All or nothing mentality

[Budog]

:confused: I have noticed here in the U.S. and elsewhere around the globe the tenancy of people on the left, the right and even within Socialism to have the "all or nothing mentality". As we are seeing now in the American political scene this kind of approach isn't working well. Change usually does not happen in large earth shaking paradigm shifts, but slowly over time, one small change at a time, using one victory as the foundation to build another one upon.

An interesting sociology experiment was done by an American university. The group went around and took a poll about the want and need of the residents of a neighborhood to promote safe driving and lower speed limits in the residential neighborhood (25 mph). About 98% of the people polled supported the measure. But when asked if they would display a 4 foot by 8 foot sign in their yard to support the cause, 0% were willing to do so.

A week later the group went to the same neighborhood and asked the residents if they would display a 3 inch by 3 inch sticker somewhere, at this time over 90% agreed to do so. So it was a small start and began getting attention and action about the issue in the area.

One month later the group went back into the same area with the 4 foot by 8 foot signs again. This time over 20% of the people were willing to put the signs in their yards!

Changes happen by taking little steps and gaining community acceptance on a smaller level and then working up to larger ones. There is the old wisdom that asks, how do you eat an elephant? The answer is simple, one bite at a time...

I know my thought will not be popular amongst the advocates of hardcore revolutionaries and anarchists, but my thinking is that we need to work from within the systems we currently find ourselves within, and bring changes from within to the whole of the system one small step, one victory and change at a time.

This is not to say I am a defeatist, dragging my feet or saying not to keep up the radical fight of revolution. I am a revolutionist, but also a realist. We will never change the world if we have an all or nothing mentality and approach. JMHO

Budog. :cool:

[Luisrah]

Well, I think it all depends on the situation.

Turning that ''metaphore'' (sp?) you just used into the way to reach socialism, I'd say you are right. You can't just speak to the people and tell them what socialism and communism is in 5 minutes, ask them to make a revolution, and actually hope it will work.

Bite by bite, the proletariat gains conscience, most probably with our help.
And it depends on the country after that.

They may organise a revolution to overthrow the current government and do things the way they should be done. Or they can simply vote for their socialist/communist (I suppose there would be no anarchist party eh?) party to make a quiet/peaceful revolution.

In either case, a revolution isn't prepared in a day.

[ZeroNowhere]

I don't see what the question is. And, for that matter, I don't even see an argument.

[Budog]

I don't see what the question is. And, for that matter, I don't even see an argument.

:rolleyes: And your point is? I was making a statement and hoping for others opinions or ideas, this could be a learning or political subject. Does everything have to be a question or argument, oh shit, I must have missed that memo...

Budog. :laugh:

[#FF0000]

This is not to say I am a defeatist, dragging my feet or saying not to keep up the radical fight of revolution. I am a revolutionist, but also a realist. We will never change the world if we have an all or nothing mentality and approach. JMHO

Budog. :cool:

Yeah that is definitely true, but that's what parties and organization have platforms for; to set some immediate goals and aims while keeping the big picture and ultimate goal in mind.

[mikelepore]

I assume the post is meant to address the issue of whether socialists should support incremental improvements to capitalism, which are called reforms. But the problem with giving such support isn't the issue of "all or nothing." Of course it's true that a part, even a small part, is better than nothing. That isn't the issue. The problem is that a human mind doesn't plan to throw anything away at the same time it is planning to fix it. Have you ever seen a person spend a long time repairing a car and simultaneously make arrangements to have the car scrapped on the junkyard? Have you ever seen a person fix up a building with new carpeting and paint while the wrecking ball is on it's way over to demolish the building? The human mind doesn't operate that way. To fix any sort of construction is to plan on keeping it, and what you plan to discard you don't mend. That situation very closely analogous to the outworn and obsolete nature of capitalism. Most efforts to patch up capitalism promote the illusion that the system is worth saving and keeping.

[cenv]

When it comes to class power, all or nothing is an appropriate mentality. Either the working class holds power or the bourgeoisie dictates the terms of life. There is no middle ground between capitalism and communism. Bourgeois power has such a totalitarian grip on the political, economic, and ideological institutions of capitalism that it's impossible to abolish capitalism "slowly over time."

[Black Dagger]

Change usually does not happen in large earth shaking paradigm shifts, but slowly over time, one small change at a time, using one victory as the foundation to build another one upon.


If this is true, and thinking now in relative terms - of time - a violent revolution would actually be the very small step, not the 'earth shaking paradigm shift' but the foundation!



my thinking is that we need to work from within the systems we currently find ourselves within, and bring changes from within to the whole of the system one small step, one victory and change at a time.

Hmmmm

But what does this mean in practice? Reforming the democratic system? Ok sure, no one wants to live in the one-party system we currently have, but what else?

How can we change class society from within?

What you're suggesting is institutional reform which is not bad per se (some reforms can have progressive outcomes) but changing the electoral system is different to altering the fundamentals of a capitalist system, like wage labour, property law, the oligarchal development of the market etc.

[blake 3:17]

Part of the radical psyche is a certain apocalypticism - total defeats, total victories, heroes and villains, and all that.

One of the important things we need to do is build social solidarity and working against total atomization and lack of community.

Part of one of the many problems of "community" from a socialist perspective is that it doesn't have any clear political orientation. Neighbourhood commitees can easily be viciously right wing.

Jack Layton, the leader of Canada's social democratic party, has a vision of "socialism" (more like social liberalism, very right wing market socialism) that is pretty common these days. Build it co-op by co-op, green business to green business, NGO to NGO, as if somehow it will all accumulate and overtake imperialism, oppression and exploitation. It's basically a world of people getting along and being nice. All very win-win.

But conflicts do happen. People aren't always nice. The rich don't just throw money out the window -- what they give away always has terms and conditions. People that have want to keep it, people who don't have want some.

[Lolshevik]

I assume the post is meant to address the issue of whether socialists should support incremental improvements to capitalism, which are called reforms. But the problem with giving such support isn't the issue of "all or nothing." Of course it's true that a part, even a small part, is better than nothing. That isn't the issue. The problem is that a human mind doesn't plan to throw anything away at the same time it is planning to fix it. Have you ever seen a person spend a long time repairing a car and simultaneously make arrangements to have the car scrapped on the junkyard? Have you ever seen a person fix up a building with new carpeting and paint while the wrecking ball is on it's way over to demolish the building? The human mind doesn't operate that way. To fix any sort of construction is to plan on keeping it, and what you plan to discard you don't mend. That situation very closely analogous to the outworn and obsolete nature of capitalism. Most efforts to patch up capitalism promote the illusion that the system is worth saving and keeping.

I agree with this, but our movement is still faced with the problem of getting the majority to REALIZE that this system is unreformable. The solution is to pose 'reform' demands, or a platform of them, that (individually or together) actually can't be implemented on a capitalist basis. For example, a 30 hour workweek with no loss of pay. Accompanied by universal employment. Ask how many workers support the dictatorship of the proletariat and you'll not get many hands raised. But pose those demands and you'll get a lot of support. The only way to realize those 'reforms' is on a socialist basis. It's the transitional method that is at the heart of how Trotskyists connect with broad audiences (though I realize you aren't a Trotskyist) - it's essentially building a bridge between someone's existing political consciousness and socialist consciousness.

[mikelepore]

I agree with this, but our movement is still faced with the problem of getting the majority to REALIZE that this system is unreformable. The solution is to pose 'reform' demands, or a platform of them, that (individually or together) actually can't be implemented on a capitalist basis. For example, a 30 hour workweek with no loss of pay. Accompanied by universal employment. Ask how many workers support the dictatorship of the proletariat and you'll not get many hands raised. But pose those demands and you'll get a lot of support. The only way to realize those 'reforms' is on a socialist basis. It's the transitional method that is at the heart of how Trotskyists connect with broad audiences (though I realize you aren't a Trotskyist) - it's essentially building a bridge between someone's existing political consciousness and socialist consciousness.

I understand that this was Trotsky's suggestion, but I don't believe that it has the intended effect.

1. It wasn't new with Trotsky. This is what socialists had already been doing since about the 1870s. If this method was going to be effective it would have already been effective.

2. Some of the demands _are_ achieved. Some of the aspects of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal (his campaign slogan was "reform if you would preserve") were previously considered impossible under capitalism - until the capitalist class suddenly granted them. This causes the next few generations of the working class to believe that capitalism is self-correcting, it automatically gets better and better with the passage of time, a conservative belief.

3. When several demands fail to be achieved, it it not generally the result that the working class realizes that capitalism caused the limitation. The general result is the attitude that ideas for systemic change are unrealistic, accept the inevitable, this is real life, get used to it, be realistic and not a dreamer, etc. -- another conservative form.

4. The ideas in the recommended form actually abandon opportunities for working class education. For example, you said "a 30 hour workweek with no loss of pay." Listing that as a this goal omits having the necessary discussion that a rationally planned economic system will have its work hours detemined by the time actually needed to produce prosperity for a classless society, which will not have the many forms of waste that capitalism has. You can't teach that lesson while you are picking a number like 30 that was simply made up and hasn't been calculated from industrial necessity.

5. This transitional method promotes the misconception that socialism, or the "path" to socialism, is defined as an accumulation of a large number of steps. It makes it more difficult for people to focus on the need for a single abrupt action - the working class declaring the means of production to be socially owned, adopting a new management system. Instead of the intended result, we promote a habit of saying "socialism" to mean, not one thing, but many smaller things. This is the reason why conservatives today say that we "already live under socialism", while they point to every municipal subway train and water supply, which were the "socialist" goals of a hundred years ago.

***

The strangest aspect of Trotsky's transitional program is that recommending the program to others requires telling the workers that it's necessary to lie to the workers! In effect you're standing up in front of an audence and telling them, "A few of the wisest people, including myself, shall know our real goal, which you wouldn't be able to understand, and so I'm letting you think that the goal is something else. Then one day you'll be pleasantly surprised by where we end up, which I had expected about along, but which you were incapable of conceiving. Based on that premise, please join us."

That is not a method that would lead to a democratic form of administration, and the audience senses that.

***

Since this is the Learning forum, I should indicate out that what I wrote above is represents only the views of the De Leonist branch of Marxism. That's a euphemistic way of saying that most other Marxists may think I'm nuts. Readers, study all views and proposals, and then decide for yourselves.

[Lolshevik]

I don't know if that last bit was aimed at me, but I certainly don't think DeLeonism is "nuts." In fact I subscribe to the theory of revolutionary industrial unionism myself, although that doesn't exactly make me a De Leonist.

Anyhow, what you described isn't really how we tend to apply the transitional method in practice. We do not for a minute hide that our goal is socialism. We just use the transitional demands as the starting point for a dialog. For example, the other day at work my coworker and I were discussing the terribly inconsistent hours we had but also how we couldn't really afford to quit because of the poor job market right now. I mentioned that the party I belonged to supported universal employment. He didn't see how that could be done so I added the part about shortening of the work week sans loss of pay; but I also took care to make it clear that this sort of thing could never be achieved on a capitalist basis. His response was good, much better than it would have been if I had just said "yeah, these hours suck, we need socialism" in a bald way.

[mikelepore]

Most socialists think that the De Leonists (like myself) are nuts.

Their usual term for us is "the impossibilists." Note the implication of that. They assign us a nickname that says immediately that what we advocate is known _a priori_ to be impossible.

And what was it that we advocate that is allegedly impossible? The education of the working class about the fact that capitalism can never work in the interests of the people, and the need for the workers to organize industrially and politically to put the workers' organizations in control of the means of production, in a classless society. That's right -- I didn't say anything along the lines of "we demand ... we demand ... we demand...." To hell with making demands. Just go in and take it all.

Here is a hypothetical situation that could be considered by class conscious working class people. Suppose this were the U.S. in the year 1850 or so. Suppose the Congress was debating whether to pass a new law that would say: "While slave owners have the moral right to own and whip their slaves, no slave shall ever be given any more than ten lashes of the whip on any given day." Question: should progressive people support passage of this new law? If the law isn't passed, the masters may deliver forty or a hundred or more lashes of the whip at any one time. Isn't an upper limit on the number of lashes a definite improvement over having no limit at all? But if you vote yes, you would be agreeing to the assertion that the enslavers have "the moral right" to own slaves. It's an interesting dilemma.

You see, this is why socialists shouldn't support any incremental improvements to capitalism. To do so would be concede that capitalism should continue existing for another day, and we say that it shouldn't.

http://deleonism.org/

--

"The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing." -- Marx

[Die Neue Zeit]

I understand that this was Trotsky's suggestion, but I don't believe that it has the intended effect.

1. It wasn't new with Trotsky. This is what socialists had already been doing since about the 1870s.

Since both of you have my work, I'd also like to cite Mike's mention of one Crane Brinton:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/deleonism-list/message/1618


A few years ago in another forum I was mentioning when I took college freshman "world history" in 1971, one of the required readings was the book Crane Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution, first published in 1938. The author studied the history of revolutions to find out when and why revolutions occur. I don't remember all of his conclusions, just this one. He said revolutions never happen just because people are poor or oppressed. Revolutions only happen when people have expectations that their living conditions will be at some higher level, and then reality is worse than they had expected. So, having remembered that book, I raised the question: if the author's thesis is correct, wouldn't that seem to be evidence in favor of the leftist (often Trotskyist) idea that the vanguard party should try to get the working class to demand a lot of improvements which the system won't provide? Why or why not? Just a question that should be pondered.

The problem with the word "transitional" is that it's prone to being abused (blame Lenin and the Comintern for this, actually). I mean, Hyman Minsky was a loyalist to the bourgeois order, yet perceived that his employment solution was a fulfillable reform.

For me, a measure becomes transitional if and only if it cannot be fulfilled under the most "socially democratic" bourgeois order that can be logically conceived. What are some of the features of this peculiar bourgeois order?

1) “Public ownership of basic economic infrastructure, natural monopolies (including the banking system) and the land itself” (Marxist-turned-Left-Georgist Michael Hudson: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12418) – I would also add Hudson’s musings on the broadcast spectrum: http://www.counterpunch.org/schaefer02142004.html (his sympathies towards his limited definition of “socialism” are more radical than either Henry George on land or Hyman Minsky on banks, and his sympathies towards the working class are greater than the elitism of John Maynard Keynes himself).

2) Economic rent should be taxed at optimal levels (land value taxation even if the land is publicly owned, for example).

3) The country’s entire tax burden is on the shoulders of rentiers (landlords, financial speculators, etc.), “industrialists” (Hudson’s description of entrepreneurial capitalists), and perhaps unproductive labour (many self-employed who cheat on their tax returns), as well. This means that productive labour has no tax burden, whether directly (payroll taxes, lotteries, etc.) or indirectly (consumer goods and services, including flat monthly premiums charged by Western governments for public health insurance). Contemporarily speaking, calls for a Tobin tax on financial speculation are cheap compared to Keynes's “substantial Government transfer tax on all transactions.”

4) A more prominent role for co-ops in the capitalist economy, which can only come by means of public assistance (Lassalle).

5) Typical welfare state benefits and perhaps more, both economically and politically (living wages, shorter workweeks, “right to the city” stuff).

[Revy]

Budog seems to be saying that to have revolutionary consciousness it must be built. That if you just dump a lot of bricks in one place you'll just have a pile of bricks. But laying each brick down one by one, that will actually construct something.

[Kayser_Soso]

A good treatment of the all or nothing mentality of the Western "new left" is provided in the book The Rebel Sell, which is ironically written by capitalists who, but for a few flaws of understanding about Marxism, severely wound the modern "anti-consumerist" movement in some vital areas. They argue that by ignoring the system entirely, they are often opting out of solutions that would theoretically get results. For an example, they cite Michael Moore's film bowling for Columbine, where he distorts Canadian gun laws and then suggests that gun control wouldn't work- it must be a total change of consciousness. Actually, they argue, sane gun laws would prevent a portion of crime- so why not adopt them? (Again, they are working from the perspective of a capitalist society)

The problem is that a lot of the American and Western left was influenced by the thought of the "Frankfurt School", which essentially turned Marxism on its head, by asserting that consciousness must change before the system can be changed.

From a realistic perspective, Marxist-Leninists should understand that any reform that helps the workers is usually positive, but these reforms can never become the end goal in itself.

[Lolshevik]

The problem is Jacob, those demands you mention don't at all correspond to the mood of the masses. Our aim is to get their ear with our slogans and then explain the necessity of socialism. Your demands may be objectively transitional, and I find them engaging, but the average (ie; non communist) worker probably wouldn't. Demands have to be drawn out with one hand on the pen and the other pen on the pulse of the masses.

[Die Neue Zeit]

The problem is Jacob, those demands you mention don't at all correspond to the mood of the masses. Our aim is to get their ear with our slogans and then explain the necessity of socialism.

Comrade, it's the difference between education and agitation, and there's also a difference between the political DOTP and socialized production:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/transitional-program-updated-t99491/index2.html


The Marxist minimum-maximum programme, which Jacob and also Rakunin refer to, has a different starting point then the transitional approach has. The transitional approach starts, as you said, from the current class consciousness and strives to build a "bridge" towards socialism. As a result the transitional approach has a certain handicap: if you focus on the current consciousness, this almost always is an economistic starting point (higher wages, shorter working hours, nationalisations, etc), where then do you start using political demands? In other words: when is the consciousness high enough for you to start agitating for the takeover of society by the working class?

[...]

The minimum-maximum approach has a different starting point. It starts with the assertion that the working class needs to take over society, this in the form of the democratic republic. From there you try to build class consciousness and popularise the idea that workers should rule society, not just the company.

[...]

As Rakunin pointed out, the transitional approach has somewhat of a tailist tendency. This in effect doesn't build any movement pro-actively, it just radicalises what there already is. This can work splendidly in a situation with a huge workers movement, and I think this was the intention of Trotsky in 1938, but anno 2009 we are in a very different situation.


As opposed to the more traditional notion of the minimum programme (that of "classical social democracy"), the Marxist minimum is not simply a carrot (with capitalism serving as the stick). It aims at the realization of "the special conditions of [the] emancipation [of the working class]". This realization eventually constitutes the "diverse means of achieving our main political aim, but the aim itself would in no wise have been achieved"; i.e. the "democratic republic" (a.k.a the dictatorship of the proletariat) and "the armies of the proletariat which would be ready to realize socialism when capitalist development had matured".

There are potential conflicts between both approaches.

First, when drafting a transitional programme, there is the danger not to keep socialist production and proletarian democracy consciously in view.

Having quoted all the above:


Your demands may be objectively transitional, and I find them engaging

Thanks, comrade, but you just made an example of the problem with the word "transitional" - its proneness to abuse and/or vulgarization. The most "socially democratic" bourgeois order is still a bourgeois order, and not "transitional." For me, a measure becomes transitional (or rather directional (http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-1/walking-in-the-right-direction/)) if and only if it cannot be fulfilled under the most "socially democratic" bourgeois order that can be logically conceived.


but the average (ie; non communist) worker probably wouldn't.

Ah, but Ferdinand Lassalle was a most excellent agitator back in the day, especially when he agitated for "producer cooperatives with state aid." This is, in fact, Point #4 above.