guy compared to Stalin. I for one think it's time we stopped talking about Hitler and the Holocaust and concentrate more on Stalin. From now on, nobody is to open a thread that doesn't address the evilness of Stalin- unless you have something against Jews?.

Bilan

6th April 2009, 12:39

Charles Xavier

6th April 2009, 15:21

I suppose when Stalin made this statement in 1952 saying "Every Jewish nationalist is a potential agent of the American intelligence. Jewish nationalists think that their nation was saved by the USA", he was really welcoming Jews with open arms.

It's true that the anti-semitism of Stalinist Russia was of a different kind than that practiced in Nazi Germany in that it was a matter of policy rather than a matter of principle. Instead, the interests of the Stalinist state were driven by cynical pragmatism: which was why Stalin urged Molotov to purge the foreign service of Jews when they were negotiating the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with the Nazis. They also were deeply suspicious of the Jewish community in general for exactly the same reasons anti-semitism in general has maintained its currency in capitalist society: the notion that the Jewish community is not truly loyal to the national state (this is a different ideological meaning to the anti-semitism of the Middle Ages which had a specifically religious flavour). This is part of the reason why Communism and Judaism have often been regarded as one and the same by the extreme right. For the Stalinists, the worry was that this section of the population may not have complete loyalty to the Soviet state - the official term for these undesireables was "rootless cosmopolitans".

Nonetheless, when it was politically expedient, the Stalinists were the Jews' best friends. They mobilised many to fight in the anti-fascist brigades during the war - even though they refused to back the rising in the Warsaw Ghettos. They also backed the creation of Israel, believing the number of Russian Jewish communists could push the new state in the direction of the Soviet Union.

By the 50s, Stalin had clearly changed his mind again. We see the infamous "Doctor's Plot" where an international conspiracy of Jews (sound familiar?) was accused of being behind an assassination plot. Pravda recorded the following about the alleged perpetrators: "The majority of the participants of the terrorist group… were bought by American intelligence. They were recruited by a branch-office of American intelligence — the international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization called "Joint." [I]The filthy face of this Zionist spy organization, covering up their vicious actions under the mask of charity, is now completely revealed…"

We can quibble I suppose about whether "anti-semitism" is the best term to describe this sustained series of attacks on the Jewish community in Stalinism Russia but the end-result is pretty much the same.

And, back to my original point, your party expelled those members who questioned this policy of attacking the Jews. So far, your response has been pretty much the same as the Party's was then: outright denial and obfuscation. If it walks like a duck ...

He didn't say jew, he said Jewish nationalists. Zionism is a reactionary anti-worker ideology. The Soviets saved millions and millions of jews during the second world war. There was absolutely no targeted campaign against Jews. When evidence fails lie and fudge facts.

Hi I'm Samyasa's brain, here are your orders: When evidence fails, please resort to lying. And don't forget to mention Stalin or derail discussion to debate about the Soviet Union. Because why would talking about Canada be important to Canadians? Just load your discussions about Stalin and the Soviet Union because its obviously irrelevant but yours truly cannot stop talking about Stalin. I am so obsessed with Stalin. I think Stalin might be in my closet! I am going to check! Hmm no? Maybe under the bed? Stalin is everywhere!!!!!!!!!

Likewise. Your post was incoherent and contradictory. Could you please clarify?

Can you please write full sentences and paragraphs, its very difficult to read what you are writing.

Devrim

7th April 2009, 12:45

What excactly do you say on what should have been done in WWII then, by workers?

The most important thing to realise was that in 1939, the working class was defeated and exhausted. The crushing of the revolutionary wave, followed by the repression unleashed by the fascist/totalitarian regimes that followed had broken the working class.

In some ways the fact that the war started shows this. In 1917-18, the working class in Europe stopped the war and shook all of the European imperialist states. The imperialists could not have launched a new general war at that time.

Twenty years later the situation was completely different. The fact that the imperialists could begin another war showed that the workering class had been politically smashed.

So in answer to your question what could workers have done, the answer is actually very little.

Despite this the communist left was active throughout the war as the only Marxist groups that opposed it.

Some details of the activity of the left in the war can be found here:

http://en.internationalism.org/books/dgcl/4/10_00.html

Devrim

Pogue

7th April 2009, 12:50

The most important thing to realise was that in 1939, the working class was defeated and exhausted. The crushing of the revolutionary wave, followed by the repression unleashed by the fascist/totalitarian regimes that followed had broken the working class.

In some ways the fact that the war started shows this. In 1917-18, the working class in Europe stopped the war and shook all of the European imperialist states. The imperialists could not have launched a new general war at that time.

Twenty years later the situation was completely different. The fact that the imperialists could begin another war showed that the workering class had been politically smashed.

So in answer to your question what could workers have done, the answer is actually very little.

Despite this the communist left was active throughout the war as the only Marxist groups that opposed it.

Some details of the activity of the left in the war can be found here:

http://en.internationalism.org/books/dgcl/4/10_00.html

Devrim

Well then being in a weakened position, and not having a strong workers movement to oppose both the capitalist allied powers and the fascists, what should the workers have done? If I was in such a situation I'd love to call for a revolution to completely overthrow capitalism, fascism, etc, but if it wasn't looking likely, and Hitler was rampaging across Europe imprisoning and killing communists, Jews, etc as he went, and I was a communist in one of the countries he was targetting and bombing, I'd sign up to fight him, certainly. Not as an apologiser for imperialism or someone who had a sense of nationalism, but as an member of the working class who wants to see this marauding fascist dictator stopped before he kills anymore people.

Pogue

7th April 2009, 12:54

And even more so with the resistance. If I lived in what was previously a liberal democracy which was shit because it was capitalism but in which we had *some* freedoms, and then where I lived was occupied by Nazis who proceeded to take away all free press, freedom to organise, imposed all sorts of authoritarian, fascist shit on me, or was hunting Jews in my area for extermination, I'd join a resistance movement, obviously, and most definatly one which was communist in its nature, as they nearly all were. It wouldn't be a matter of me siding with imperialism, it would be me defending myself, my class and my people against a violent, fascist aggresor. If the US, British, Russian etc states were fighting the same enemy, then thats just that, but I'd be fighting for my reasons, to preserve myself and my community against fascist aggression. I can see no possible train of thought that would lead to the conclusion that I shouldn't fight, as an individual, against fascism, just because it'd mean I'd be on the 'same side' as imperialist states.

Devrim

7th April 2009, 12:54

I don't see how Stalin has anything to do with me thinking that the ICC think its the only revolutionary group, as they have said they are revolutionary, and people who agree with them are revolutionary, and openly state that everyone else is bourgeiosie.

So I went around my documents and checked about Stalin, First of all, I just checked, my name isn't Stalin, second of all, I checked my date of birth, I wasn't alive when Stalin was around so I guess I didn't have secret conversations with Stalin on the ICC, then I checked my passport and birth certificate, turns out I never visited the Soviet Union or was born there. Now I look around my room, No books by Stalin, no pamphlets on Stalin, no pictures or busts of Stalin. Maybe you are psychic so I went and checked out my book on dialectical materialism and I read that that is metaphysical.

I think that you completely misunderstand what is being said about 'Stalinism'. It is not about the individual personage of Stalin. It is about the political current which Stalinism represents.

One of the main ideas of Stalinism was that of socialism in one country, and the idea that the USSR was socialist even after the war. These are ideas that you follow:

As for WW2 this is an example of international interest being much more important than national ones. Was it in our national class interest as Canadians to fight in WW2? No it wasn't when the Soviet Union was attacked, it became a question of suppressing national interests for the interest of the international proletariat. And we communists actually did most of our work recruiting for Partisans, to be dropped in Yugoslavia and whatnot.

Did we have any illusions that the British/America bourgeioisie were better than the Italian/German ones, of course not. But it was our duty to defend socialism. Not in words but in deeds. Our class enemy our own bosses had an interest of controlling the world, our interests was to save socialism. We fought the same fight for different reasons.

And socialism came out much struggle after ww2 as a result to the status of a Superpower.

Also I would just like to comment on this statement;

As for WW2 this is an example of international interest being much more important than national ones. Was it in our national class interest as Canadians to fight in WW2?

Of course, as has already been pointed out, the idea of 'national class interest' is absurd for the working class. It is never in the class interests of workers to go out and massacre each other on behalf of the bosses.

It was in the interest of the Canadian bourgeoisie to fight on the side of the countries that they were aligned to, the UK and the US.

Doesn't the fact that your so-called communist policy was the policy of the big bourgeoisie make you at least think twice?

Devrim

Devrim

7th April 2009, 12:59

In the Wiki's entry for Amadeo Bordiga ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeo_Bordiga ) we find this:

For Bordiga, the party was 'the social brain' of the working class whose task was not to seek majority support, but to concentrate on working for an armed insurrection, in the course of which it would seize power and then use it to abolish capitalism and impose a communist society by force. Bordiga identified 'dictatorship of the proletariat' and dictatorship of the party and argued that establishing its own dictatorship should be the party's immediate and direct aim.

Rejecting Pop Fronts and elections doesn't bring the Italian Bordigaist left communists very far from Stalinists, if we are to take for accurate the wiki's statements.

As has been pointed out already, there are no Bordigists on here.

Despite their mistakes though I think that there was a world of difference between the Bordigists and the Stalinists. One side was internationalist, and the others were nationalists.

Devrim

Samyasa

7th April 2009, 14:07

Well then being in a weakened position, and not having a strong workers movement to oppose both the capitalist allied powers and the fascists, what should the workers have done? If I was in such a situation I'd love to call for a revolution to completely overthrow capitalism, fascism, etc, but if it wasn't looking likely, and Hitler was rampaging across Europe imprisoning and killing communists, Jews, etc as he went, and I was a communist in one of the countries he was targetting and bombing, I'd sign up to fight him, certainly. Not as an apologiser for imperialism or someone who had a sense of nationalism, but as an member of the working class who wants to see this marauding fascist dictator stopped before he kills anymore people.

The Stalinists and the Allies were also rampaging across Europe killing Communists and Jews. Certainly one of the ICC's founding comrades who spent most of the War dodging the Nazis on account of being Jewish, and was living in France during the "liberation" was nearly killed by the thugs of the French CP for having internationalist leaflets in German.

But, more to the point, what about the German workers who was first worked to death in the factories to feed the German war machine and then suffered under the Allied occupation which effectively turned the whole country into a concentration camp. They were starved to death (rations in the British zone for example amounted to 1000 calories a day in 1946) and repeatedly raped (many women ended up becoming the mistresses of Allied officers to gain "protection" - one 18 year old German girl resorted to this in the Russian zone after being raped 60 times! This occurance was far from unusual - it's estimated that the Red Army raped about 2 million women).

Contrary to the official story of "food shortages", the starvation of the whole of Germany was a quite deliberate policy. Food rations were consciously diverted to non-Germans and when, as one example, the Vatican attempted to send food to German children they were forbidden by the US! While the Germans were getting between 1000-1500 calories a day, the British were getting 2900 which was just behind the US at 3200!

As for the Jews, many ended up in DP (Displaced Person) camps administered by the Allies. The Allies appointed ex-Nazis as guards as often as not and the suspicions of the British high command about the Jews' intentions (they thought they were part of a conspiracy to get to Palestine) led them to close the camps and enforce compulsory labour. The last Jewish DP camp didn't close until 1957!

Over 4 million German POWs were put in work camps across Europe and (in a similar policy to Bush most recently) were recategorised as Disarmed Enemy Forces in order to avoid complicity with the Geneva Convention. 750,000 of these "unpeople" were put to work in France, often clearing minefields - the rate of attrition from deaths and injuries was 2000 a month!

The whole capitalist system drips with blood and gore - taking sides with one capitalist against another on the basis that one side will butcher marginally less people than the other is making a submission to the logic of the system as a whole. The working class has the only alternative to this logic - struggle against the bourgeoisie in all countries, fraternisation across all borders, turn the imperialist war into a civil war. It's true that this alternative cannot always be realised at any given point in time. But it's the responsibility of revolutionaries to keep this flame of hope alive, no matter how grim the circumstances. When revolutionaries abandon this most precious principle, they abandon the working class.

Bilan

7th April 2009, 14:23

Can you please write full sentences and paragraphs, its very difficult to read what you are writing.

1/ Your presumption on the nature of the Canadian Trade Unions - that being, that although they're not 'the best' (your words) but still operate as 'working class organizations' - is baseless, as your entire post is riddled with contradictions, grammatical errors, and no examples or proof to back up any of your statements.

2/ The IWW is not an anarcho-syndicalist union. It is an industrial union which holds no allegiances with a political party as such. This is not the same as anarcho-syndicalism.

3/ "The question here is not of individual workers, but of the interests of the class." These two are not synonymous. It may be individual workers part of the class, but its the collective - the unity of all workers - which makes the class, and the responses to issues on one level to another are different.
Trade Unions, in this instance, can be useful for individual workers in disputes between management, the boss(es) or whatever. But they don't represent a solution, or a useful mechanism for the class as a whole. The trade union is the mediator between the working class and the bourgeoisie, and plays just that role, irrespective of how combatant they were, or how combatant they sound. They are mediators, and must make concessions to the bourgeoisie at the expense of the workers.
Let us use an example to illustrate this.
Recently, in Australia, in the car manufacturing industry unions have been supporting pay cuts to the workers in a struggle to maintain these jobs (in Australia, as they're at risk of being outsourced).

Some socialists argue that this is the fault of the leadership, and that with a strong socialist militant rank-n-file and the election of Socialist leaders in the trade unions, they will take on a more radical form.
This is as naïve as it is ridiculous, and a quick step back into the history of the Trade Unions, particlarly in the 80's, will shatter all of these farcical ideas.
But let's presume, for arguments sake, that it is the fault of the trade union leaders, that the trade union leaders are bourgeois or sell outs.
But what drove the Trade Unions to this position? The bourgeois leaders in the trade union rose in a way that was relative to the degeneration of the Trade Unions generally, of which was relative in turn to the degenerating economy.

4/ The idea you present, that:

"(...) our trade unions are fighting for working people and they can do a lot better. We don't abandon our efforts when things look bleak, we must struggle harder to put forward a better struggle."

Rests on the idea that the trade unions strength grows due to volunteering of militants. It negates any relation between the openness and aggressiveness of the class struggle in different periods; it negates the rise and fall of crisis, and how that corresponds to trade union activity and demands; and it doesn't answer, or even address, why this method of working class organisation is still possible, still useful, or anything, considering that they've degenerated.
There is an interrelationship between the degeneration of the trade union leadership, and the openness of the class struggle; a corresspondence between all of these above raised points.
But you maintain this position of involvement in spite of this, which to me, appears as dreadfully unmaterialist.

5/ Workers have no national interests, nor do "national class interests" exist.
6/ Your position on WWII, and your parties involvment in the recruitment of Workers into an Imperialist war, where they were to be slaughtered en masse and to slaughter en masse is nothing beyond bourgeois. You support the working class dying and fighting in an imperialist war. Furthermore, your position - or at least, your post - is totally incoherent.

1. You mention 'national class interests', and then here, suppressing national class interests for internationalist class interests. This implies a conflict of interest between the international proletariat, and the proletariat of a particular country beyond in the context of struggle - which is wrong. These 'national interests', whether draped in red or not, are bourgeois interests, purely and simply. The proletariat is international, and the struggle is always international.
2. An imperialist war is always against the interests of the proletariat, anywhere and everywhere. It is in the interests of the bourgeoisie.
3. You admit, above, that you took part, openly (and peculiarly proudly) in recruiting proletarians to die in a war for the bourgeoisie, under the façade of 'proletarian internationalism'.

7/ Capitalism is global, it does 'control the world' because it dominates all corners of it. Fighting in an imperialist war to "stop" or "hinder capitalisms domination of the entire planet" makes about as much sense as working at a slaughterhouse to promote veganism.
You say, "(you) fought the same fight for different reasons", and right there, articulate your own ignorance of the nature of imperialist war, let alone capitalism.

8/And you didn't save socialism. This is fictitious, pure and simple. Saving the USSR (even though it saved itself...) does not equate to 'saving' socialism. Socialism is not an imperialist war, it is class struggle. If you were really interested in 'saving' socialism (which is stupid anyway, that necessitates socialism existing), you would have taken part in fighting against the bourgeoisie, not having comrades killed for them.

9/ You also mention that post-WWII the USSR became a 'superpower' and then maintain it was 'socialist'. Somethings wrong. Can you guess?

Samyasa

7th April 2009, 14:35

He didn't say jew, he said Jewish nationalists. Zionism is a reactionary anti-worker ideology. The Soviets saved millions and millions of jews during the second world war. There was absolutely no targeted campaign against Jews. When evidence fails lie and fudge facts.

I haven't lied at all. I've quoted what Stalin said and I've pointed out what was actually done in Soviet Russia. It's quite clear there was a targetted campaign against Jews and Jewish culture at certain points. I also pointed out that there were times when the Jews were embraced by the Stalinist state. The key to all my points was that it depended on what was politically expedient at the time. This doesn't change the fact that it happened.

The question is not whether Zionism is reactionary or not - on the point, at least, we agree. But the Stalinists didn't - the "Labour Zionists" were a key part of Stalinism's policy towards Israel until it became clear that Israel wasn't going to fall into the Russian bloc's hands. Then Zionism was once again perceived as a threat and the whole Jewish population was regarded as being a vector for Zionism and targetted accordingly. Even Jewish culture was perceived as a threat which was why the 13 most prominent Yiddish writers, actors, etc. were executed on Stalin's orders in 1952 on the so-called "Night of the Murdered Poets". Those terrible "rootless cosmopolitans", eh?

Charles Xavier

7th April 2009, 16:30

1/ Your presumption on the nature of the Canadian Trade Unions - that being, that although they're not 'the best' (your words) but still operate as 'working class organizations' - is baseless, as your entire post is riddled with contradictions, grammatical errors, and no examples or proof to back up any of your statements.

2/ The IWW is not an anarcho-syndicalist union. It is an industrial union which holds no allegiances with a political party as such. This is not the same as anarcho-syndicalism.

3/ "The question here is not of individual workers, but of the interests of the class." These two are not synonymous. It may be individual workers part of the class, but its the collective - the unity of all workers - which makes the class, and the responses to issues on one level to another are different.
Trade Unions, in this instance, can be useful for individual workers in disputes between management, the boss(es) or whatever. But they don't represent a solution, or a useful mechanism for the class as a whole. The trade union is the mediator between the working class and the bourgeoisie, and plays just that role, irrespective of how combatant they were, or how combatant they sound. They are mediators, and must make concessions to the bourgeoisie at the expense of the workers.
Let us use an example to illustrate this.
Recently, in Australia, in the car manufacturing industry unions have been supporting pay cuts to the workers in a struggle to maintain these jobs (in Australia, as they're at risk of being outsourced).

Some socialists argue that this is the fault of the leadership, and that with a strong socialist militant rank-n-file and the election of Socialist leaders in the trade unions, they will take on a more radical form.
This is as naïve as it is ridiculous, and a quick step back into the history of the Trade Unions, particlarly in the 80's, will shatter all of these farcical ideas.
But let's presume, for arguments sake, that it is the fault of the trade union leaders, that the trade union leaders are bourgeois or sell outs.
But what drove the Trade Unions to this position? The bourgeois leaders in the trade union rose in a way that was relative to the degeneration of the Trade Unions generally, of which was relative in turn to the degenerating economy.

4/ The idea you present, that:

"(...) our trade unions are fighting for working people and they can do a lot better. We don't abandon our efforts when things look bleak, we must struggle harder to put forward a better struggle."

Rests on the idea that the trade unions strength grows due to volunteering of militants. It negates any relation between the openness and aggressiveness of the class struggle in different periods; it negates the rise and fall of crisis, and how that corresponds to trade union activity and demands; and it doesn't answer, or even address, why this method of working class organisation is still possible, still useful, or anything, considering that they've degenerated.
There is an interrelationship between the degeneration of the trade union leadership, and the openness of the class struggle; a corresspondence between all of these above raised points.
But you maintain this position of involvement in spite of this, which to me, appears as dreadfully unmaterialist.

5/ Workers have no national interests, nor do "national class interests" exist.
6/ Your position on WWII, and your parties involvment in the recruitment of Workers into an Imperialist war, where they were to be slaughtered en masse and to slaughter en masse is nothing beyond bourgeois. You support the working class dying and fighting in an imperialist war. Furthermore, your position - or at least, your post - is totally incoherent.

1. You mention 'national class interests', and then here, suppressing national class interests for internationalist class interests. This implies a conflict of interest between the international proletariat, and the proletariat of a particular country beyond in the context of struggle - which is wrong. These 'national interests', whether draped in red or not, are bourgeois interests, purely and simply. The proletariat is international, and the struggle is always international.
2. An imperialist war is always against the interests of the proletariat, anywhere and everywhere. It is in the interests of the bourgeoisie.
3. You admit, above, that you took part, openly (and peculiarly proudly) in recruiting proletarians to die in a war for the bourgeoisie, under the façade of 'proletarian internationalism'.

7/ Capitalism is global, it does 'control the world' because it dominates all corners of it. Fighting in an imperialist war to "stop" or "hinder capitalisms domination of the entire planet" makes about as much sense as working at a slaughterhouse to promote veganism.
You say, "(you) fought the same fight for different reasons", and right there, articulate your own ignorance of the nature of imperialist war, let alone capitalism.

8/And you didn't save socialism. This is fictitious, pure and simple. Saving the USSR (even though it saved itself...) does not equate to 'saving' socialism. Socialism is not an imperialist war, it is class struggle. If you were really interested in 'saving' socialism (which is stupid anyway, that necessitates socialism existing), you would have taken part in fighting against the bourgeoisie, not having comrades killed for them.

9/ You also mention that post-WWII the USSR became a 'superpower' and then maintain it was 'socialist'. Somethings wrong. Can you guess?

My proof is that they engage in both economic and political struggles to better the lives of working people. The Class collaborationist leadership of some union being exceptions. As for the IWW I am mostly refering to the historical IWW not the current one. And I guess you are correct they were not openly anarcho-syndicalist but their they were a revolutionary syndicalist union.

I don't recall saying "The question here is not of individual workers, but of the interests of the class." The trade unions are a tool to be waged with the workers. They do not have to make concessions, just look at Local 1005 in Hamilton, Ontario when Stelco went into bankruptcy protection, the bosses were asking for massive concessions. Local 1005 wouldn't give them it and exposed their fraud, now that US steel has pulled out of the operations it is calling for nationalization. Why is this a different course here? Well they have socialists in their leadership.

Mine Mill before it was raided, was another such example. The Longshoremens union before it was crashed was another such example of what a strong union could do. Some of the local CAW unions are strong leftist unions. Sid Ryan is another good leftist trade unionist, who banned Israeli speakers from campuses after the gaza offensive. But it matters who is backing them, who is helping them stear the course.

Its just bureacratic leadership of many trade unions that lead to class callaboration, and many workers feel like they have a gun to their head such as the autoworkers where the bosses are asking for massive concessions or threaten to pull out. A correct line would be for communists in that position is that if they want to leave then fine, leave the equipment behind and we'll get back to work.

Well the crisis put the trade unions in the same position they put working people, they either panic for concessions or they fight. It depends what kind of slate, and political maturity of the leadership, left of social democracy or centre and right of social democracy.

Workers do have national class interests, Healthcare would be a national class interest, raising the minimum wage would be a national class interest, jobs would be a national class issue IE not exporting the raw material from Canada but finishing the product. They are linked with thousands of other struggles around the world, but it cannot be workers in Germany fighting for a minimum wage increase in Ontario.

1. Yes I am implying sometimes theres a contradiction between national and international interests, jobs is one of them, the Chinese workers will not like losing canadian companies and jobs so they are produced in Canada again. And this example also shows national working class interest that its against the bourgeiosie interests as they would prefer to produce their goods where labour costs are dirt cheap.

2. Yes an imperialist war is against the interest of the working class, and on this basis we oppose it. But when workers are attacked what should their answer be to an imperialist invasion of belligerent countries? Sit down and face extermination? No they need to fight to live. The resistance fighters in germany were helping the Soviet Union and the British/American imperialists but obviously they were fighting against their own bouergeiosie. Are you telling that german resistance fighting to lay down her arms? Should she just not show any opposition or support of her bourgeiosie?

3. The imperialist war in europe turned into something new when the Soviet Union was involved, it was still an imperialist war but then you had socialist countries who were anti-imperialists being attack. As the centre of the revolution in the world, workers had a duty to defend it.

And Capitalism is global, but so is socialism. We weren't fighting for imperialism we were fighting for socialism, while our workers were not going to change the mind of the Imperialists the Soviet workers and the partisans were going to make massive changes. So anything we could do to assist them even engage in a war we found it our duty to do so.

8/And you didn't save socialism. This is fictitious, pure and simple. Saving the USSR (even though it saved itself...) does not equate to 'saving' socialism. Socialism is not an imperialist war, it is class struggle. If you were really interested in 'saving' socialism (which is stupid anyway, that necessitates socialism existing), you would have taken part in fighting against the bourgeoisie, not having comrades killed for them.

We helped the Soviet Union, we helped those in concentration camps, it is purely speculative as to how much. But the combined action of workers especially in Eastern Europe lead to profound changes in the world. The class struggle was present in Eastern Europe. While turning the guns on the bourgeoisie would obviously be something all workers would want, we weren't suffieciently organized or had the capacity to do so. Such an action when communist engage in an action divorced from the masses would have caused more harm than good especially during ww2 which would have made the government descend into counter-revolution.

And the revolution isn't allow to be strong enough to tell the imperialists that you can't fuck with us or our allies? I would argue contrary the revolution must ascend to such a status.

Pantalones

30th April 2009, 20:48

My comrades and I are not Trots, as one of the founding members of the IWG/GIO, can say in full confidence that we have exactly ONE EX-trot in our organization. That is how Trotskyite we are.

"Marxism-Leninism" is Stalinism. It is the word for the ideology promoted by Stalin, the word I believe was even coined by Stalin, just as "bolshevik-leninist" was a term coined by Trotsky. Those who espouse "marxism-leninism" are Stalinists and we will call them what they are.

The SHINING PATH were filthy butchers. I distinctly remember the RCP cats jabbering on about "Marx-Lenin-Mao-Gonzalo" thought. Chairman Gonzalo, why anyone would follow another Stalinist professor is beyond me. You don't hear them talking about that anymore since they changed their so-called "people's war" to a "people's war for democracy". Then again not having any historical memory is helpful when defending the indefensible.

Stalin was ardently anti-semitic especially later on in his life. He created a separate "republic" to deport Jews to in far eastern-Siberia. This was not out of the kindness of his heart, or a desire to give them a "homeland", but in line with his forced deportation policy regarding many nationalities that he pushed around all over the face of the USSR--just like the Chechens.

It is time as well that people rethink their ideas of what happened in WWII. The glorious struggle of Stalinists and their fellow united front members against fascism was never the "resistance" that they claimed it to be. Stalinists in Buchenwald were so nationalistic they couldn't even mount a resistance...no that was left up to Trots and left-communists around the Fischer-Maslow group who published the Manifesto of the Internationalist Communists of Buchenwald Camp. Of course the Stalinists in action during that period had no problem with ratting out their fellow united front members to fascist police. "Anti-fascist" struggle? I call it a lie.

Stalin himself refused to acknowledge that the Germans had invaded the USSR and hid, doing NOTHING for eleven days. There's your glorious struggle against fascism. The same Stalinists all over the world not long before had been talking up the Hitler-Stalin Pact. But then "Marxist-Leninists" don't like to think about that, not when they are sincere believers that bourgeois leftists and capitalists would actually wage a real struggle against fascism, which can only mean a struggle against the system and those who started it.

Those who were responsible for the rise of fascism in Europe were Social-Democratic bourgeoisie and capitalists. Fascism arose to crush revolutionary workers. German reactionary veteran soldiers marched into Berlin with swastikas painted on their helmets to butcher the Berlin Soviet and they were proud of it. Those people became the first cadres of the SA. Fascism is the flip-side of Democracy, one in the same it is only a pretense that divides them. When the liberals and conservatives are scared of rebellions and unrest they call out the reactionaries and all that nice talk about "rights" goes out the window. Fascism exists in a historical context, such that to say we must support this or that ruling capitalist party in order to defend ourselves from this fascism is an ahistorical lie.

Some people when I was younger still remembered how the Roosevelt and Churchill regimes turned back Jewish refugees knowing full well what was going to happen to them.

Now if Nazis and Stalinists and Dyermocratz were slaughtering each other and leaving everyone else alone, I'd support that. The Allied armies of the US raped almost as many women as the Russian Red Army did, but that is not talked about by historians so much, I assume because they love the Dyemocracy, being middle-class or upper-middle they probably benefit from it somehow.

Why were the soldiers of the Red Army so brutal? For one, Stalin's regime didn't bother to arm them. Stalin's regime didn't bother to feed them. Stalin's regime didn't bother to clothe them. After having to do all that for yourself, how would you treat the people around you? It is a miracle that they didn't just turn all Germany and Poland into a smoking hole in the ground. That too was the doing of the Stalinist regime. All armies are basically scum-sucking macho rapist filth--not just "fellow workers in uniform". At the start of WWII, Stalin's regime couldn't even provide more than one rifle for every Russian soldier. After the five year plans and years of calling everyone a fascist, the Stalin's in their CPs failed to defend Russia. In fact the only reason Russia survived was because that the annihilation of Slavs had become fascist policy. The USSR survived in spite of Stalin, not because of him.

In fact it was the decision of the allied armies not to accept anything less than a total surrender that caused much of the killing, even the allied officer corps understood what this meant when the conditions for peace became total surrender. This was intentional on the part of imperialists. The same reason the Red Army stopped before going into Warsaw so that the partisans could get slaughtered first. The same reason the Allied armies in Italy stopped before they got to Rome and took the north of Italy, because they wanted to Partisans to get slaughtered first. Getting slaughtered for any capitalist is just plain stupid and workers don't need idiots "defending" them.

**Wikipedia links do not disprove Stalinist anti-semitism. That's not proof of anything except what the Wikipedia writer believes. WIKI is not a "source", read below the article and look at the writers' sources and use those if you want to cite something. My opinion is that this is the web...go find out for yourself what I say is true or not, unless you lack the intellectual courage.

Charles Xavier

1st May 2009, 04:04

BLAH BLAH BLAH

This is 100% off topic.

Unregistered

7th May 2009, 20:43

This is 100% off topic.

I had an obligation to clear up lies spoken about a group that I founded, explicitly to NOT be just another Stalinist/Trot/Mao/Anarcho bullshit activist groupuscule. As I recall the topic was "Am I a member of a bourgeois party." My answer to you is YES and this is why.

Again, to profess "marxism-leninism" makes one a STALINIST or Mao-Stalinist. Being a Stalinist today means that your politics are simply a watered down social-democratized centrism that poses as radical by calling for things like nationalization of the economy. In the US the most militant M-Lers have put forward the most nauseating centrist shit, they are responsible for tying the left to the democratic party and to the inherent need for the bourgeoisie to pursue imperialist war.

Take a hard look at how capitalism and state-capitalism function in reality. By state-capitalism I mean all nationalization of the capitalist economy and state interference in the economy regardless of official stated ideologies like "democracy" or "stalinism". Nationalized formations of capital are affected in the same way by the same problems private capitalist entities do. The USSR had permanent unresolvable unemployment that masked in any number of clever ways just as surely as unemployment is everywhere is statistically hidden by national-bourgeoisies. Every state-capitalist economy had wage labor, that is wage-slavery. Every state-capitalist economy had a currency. The fact of exploitation of workers is shown in its utmost clarity in the reality of a paystub and a paycheck. If you are paid in wages you are being exploited by capitalists (Communist Manifesto).

Marx, Engels (Revolution in Science) and Lenin (State and Revolution) and many other great revolutionaries understood what state-capitalism was. Stalin and Mao even in their own writings recognized, accepted and embraced it. Mao wrote of "State Capitalism of a new type" because it is officially owned by the "people". In the USSR we got to see how fast this "property of the people" was sold off, showing this was never even remotely the property of any "people" other than the bourgeoisie.

Consider the Marxist understanding of the state (Engles-Origins of Family, Private Property and the State), that the state is not neutral, it is not a tool for you to pick up and wield to your satifaction. This is because it exists as a means of controlling social tensions and class strugge, it was created as a means of giving the bourgeois class, who came to power with the days of the bourgeois revolutions in the 18th Century. If the state owns a thing that means nothing to workers who have no control over it anyway. A traditionally clever dodge of state-capitalism supporters is the sophistry of "state-capitalism with workers' control". Supporters of brands of Maoism and Stalinism today don't even have that going on, for them socialism is a big benevolent daddy bourgeoisie in control of some capital ironically labelled the "property" of the people.

Anyone who professes to be a Marxist-Leninist today is supporting bourgeois politics and policies within a party whose populist rhetoric disguises bourgeois politics and policies. Specifically "marxist-leninists" supporting Obama and the DP and by extension the imperialist war that this faction of the capitalist class supports. Everywhere "marxist-leninists" talk militant but sell-out harder and faster than a social-democrat whose just been offered a post as prime-minister. "Marxist-Leninism" is bourgeois and always has been. Both Marx and Lenin would've rejected such a label that serves only to simplify their ideas beyond all recognition.

When the capitalist class nationalizes an enterprise or otherwise "rescues" it, like GM today for example, this isn't ever for the benefit of workers. The capitalists do this to save their profits and more importantly than profit...POWER.

Slogans inherited from the second international and Jacobin revolutionaries like the "Right of Nations to Self-Determination" are bourgeois slogans as they were used explicitly to mobilize workers to slaughter each other. Lenin, Luxemburg and an entire world movement full of workers could see this was was WWI was all about. Only the betrayals of Stalinism and the hypocritical button pushing mass murderers of the western bourgeoisie made WWII into an ideology of support for imperialist war. A sacred struggle for freedom. Stalinists revel in how they "extended" the lifespans of workers in their countries as the result of national-capitalist development. For workers this process didn't exactly extend their lives, Stakhanovism never extended anyone's life. In fact, the life expectancies of the entire world directly hinge on sanitation and clean water, as opposed to medicine or the supposed miracle of stalinist economic "development". So who did this for the Soviet people? Not Stalin.

Support for nationalism and nationalists is bourgeois. Workers of the world, unite!...Internationalism...not workers of the world separate under national flags and slaughter each other. Take a look at the position of workers in Vietnam. As soon as you are "nationally liberated" your guerrilla gangster bosses will tell you to get back to work. They will make you work harder to build their "great nation". That's what happens to workers under national liberation.

Marxism-Leninism is bourgeois. Marxist-Leninist parties are bourgeois. Marxism-Leninism IS Stalinism. If your party takes sides in imperialist wars, it is bourgeois. That is how an internationalist would see it. These positions aren't drawn out of dry abstractions, or conceptions imposed upon reality but rather they are based in an analysis of actual conditions and events in the concrete, stripped of all sophistry, illusions and lies--historical materialism.

Charles Xavier

7th May 2009, 23:34

I had an obligation to clear up lies spoken about a group that I founded, explicitly to NOT be just another Stalinist/Trot/Mao/Anarcho bullshit activist groupuscule. As I recall the topic was "Am I a member of a bourgeois party." My answer to you is YES and this is why.

Again, to profess "marxism-leninism" makes one a STALINIST or Mao-Stalinist. Being a Stalinist today means that your politics are simply a watered down social-democratized centrism that poses as radical by calling for things like nationalization of the economy. In the US the most militant M-Lers have put forward the most nauseating centrist shit, they are responsible for tying the left to the democratic party and to the inherent need for the bourgeoisie to pursue imperialist war.

Take a hard look at how capitalism and state-capitalism function in reality. By state-capitalism I mean all nationalization of the capitalist economy and state interference in the economy regardless of official stated ideologies like "democracy" or "stalinism". Nationalized formations of capital are affected in the same way by the same problems private capitalist entities do. The USSR had permanent unresolvable unemployment that masked in any number of clever ways just as surely as unemployment is everywhere is statistically hidden by national-bourgeoisies. Every state-capitalist economy had wage labor, that is wage-slavery. Every state-capitalist economy had a currency. The fact of exploitation of workers is shown in its utmost clarity in the reality of a paystub and a paycheck. If you are paid in wages you are being exploited by capitalists (Communist Manifesto).

Marx, Engels (Revolution in Science) and Lenin (State and Revolution) and many other great revolutionaries understood what state-capitalism was. Stalin and Mao even in their own writings recognized, accepted and embraced it. Mao wrote of "State Capitalism of a new type" because it is officially owned by the "people". In the USSR we got to see how fast this "property of the people" was sold off, showing this was never even remotely the property of any "people" other than the bourgeoisie.

Consider the Marxist understanding of the state (Engles-Origins of Family, Private Property and the State), that the state is not neutral, it is not a tool for you to pick up and wield to your satifaction. This is because it exists as a means of controlling social tensions and class strugge, it was created as a means of giving the bourgeois class, who came to power with the days of the bourgeois revolutions in the 18th Century. If the state owns a thing that means nothing to workers who have no control over it anyway. A traditionally clever dodge of state-capitalism supporters is the sophistry of "state-capitalism with workers' control". Supporters of brands of Maoism and Stalinism today don't even have that going on, for them socialism is a big benevolent daddy bourgeoisie in control of some capital ironically labelled the "property" of the people.

Anyone who professes to be a Marxist-Leninist today is supporting bourgeois politics and policies within a party whose populist rhetoric disguises bourgeois politics and policies. Specifically "marxist-leninists" supporting Obama and the DP and by extension the imperialist war that this faction of the capitalist class supports. Everywhere "marxist-leninists" talk militant but sell-out harder and faster than a social-democrat whose just been offered a post as prime-minister. "Marxist-Leninism" is bourgeois and always has been. Both Marx and Lenin would've rejected such a label that serves only to simplify their ideas beyond all recognition.

When the capitalist class nationalizes an enterprise or otherwise "rescues" it, like GM today for example, this isn't ever for the benefit of workers. The capitalists do this to save their profits and more importantly than profit...POWER.

Slogans inherited from the second international and Jacobin revolutionaries like the "Right of Nations to Self-Determination" are bourgeois slogans as they were used explicitly to mobilize workers to slaughter each other. Lenin, Luxemburg and an entire world movement full of workers could see this was was WWI was all about. Only the betrayals of Stalinism and the hypocritical button pushing mass murderers of the western bourgeoisie made WWII into an ideology of support for imperialist war. A sacred struggle for freedom. Stalinists revel in how they "extended" the lifespans of workers in their countries as the result of national-capitalist development. For workers this process didn't exactly extend their lives, Stakhanovism never extended anyone's life. In fact, the life expectancies of the entire world directly hinge on sanitation and clean water, as opposed to medicine or the supposed miracle of stalinist economic "development". So who did this for the Soviet people? Not Stalin.

Support for nationalism and nationalists is bourgeois. Workers of the world, unite!...Internationalism...not workers of the world separate under national flags and slaughter each other. Take a look at the position of workers in Vietnam. As soon as you are "nationally liberated" your guerrilla gangster bosses will tell you to get back to work. They will make you work harder to build their "great nation". That's what happens to workers under national liberation.

Marxism-Leninism is bourgeois. Marxist-Leninist parties are bourgeois. Marxism-Leninism IS Stalinism. If your party takes sides in imperialist wars, it is bourgeois. That is how an internationalist would see it. These positions aren't drawn out of dry abstractions, or conceptions imposed upon reality but rather they are based in an analysis of actual conditions and events in the concrete, stripped of all sophistry, illusions and lies--historical materialism.

This is completely 100% off topic. If you want to talk about Stalin do it in other threads.

the only people talking about Stalin are the ones who do not want to talk about the topic at hand. Please don't derail the threads with your fight with a straw man. Stalin has absolutely nothing to do with the topic.

You should have just posted this instead:
http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/1931/stalina.jpg