Workers Power [Archive]

penguinfoot

8th November 2010, 01:49

My, my, penguinfoot. Yeah, nothing in Marx was utopian, because he called others utopian but not himself, therefore he wasn't.

No, you miss the point entirely. The fact that Marx called others utopian does not rule out the possibility that you or someone else might consider Marx utopian, or even that you might be right. The point is that the concept of utopianism is it is deployed by Marx does not centre around the everyday or common-sense usage, that is, some body of thought that looks towards a new social world that is fundamentally unobtainable or unrealistic because it overlooks certain basic facts about human nature or the eternal constraints of social and political coordination (this being a rough definition of what your average person might understand by utopian). Rather, when Marx describes, say, Saint-Simon, as a utopian socialist, the allegation he is making is not necessarily that Saint-Simon's ideas are grossly unrealistic as such, not least because Saint-Simon frequently describes himself as a realistic, and because, according to some scholars, Marx's account of communism is based on Saint-Simon to a considerable extent - rather, what Marx means when he says that Saint-Simon and Fourier and so on are utopian is that they have in common a belief in providing detailed descriptions of the future society, which Marx sees as indicative of a failure to understand the nature of the historical process. The issue I want to stress is just that Marx uses concepts like utopianism in a distinctive way, not that his usage exhausts all the features and meanings we associate with utopia and utopian socialism.

Something is good or bad only in relation to something else

This does nothing to show that communists should draw up detailed plans of what a communist society will be like, because it's just as possible to base a critique of capitalism on its failure to promote some moral good. In fact, even descriptions of the future society have to be based on a set of moral understandings that guide out views on what is valuable or not. Marx's own criticism of capitalism is largely based (in my view, though this is a subject of intense debate) on a perceived failure of capitalist society to enable what he regards as the flourishing of the human essence, based around rational and creative labour activity. Now, both of us can agree that critiquing capitalism from the viewpoint of a moral good like human flourishing still requires that there be an alternative social order that can enable greater human flourishing but even this does not require the kind of detailed blueprints that characterize utopian socialism, because Marx views it as adequate to identify the social and material forces within the existing order that are capable of making classless society a reality - namely, the proletariat, and the advanced productive apparatus on which communism will be built.

to expect masses to work in a disciplined manner towards that structure, to even risk their lifes for it, without saying what that structure could be, is not exactly a realistic approach for getting shit done

This totally ignores the organic and dynamic way in which revolutionary movements develop - that is, the ways in which workers, in the course of responding to issues that are immediate in nature and not yet connected with the possibility of an alternative social order, discover new ways of doing things, new political and social arrangements, that broaden their sense of possibility. It's inaccurate to say that workers will be compelled to struggle for communism without first engaging in other kinds of struggles just because communists make an effort to describe a communist society - such an effort would rightly be rejected as unrealistic because most of the time, that is, outside periods of militant class struggle, workers accept bourgeois conceptions of feasibility.

It also leaves the door wide open for leaders to fill the void with their own sick ideas of what the road to communism is.

This is a potentially valid criticism, but I would argue that the danger inherent in drawing up blueprints is that we ignore the ways in which consciousness is transformed through the revolutionary process and limit the scope of experimentation and innovation in a socialist or communist society.

The etymology of utopia is "going nowhere." Jimmie, I'd recommend that you read something like Towards a New Socialism to get an idea of how to formulate a maximum program for workers interested in post-capitalist alternatives.

Has anyone ever told you that your posts sound really arrogant?

anarkostalinist

8th November 2010, 03:24

From that definition it should be clear that, for Marx at least, it would be absurdly contradictory to describe him as utopian for not providing blueprints of the future society, because providing blueprints is the essence of what utopianism is..

Two things to consider: First Marx did provide several programmatic documents which are still valid to some extent, obviously the Manifesto, also the Gotha Program, the Paris Commune...he basically advocated a combination of nationalization and cooperatives. Not too complex. Also, he was writing at the origin of the modern communist movement, when there weren't "blueprints" available that would have been anything but pure speculation. Marx wasn't interested in adding to the speculation, as many previous writers had been. Our position is different, having had a century of social movements and nations based on variants of communism/socialism. Therefore it is not utopian for us to posit political programs, based on this history. And naturally, specifying the exact role of workers' control in a liberated society is a central concern. Does that mean that we need to plan where the fire stations will go "after the revolution?" No, but of course workers' self-management (or lack thereof) will have to be key to any revolutionary program, it's not a utopian consideration at all. Finally, remember that Marx was not necessarily against "blueprints" as such, he was against the utopians practice of creating utopias in books, that had no basis in existing mass movements. That's why Marx was interested in organizing (the International), propaganda (the Manifesto, newspapers), and critique (Kapital), instead of musing about a future utopia without a basis in reality.

In terms of scholarly interpretation of Marx's definition and critique of utopianism I'm following Leopold here, who, as you might know, actually argues that one of the main problems with Marx's account of the utopian socialists is that his belief in historical immanency relies on the unvoiced assumption that there is a developmental plan to the historical process and that an assumption of this kind can be considered part of a Hegelian account in which history is considered to be the unfolding or increasing self-realization of some entity but is not easily reconcilable with Marx's efforts to establish a materialist account of history.

Marx was working with the existing philosophical material at hand in his day, and the Hegelians were popular (Feuerbach). Marx was precisely materialist in the sense that he put the struggle against exploitation at the core of a theory of historical change (workers' revolution against capitalism). His specific idea that revolution occurs when the ruling class no longer can operate its economy profitably (forces of production superseded by relations of production) is open to debate, but it's hardly less than a materialist explanation of history. It's still a beautiful notion that an end to exploitation (communism) is the goal of history, as evidenced by all the uprisings over time.

anarkostalinist

8th November 2010, 03:45

[QUOTE=penguinfoot;1917492]You're also asking questions which reveal your ignorance of the whole of the Marxist tradition. ...
Learn some Marx, then come back.QUOTE]
Is this really necessary? How about just ignore people who ask questions you don't care to address, instead of accusing them of being ignorant? Of course, studying the "tradition" is good advice, but I would hope this forum is a good place for people who want to learn, as well as those who already know a lot about the topics. Personally, in a thread about "what is workers' control", I think it's entirely appropriate to discuss the specifics of institutional arrangements, not just general theory. For example, Yugoslavia based their national economy on a fusion of central planning and self-management, which has an extensive literature, and could be the basis for discussion of the relative merits of different institutional arrangements. The Mondragon Corporation would be another major example, of a more syndicalist approach than communist, where real discussion of specific institutional arrangements could be presented. I think the question of "national defense" in a syndicalist system is interesting, how does one coordinate "citizen militias" without a centralized state? The truth is most people these days are hesitant to "overthrow capitalism" without some guarantee that they're not signing up for the usual communist police state or moribund planned economy. So it's not utopian to advance a political program that makes clear the extent to which democratization is a fundamental value in economic management -- i.e. some variation of workers' control.

Jimmie Higgins

8th November 2010, 03:47

The etymology of utopia is "going nowhere." Jimmie, I'd recommend that you read something like Towards a New Socialism to get an idea of how to formulate a maximum program for workers interested in post-capitalist alternatives.Well I do have a political goal which is "going somewhere": towards direct working class rule of society. Without that, the best made plans for post-revolutionary society really don't go anywhere at all.

I just don't know how useful it is for a million or so (maybe less) revolutionaries living in the world today when (aside from some isolated mobilizations in some regions) there are no mass working class movements to decide how billions of people at some time are going to organize themselves most effectively.

Anything we suggest now, is going to have to be broad strokes, until there really is a huge revolutionary movement and these questions are practical and really imminent. I don't think it's bad to come up with ideas about how something could be done, but ultimately, if post-capitalism is going to be worker's running things for themselves, at best we can make recommendations to what future generations might do.

I also downloaded a pdf of this piece you recommended and I will take a look.

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/ (http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/%7Ecottrell/socialism_book/)

Die Neue Zeit

8th November 2010, 04:20

I should also note that Kautsky himself outlined an authoritative maximum program called On The Day After The Social Revolution (authoritative by means of transmission from left-social-democrats, further-left democratic socialists, and most Communists, despite this work collecting dust somewhere):

http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1902/socrev/pt2-1.htm

Cockshott, Zanthorus, and I have critiqued that earlier maximum program in various other posts and sites (http://reality.gn.apc.org/polemic/conrad.pdf), if you're interested.

penguinfoot

8th November 2010, 11:19

First Marx did provide several programmatic documents which are still valid to some extent, obviously the Manifesto, also the Gotha Program, the Paris Commune...he basically advocated a combination of nationalization and cooperatives

Let's look at each of these in turn. It is true that the Manifesto includes a number of substantive points and demands at the end and it's also some of these points that have been cited as evidence that Marx was influences strongly by the utopians but what is more important is that these points and demands are derived broadly from processes that were already underway in the capitalist economy of Marx's day - the disappearance of ground rent is a characteristic of capitalism but even progressive taxation of income and not on consumption had been introduced in England a few years before the writing of the Manifesto and death duties were also beginning to emerge in the same country, despite being considered a dangerous threat to private property. The Bank of England had also been granted a monopoly on note circulation and a prohibition had been put on private banks issuing negotiable notes.

The nineteenth century had also witnessed the extension of railway production and this had only been made possible by certain assaults on private property in the form of the compulsory expropriation and purchase of tracts of land that needed to be used for the course of railway lines as well as by the public guarantee of the stock floated by railway companies. In other words, these points are not intended to represent a radical break with history, but affirm Marx's view that the classless society is immanent in the historical process itself and that all we need to do s look for and identify those processes that are tending towards the transformation of society.

More directly, neither Marx nor Engels seems to have placed much importance on the demands, either as a future blueprint or anything else - they comment in their 1872 German Preface that "the practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II". As for the Gotha Programme, I think you mean Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme, and I also don't see how this would be seen as evidence of Marx having wanted to draw up blueprints of any kind, no matter how detailed - simply because the Critique is a set of criticisms (hence the name, obviously) which are themselves couched in general terms and involve an emphasis in historical specificity, so that Marx criticizes the writers of the original Programme, for example, for looking over the institutional differences between contemporary state apparatuses, and Marx identifies "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" as the distributive principle of communist society without then giving substance to this principle.

I also don't know why you think the Paris Commune is evidence of Marx having wanted to draw up programmatic statements because whilst he had a highly positive attitude towards the Commune in the published version of The Civil War in France he did so precisely because the Commune was a case of the working class itself demonstrating the institutional forms that could arise as part of the transition to communism and which might offer general lessons for workers throughout the world - he did not believe that the events of the Commune were the result of workers having accepted any ready-made plan of how society should be organized ("they have no ready-made utopias to introduce") and it is also problematic to say that Marx's attitude towards the Commune was even wholly positive, as in the unpublished drafts of The Civil War in France he was ore willing to identify the middle-class character of its leadership and the ways its measures had benefited the middle rather than working class.

So no, these alleged programmatic statements should not be described as such at all, and they do not indicate that Marx thought that even semi-detailed planning was possible or valuable. I'm also not convinced that we should go so far as to draw up even basic institutional blueprints.

he basically advocated a combination of nationalization and cooperatives. Not too complex

Clearly it is a bit more complex, because Marx did not advocate either of those things. The Manifesto's demands include what can broadly be termed demands for nationalization but at no point in this document or in any other does Marx call for the nationalization of property in general rather than, say, the nationalization of the property of emigres, as this would make no sense in the context of his view that the communist society is one in which the state has been abolished and that the state continues to exist only so long as the economy had not been placed under full collective control. As for cooperatives, there is, again, nothing in Marx to suggest that he thought that communism would be brought about through the creation of cooperatives within the framework of the existing society. He does not offer a prolonged discussion of cooperatives in any text as far as I'm aware but he does talk about them in the third volume of Capital, in the context of a discussion around the equalization of profit and the relationship between price and value, as he raises the possibility of “the laborers themselves” being “in possession of their respective means of production” and exchanging “their commodities with one another” - yet there is nothing about this brief passage to suggest that he did see cooperatives as the means by which the communist society would occur.

Marx was precisely materialist in the sense that he put the struggle against exploitation at the core of a theory of historical change (workers' revolution against capitalism)

This doesn't make someone materialist, and this isn't even an adequate description of Marx's theory of history either. Marx did not put the struggle against exploitation at the centre of his historical theory, he put the development of the productive forces at the centre, and understood that relations of production remain in place or change depending on whether they promote the further development of the forces or not - which distinct from whether the forces can be operated "profitably", whatever that means - with class struggle being the means by which changes in the relations occur, and class struggle being more or less successful depending on whether a given set of relations have exhausted their productive potential.

as evidenced by all the uprisings over time

Except, Marx wouldn't have believed that any of these uprisings, up to and possibly including the Paris Commune, had the potential to establish communism, because communism relies on an advanced productive apparatus of the kind that was inaccessible and unavailable until the development of industrial capitalism.

Is this really necessary? How about just ignore people who ask questions you don't care to address, instead of accusing them of being ignorant?

In this case, it is necessary, because red cat is someone who makes absurd statements like saying there is a communist society in India at this very moment (!!) and refuses to enter real discussions.

JamesH

13th November 2010, 20:49

Perhaps because they weren't.

Devrim

I don't see why not. Although these economies had many differences between them, they all had many broadly socialist programs, such as free housing, healthcare, full employment, and state ownership of most industries. Moreover, in regards to the Soviet Union at least, there was a very different, non-market, method of surplus extraction; no longer was the appropriation of surplus value decided by the many localized battles over wages but instead through a centralized plan. I don't know what perspective you are coming from but Marx insisted that this was the main way of distinguishing between different economic forms. From Capital Vol.1 Chapter 9:

"The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one based on wage-labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus-labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer."

Zanthorus

13th November 2010, 21:28

no longer was the appropriation of surplus value decided by the many localized battles over wages but instead through a centralized plan.

Not everyone agrees. For example, here is a piece by the International Communist Party (Programma Comunista), building on the work of Amadeo Bordiga:

The myth of «socialist planning» in Russia (http://www.sinistra.net/lib/upt/compro/lipo/lipoebubie.html)

penguinfoot

14th November 2010, 16:52

If this is how you wish to define socialism, that's fine but you can't pass this off as the viewpoint of Marx. He insisted that the economic form of society determines its political form, not the other way round.

What a grossly mechanical and vulgar understanding of Marx! If you had read Marx's 1843 Critique you would know that Marx does not simply believe that the economic determines the political in a straightforward way in every stage of human history, instead, you would know that, for Marx, it is only under capitalism or the conditions of modern society that the concept of the political state becomes meaningful, because it is only in these forms of society that the state and civil society (or the economic base, if you prefer) separate out from one another, so that it is possible to speak of the political and the economic as distinct spheres of social life, whereas previously in feudal societies and other pre-capitalist modes of production there was a direct intersection of political and economic power in such a way that it was impossible to meaningfully distinguish between them.

The Hegelian viewpoint on the division between the civil society and the political state is that these two spheres are defined not in strictly institutional terms but in terms of the different interests and drives that exist in each, such that civil society is supposed to be the sphere in which humans are able to pursue their particular desires and that it is in and through the political state that human beings are brought back to universality by being able to secure the institutional preconditions for the whole of ethical life, and it is Marx's point, in the Critique, that not only does the state secure universality only in a highly inadequate way, due to the bureaucracy being just another group with interests of its own, but that the division of society into these spheres involves the bifurcation of human activity, into bourgeois egoism in civil society and the activity of the citizen in the political state, and is in itself a form of alienation, because of these separate and antagonistic spheres.

What this means for Marx's vision of communism is that it is a society in which these spheres are reintegrated through the extension of democratic decision-making to the economy, thereby making universality a reality, rather than something that is restricted to a confined sphere and undermined within that sphere through the existence of an egoistic civil society. This is an argument that is present in the Critique in the section on democracy but it is also developed further in On the Jewish Question, in Marx's critique of legal rights and emphasis on the inadequacy of political emancipation alone, and it is also the basis for Marx's positive (in the final draft of The Civil War in France anyway) attitude towards the Paris Commune, because he saw in the structures of the Commune the abolition of capitalist bifurcation. To the extent that you have an economy, state-owned or otherwise, and a political state of any kind, but especially an authoritarian one, situated above it, that society cannot be communist or socialist, because it is a society in which human activity is still bifurcated - this bifurcation being a central part of modern capitalist society, for Marx.

Of course, RED DAVE is right to point out that socialism has nothing to do with the state or state ownership. I thought we dealt with this way back in the debates with Lasalle?

JamesH

15th November 2010, 04:31

I'll discuss this further below, but show me where Marx said this. One thing is clear about capitalism: it's economic form, the forcible extraction of surplus value an the production of commodities for exchange does not determine its political form. Capitalism has taken the forms of bourgeois democracy, military dictatorship, fascism, monarchy, social democracy, etc. All of these political forms are differentl.

I can provide it here, from Volume III, Chapter 47 of Capital:

"The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers — a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity — which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis — the same from the standpoint of its main conditions — due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc. from showing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances."

And what you fail to understand is that under socialism, the economic and politics forms are fused. This is not the rule of the bourgeoisie, which retains ownership and control of its property and control of the economy whether there is a bourgeois democracy or dictatorship.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean here, saying the forms are fused.

You say that the "economic form determines the political form." What is the economic form of socialism but workers control of surplus value and the production of commodities for use? What form would you posit except one that is a form of workers democracy?

The extraction and division of the surplus product through a pre-determined plan, rather than through market exchanges. Surely this ought to be democratic (it was not in the Soviet Union) but I don't believe it has to be for it to constitute a socialist economic mechanism.

As a subsidiary question, answer this: if the USSR and China were socialist, albeit authoritarian and undemocratic, and therefore as socialism they were run for the benefit of the workers, why is it that he workers in the two largest "socialist" countries in the world accepted the "overthrow" of socialism and their replacement with a new class, with no fight back? Where was the massive civil war that should have happened when the workers state was taken away from the workers and capitalism put in its place?

You are attacking a straw man. I never claimed that workers' control is the essence of socialism and hence do not see the failure of socialism in these countries as taking the "workers' state" away from the workers.

RED DAVE

15th November 2010, 12:15

Just a quicky; more later:
The extraction and division of the surplus product through a pre-determined plan, rather than through market exchanges. Surely this ought to be democratic (it was not in the Soviet Union) but I don't believe it has to be for it to constitute a socialist economic mechanism.(emph added)

You don't believe!

Cool! What you're saying is that you don't believe that socialism has to be democratic. Of course, there's no basis for your belief in the history of socialism, that socialism can be a dictatorship over the proletariat as opposed to a dictatorship of the proletariat, but keep on believing, and I'll keep calling you some kind of Stalinist.

RED DAVE

JamesH

15th November 2010, 13:42

Just a quicky; more later:(emph added)

You don't believe!

Cool! What you're saying is that you don't believe that socialism has to be democratic. Of course, there's no basis for your belief in the history of socialism, that socialism can be a dictatorship over the proletariat as opposed to a dictatorship of the proletariat, but keep on believing, and I'll keep calling you some kind of Stalinist.

RED DAVE

Stalinists don't usually proclaim that the Soviet Union was a dictatorship but this is by the by.

I think our differences on this issue aren't that incredibly important. I want workers' control, an end to exploitation, and democracy (although our conception of that is quite different). This the socialism that is most preferrable but I think its unwise to throw away an entire century's worth of knowledge and experience with the tired claim that no self-proclaimed socialist society actually was. As I've said, I consider statements such as "the Soviet Union was not democratic, therefore it was not socialist" to be unscientific; these are moral arguments designed to defuse the right's near-endless criticisms of socialism that draw on the failures of the twentieth century experience.

Milk Sheikh

15th November 2010, 14:53

I am new to all this, so just a question out of curiosity: why is democracy important for socialism? If anything, wouldn't democracy be an impediment to socialism?

Thirsty Crow

15th November 2010, 15:08

I am new to all this, so just a question out of curiosity: why is democracy important for socialism? If anything, wouldn't democracy be an impediment to socialism?

On what grounds do you base your suspicion that democracy would be an impediment for a successful "construction" of socialism?

Milk Sheikh

15th November 2010, 15:42

On what grounds do you base your suspicion that democracy would be an impediment for a successful "construction" of socialism?

As long as there is democracy, people are going to identify with various interest groups - and political parties will represent each one of them. So the interests of the workers will be sidelined.

RED DAVE

15th November 2010, 17:07

Stalinists don't usually proclaim that the Soviet Union was a dictatorship but this is by the by.Actually, by now many of them do and adopt your attitude: that it is possible to have socialism without democracy. I consider this attitude to be the essence of stalisnism/maoism and their primary political legacy.

I think our differences on this issue aren't that incredibly important.I disagree.

I want workers' control, an end to exploitation, and democracy (although our conception of that is quite different).I would like to know what your conception of workers democracy is.

This the socialism that is most preferrable[.]It is not preferable, it's crucial, absolutely necessary. Without workers democracy, there is no socialism.

ut I think its unwise to throw away an entire century's worth of knowledge and experience with the tired claim that no self-proclaimed socialist society actually was.The claim is far from tired so long as people consider that Stalin's and Mao's abortions were socialism. A clue that they were something else (state capitalism) is that when they were replaced by private capitalism, the workers did nothing. Think of what happened in Russia when the foreign and White armies tried to overthrow the newly-established workers state: war and civil war.

As I've said, I consider statements such as "the Soviet Union was not democratic, therefore it was not socialist" to be unscientific[.]You can consider what you will. There is no basis for your "consideration" that socialism can exist in the absence of workers democracy.t

[T]hese are moral arguments designed to defuse the right's near-endless criticisms of socialism that draw on the failures of the twentieth century experience.My criticisms have nothing to do with those of the Right, except that they're written in the same language. Workers democracy is no more a moral issue to socialism than private property is a moral issue to capitalism. Both are part of the essence of the system.

[B]RED DAVE

Paul Cockshott

15th November 2010, 19:13

RED DAVE

15th November 2010, 20:01

a significant difference between 1991 and the civil war was that in 1991 the cpsu was split between pro and anti capitalist factions. Without the determined CPs leadership seventy years earlier reaction would have won then tooNice try but no cigar. The left was split at the time of the Revolution, but one faction of the left, the Bolsheviks, stood for the workers without hesitation.

There was no significant faction of the CPSU that was willing to side unequivocally with the workers, which tells you about the kind of racket they were running.

And there were no spontaneous workers uprisings or mass demonstrations calling for the restoration of Stalinism. i have seen workers in the USA, in the absence of any kind of leftist leadership, pull off a wildcat strike that shut down the post office for 8 days. We didn't even see such a thing.

Truth is, the workers lost one set of masters and gained another. Russia was state capitalist, now private capitalist with a strong state component.

No workers democracy, no socialism. And how about a reply to my post addressed to you, Paul?

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1924495&postcount=53

RED DAVE

Paul Cockshott

15th November 2010, 20:28

Jeez what a statist you are. You need to be locked in a small room for 24 hours with a dozen teenage anarchists. Maybe you'll learn something. :D

Don't you have any concept of the dynamics of the working class?

Yes I do have a concept of it. The maths are actually quite simple. Apply them to the model you propose and you will see that it leads to exactly the sort of one party state you criticise.
________________________________

Suppose that an RSDLP member was 50 times more likely to be nominated and 4 times more likely to be elected if nominated than a randomly citizen.
This gives 200 fold over representation of RSDLP members in the local soviets. If the RSDLP made up one in a thousand of the Russian population, they would already make up 20% of the local soviets.
Indirect elections amplify any inequalities in votes at lower level.
Result: total domination of the council of commissars by the RSDLP

This is what happened and what will inevitably happen with a system of indirect election via a hierarchy of soviets.

Do you really believe that working class, numbering in the tens of millions in a major industrial country, is not going to work these things out? Do you really believe that the members of the armed forces, who will revolt and take on the remnant of the armed forces who stay loyal to the ancien regime, will not get a share in society? Do you really believe that the working class is going to disenfranchise the home workers, the older workers or the small farmers? Where do you get these chicken-shit fears?

No I dont think it is going to happen, but you are proposing a constitutional structure which would have that result.

And do you believe that all the goodies of the revolution are going to be enshrined in a constitution?

Every state has a constitution whether explicit or not. Some forms of consititution are more favourable to the interests of the mass of the population than others. Pretending that constitutions are not important is very dangerous an opens the way for all sorts of arbitrary measures in the name of revolutionary necessity.

However, if we read even a paragraph from your book, Transition to 21st Century Socialism in the European Union and get an idea of what your conception of socialism is, some light is shed.

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/transition-to-21st-century-socialism-in-the-european-union/6443810 (Page 6)

What the fuck is being put forward here? "We advocate the establishment of positive legal rights for workers." Is this the culmination of the struggle for socialism? Some state (unspecified but presumably the bourgeois state since there is no reference to revolution and the establishment of a revolutionary workers state) is going to grant "positive legal rights to workers."

Wow.

And then, "These rights will, when collectively exercised by workers, end the exploitation of labour by capital." No social struggle. No strikes, demos, general strikes, insurrections. Just "collective expression."

Double wow.

So:

STEP 1 - Workers rights are established.

STEP 2 - Workers exercise these rights.

STEP 3 - Socialism.

RED DAVE
The political section of that programme calls for a sovereign EU assembly with the majority of representatives randomly selected from the population along with the right of initiative and popular votes on taxes. My assumption is that socialism in Europe is only possible by first winning the struggle for direct democracy.

penguinfoot

15th November 2010, 22:09

Yes I do have a concept of it. The maths are actually quite simple.

No I dont think it is going to happen, but you are proposing a constitutional structure which would have that result.

The assumption here is that the development of the Russian Revolution can be explained in terms of legal structures and mathematical models and that the type of constitution that a socialist society has is the most important determinant of whether that society is democratic or not. There are a whole range of problems with this position, some historical, some more theoretical. The most important is as follows: by making the constitution the main issue you are trying to provide a facade of humanism for what everyone knows to be your Stalinist politics, because the logic of that position is that it does not matter whether the working class has actually transformed itself and its way of seeing the world through revolution or not, because even if what you regard as socialism - apparently an entirely economic category that is compatible with a whole range of political arrangements and which preserves the distinction between politics and economics - has come about through the victory of a peasant guerilla war or the victory of some other kind of organization that claims to represent or act on behalf of the working class (this being the course of events in many of the countries that you would see as historic examples of socialism), you can transform a society into a working model of socialism simply by combining the right constitution and a nationalized economy, and what this account ignores is that Marx saw revolution as absolutely the only means by which a socialist society could come into being, not only because he adopted the classical anti-parliamentary position that the state in capitalist society inherently privileges the interests of the bourgeoisie and that the working class cannot but smash the state as part of its conquest of power, but that it is also through the revolutionary process that the working class throws off the muck of ages, as he puts it in The German Ideology, and becomes capable of managing society in its own interests, in a way that is not possible without participation in revolution.

In some respects this is similar to the Sorelian conception of the transformative power of political action but without the emphasis on the purifying role of violence, and it also has something in common with Rousseau's view that it is impossible for members of corrupt societies to understand what life under the social contract will be like so long as they continue to inhabit societies that are characterized by amour propre (but without Rousseau's conclusion that individuals therefore need a law-giver to trick them into consenting to the establishment of the social contract) and yet as soon as you recognize that Marx held this position, which anyone who has ever been involved in so much as a student occupation can sympathize with, that is, as soon as you recognize that the working class will be transformed through revolution and that revolution is necessary for this reason, all your theorizing about constitutions in advance becomes pointless, because you cannot predict the radically different solutions that workers will themselves develop once they are no longer weighed down by the muck of ages. Not only does utopian theorizing become pointless, it becomes positively anti-democratic, because it forces workers to conform to a plan that has been drawn up in advance rather than develop solutions and new social and political arrangements in a more organic and spontaneous way. I prefer to accept that revolutionized workers will come up with adequate solutions of their own - solutions which may or may not take the form of legal codes - than to place all my hopes in your dreary constitutional theorizing.

Revolution is a beautiful thing! That's what you don't get! I've always thought that if you want to get an understanding of what socialist revolution is like you should look at the forms of culture and artistic experimentation that emerged in Russia during the first years of the revolution's existence and in spite of the incredibly difficult conditions that were present in Russia at that time for artists as well as for the population at large - who, in 1916, could have predicted that the revolution would result in orchestras without conductors, in factory symphonies, and everything else? When you look at that, how can you dream of being able to lay down plans in advance for what the political or social arrangements of a mature socialist society will be like?

The political section of that programme calls for a sovereign EU assembly with the majority of representatives randomly selected from the population along with the right of initiative and popular votes on taxes. My assumption is that socialism in Europe is only possible by first winning the struggle for direct democracy.

...and even if we did somehow accept that theorizing in advance was a worthwhile activity, this is the last thing we would want to come up with. What kind of socialism keeps the EU intact? Not only that, the absurd plan of drawing representatives at random maintains the structure of bourgeois politics insofar as it fails to combine political and economic power in institutions that exist at the point of production, that is, it preserves the atomization of the individual citizen, rather than acknowledging the centrality of social production.

The twin evils of Stalinism and reformism are surely alive in our movement if your rants are anything to go by.

Kotze

16th November 2010, 00:10

The assumption here is that the development of the Russian Revolution can be explained in terms of legal structures and mathematical modelsI suggest you look up 2 words: Gerrymandering & recursion.
the absurd plan of drawing representatives at randomTell us how you truly feel about ordinary people. :rolleyes:

penguinfoot

16th November 2010, 00:17

I suggest you look up 2 words: Gerrymandering & recursion

Which are relevant how?

Tell us how you truly feel about ordinary people.

I think we should choose our own representatives by means that we deem to be fit, and that any system that we choose will most likely involve institutions that draw their strength from units of production, rather than have representatives selected according to a system drawn up by a Stalinist hack before the revolution. How do you feel?

RED DAVE

16th November 2010, 00:34

I think that penguinfoot has shredded PC's nonsense well enough. I just want to add one point.

The political section of that programme calls for a sovereign EU assembly with the majority of representatives randomly selected from the population along with the right of initiative and popular votes on taxes. My assumption is that socialism in Europe is only possible by first winning the struggle for direct democracy.This is the biggest piece of social democratic bullshit I have seen on this board! It completely contradicts the Marxist notion that the bourgeois state is not a fit institution for workers democracy. This is the exactly the kind of thing that a bunch of liberal (in the American sense) university profs might come up with some night, when they've had a few and they're trying to remake the world in their own image.

RED DAVE

RED DAVE

16th November 2010, 00:36

I suggest you look up 2 words: Gerrymandering & recursion.Tell us how you truly feel about ordinary people. :rolleyes:Tell us how you feel about institutions of class power.

RED DAVE

JamesH

16th November 2010, 02:49

I would like to know what your conception of workers democracy is.

My conception is the same as Paul's; he has explained it in his many works much more articulately than I could though.

The claim is far from tired so long as people consider that Stalin's and Mao's abortions were socialism. A clue that they were something else (state capitalism) is that when they were replaced by private capitalism, the workers did nothing. Think of what happened in Russia when the foreign and White armies tried to overthrow the newly-established workers state: war and civil war.

Marx analyzed many different societies with many varying economic mechanisms and came to the conclusion that the extraction of the surplus product was the main factor in determining how to distinguish between different economic forms. You (and you are certainly not alone in this) have sought to save socialism from the calumnies directed at the Soviet Union by claiming that it was not really socialist. Yes, I do see a strong moral element in this, betrayed by your constant references to undemocratic socialism as Stalinism or Maoism. If workers' control is the defining element of socialism, than we may with equal accuracy call these socialisms Leninism instead. Why does Lenin escape criticism? He, not Stalin, was initially at the head of this decidedly non-socialist state. Was Lenin a socialist before 1918, when he was for rabochii kontrol (which is something different from modern conceptions of workers' control) but not after, when the usual capitalist management relations were re-introduced? I think this kind of thinking leads to such absurdities.

Also, on a purely practical level, this perspective is certainly not obvious and I'm not sure how seriously it will be taken. After all, the USSR proclaimed itself to be socialist, it had many unquestionably orthodox socialist programs, its economy was run according to non-market principles, it was ruled by men who considered themselves Marxists, and it was considered by millions of people all over the world, both admirers and detractors, to be socialist. You have to argue uphill against all of this; it's going to be very difficult to disabuse people of conception that the Soviet Union was socialist. Better instead, I think, to claim that it is not the only socialism possible.

You can consider what you will. There is no basis for your "consideration" that socialism can exist in the absence of workers democracy.t

RED DAVE

I would argue that both Marx's writings and decades of history give quite a solid basis to my consideration.

penguinfoot

16th November 2010, 03:13

Marx analyzed many different societies with many varying economic mechanisms and came to the conclusion that the extraction of the surplus product was the main factor in determining how to distinguish between different economic forms.

It's possible to run with this, although personally I would express the concept of relations of production in more analytical terms as embodying both the degree to which the producers control their own labour power and the degree to which the producers control the means of production, so that capitalism is defined in terms of producers having absolute control over their labour power and being separated from the means of production. If, as you say, capitalism can be defined in terms of how surplus value is extracted, then on the basis of the first chapter of Capital volume one we are informed by Marx that capitalism differs both from pre-capitalist societies (or at least feudalism) and also the future communist society, in that under capitalism it is not immediately clear to producers how much of their working day is devoted to the production of the amount of value that is embodied in the labour power that they sell to the capitalist and which they receive in its full value in the form of a wage and how much is devoted to the production of surplus value for the capitalist, this being the remainder of the working day once the portion devoted to covering the outlay on variable capital has been covered, with it being this ambiguity - or mystification - that led Marx to analyze the exact nature of the labour process, including the process of exploitation deploying his concept of science as something whose necessity arises from the fact that appearance and inner essence do not always coincide with one another. In this connection Marx makes clear that feudalism is different from capitalism and transparent insofar as it was immediately obvious to serfs how much of their output they had to hand over to the lord, and he also says that it will be obvious under communist or socialist society, or "a community of free individuals".

Why, one might ask? Because the total product of the community is distributed "in accordance with a definite social plan" which "maintains the proper proportion between the different kinds of work to be done and the various wants of the community" - in other words, because communism embodies rational planning, which makes clear how the output of the community is distributed, including how much output is set aside for purposes other than consumption, these purposes being outlined more fully in Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme, and yet, lest it be thought that the Soviet Union was therefore socialist simply because it involved planning of some kind, what is important about Marx's description of planning in this instance, is that, in order for production relations to no longer be mystified, in order for the extraction and distribution of surplus value to no longer take place in the way that it does under capitalism, it is necessary as a matter of logic that the plan of the community be accessible to individuals and that they have a role in drawing up that plan, in order that social relations might be genuinely transparent. It is precisely in this sense that the Soviet Union and other such states could not have been socialist or communist because the plan was not accessible to ordinary individuals and ordinary individuals did not have input into its creation, instead, social relations were still mystified, and in that respect they were capitalist, as it would have been possible for Marx to see as socialist or communist any society in which the relations of production were not transparent to the producers.

Die Neue Zeit

16th November 2010, 03:46

What kind of socialism keeps the EU intact? Not only that, the absurd plan of drawing representatives at random maintains the structure of bourgeois politics insofar as it fails to combine political and economic power in institutions that exist at the point of production, that is, it preserves the atomization of the individual citizen, rather than acknowledging the centrality of social production.

The twin evils of Stalinism and reformism are surely alive in our movement if your rants are anything to go by.

I think you're out to lunch here.

Cockshott was referring to the geographic space of the European Union, not the state itself. Some alterations of institutions are proposed, but note that he said one-third of the parliament be selected by lot.

For all offices to be selected by lot, there would have to be something more than just seizing the EU apparatus. The "combination of political and economic power in institutions that exist at the point of production" is little more than rehashed economism. The combination of such power cannot occur at the outset of the DOTP (for example, the Bolshevik party vs. the factory committees), though it may transpire later on.

Better instead, I think, to claim that it is not the only socialism possible.

Apparently some posters here forgot what was written in the Communist Manifesto about Feudal Socialism, Petit-Bourgeois Socialism, True Socialism, Bourgeois Socialism, and Utopian Socialism. Don't forget Bordiga's technocratic socialism as an anti-democratic form.

Kotze

16th November 2010, 10:11

[Gerrymandering & recursion] are relevant how?My guess from your "reply" to post #73 (http://www.revleft.com/vb/workers-controli-t144527/index.html?p=1925784#post1925784) was you (and also RED DAVE and Zanthorus) didn't even grasp what the argument was. My other guess was that telling you once would fix that, oh well.

Here is the context:
Workers control is that economic condition where the working class controls the economy of a country from the bottom to the top. This means that on every level, from the workplace to the whatever regional, national and international organs are built, the working class is in control. (...) The working class will expand them from the workplace upwards
We know from history that the soviet system, when extended beyond the factory becomes a perfect vehicle for single party dictatorship because of its indirect system of election. Your proposed solution is actually the cause of the problem.When people don't vote directly on an issue, but vote for people who then vote on that issue, there are possible distortions — even when we have idealised assumptions, like candidates being completely honest about their intentions and voters having the time to get to know each candidate. The distortions are much worse than under idealised assumptions when there are groups who consciously game the system. When you have a system where people elect people who elect people who elect people who elect people this distortion happens on every level of the hierarchy. From my own experience I know that inside parties the game is played at every level. Even when individual voting behaviour isn't published, it is known how subsets vote. This is used by some currents to get disproportional leverage. Now consider the recursion. Like compound interest, this is something that some people quickly get and some others don't. Like economics, how to aggregate preferences is a topic that has a lot to do with math.
all your [=Cockshott] theorizing about constitutions in advance becomes pointless, because you cannot predict the radically different solutions that workers will themselves develop once they are no longer weighed down by the muck of ages. Not only does utopian theorizing become pointless, it becomes positively anti-democratic, because it forces workers to conform to a plan that has been drawn up in advance rather than develop solutions and new social and political arrangements in a more organic and spontaneous way.Actually, as this forum's most knowledgable person on how to aggregate preferences I do have some experience what happens when people discuss this issue for the first time in their lifes. I could tell people which methods to use and why; but of course that would make me a utopian coordinator class elitist, so I guess I will just have to wait for the same fuckups to happen that I have seen before, only this time on a massive scale. :bored:

Paul Cockshott

16th November 2010, 10:19

Quote:
I suggest you look up 2 words: Gerrymandering & recursion
Which are relevant how?

I take the view, one certainly shared by Engels and probably by Marx, that there are laws of motion that govern human society. One can examine these on the economic level but also on the political level. If one is looking at a proposed political structure you have to understand its laws off motion. All electoral systems are selective, ie, aristocratic. The more hierarchical they are, the more aristocratic they are. At each stage in the hierarchy the probability of an ordinary person progressing up the hierarchy goes down, and the probability of a nominee of a political party progressing goes up. Thus a hierarchy of workers councils appeals to small political sects as it is only through such a gerrymandered system that their dream of becoming peoples' commissars can be realised.

Paul Cockshott

16th November 2010, 10:30

What kind of socialism keeps the EU intact?

It used to be called internationalism. It is what Jaures died for.

Nobody with any feel for the bloody history of Europe leading up to the EU should propose a return to the era of competing nation states.

Not only that, the absurd plan of drawing representatives at random maintains the structure of bourgeois politics insofar as it fails to combine political and economic power in institutions that exist at the point of production, that is, it preserves the atomization of the individual citizen, rather than acknowledging the centrality of social production.

Existing politics is based on excluding ordinary people from political power. Establishing democracy in Europe would amount to a political revolution. It would destroy the power of the nation states, the uncontrolled rule of finance and the unregulated power of the commission.

penguinfoot

16th November 2010, 15:55

Actually, as this forum's most knowledgable person on how to aggregate preferences

Go away, you silly person.

I take the view, one certainly shared by Engels and probably by Marx, that there are laws of motion that govern human society. One can examine these on the economic level but also on the political level

What does it mean to say that politics (also!) exhibits laws of motion? You've been talking about electoral systems and laws, and so it's appropriate to look towards what comparative government has had to say on the issue of whether political life can be explained in terms of laws - not because I think that the techniques and assumptions of comparative government are the best way of understanding political institutions or because I don't think that the Marxist tradition has things of its own to say about politics but because much of what you say is drawn from outside the Marxist tradition, and so it only makes sense to start with your own epistemological terrain, and also because it's political scientists who have focused most on the operation of electoral systems.

It's standardly recognized in mainstream comparative government that political science differs from the natural sciences insofar as political scientists make use of the comparative method, and that the need to do so derives from the fact that political scientists are not able to freely change laws and institutions in order to judge the effects of those changes, or to hold experiments in which certain factors can be held constant, and are also faced with large bundles of interlinked factors, such is the complexity of political life, and hence it is only through examining countries as they currently exist that they can seek to establish theoretical relationships amongst variables. Yet, it is also recognized in discussions around methodology in social science and comparative government in particular that the very fact that the comparative method is so central to analyses of political life means that the problems of spurious correlation (which might conceivably be avoided in a laboratory setting) are particularly acute and that the theories that political scientists develop can never be given the status of laws in the same way as those theories that are the product of laboratory experimentation or those theories which might be used to explain an economy taken in the abstract, and that the best that political scientists can do, on this account, is arrive at generalizations at some level of abstraction, due to there always being important exceptions and the possibility of other political scientists arriving at more nuanced or substantially different explanations.

To remain on the subject of electoral systems - and this is just one example of how there aren't laws in any meaningful sense for political life - one of the long-running debates within comparative government is on the relationship between party systems and electoral systems in terms of how the role of the electoral system should be ranked alongside other variables and which electoral systems result in which kinds of party system, including the effect of changes to the electoral system, and whilst it has been argued by many theorists that there is a link between single-member constituencies and party systems that embody small numbers of effective parties, it's also been pointed out in response (or along with the articulation of the general trend, which does exist) that this cannot be considered a law because the restrictive impact of a single-member constituency system holds only at the level of each individual constituency (if at all) and that to say that the result will always be a restricted party system (which nobody does) neglects social and cultural cleavages, which are highly complex and specific, with India often being pointed to as an example of a country that uses a single-member constituency electoral system at the same time as having a highly differentiated party system at the national level, due to it being a society with many social and cultural cleavages.

If political scientists don't view their theoretical conclusions as binding laws when it comes to the effects of single-member constituencies on party systems, then what makes you think that you can categorically assert as a law that a system of workers councils will inherently privilege party dictatorship? This is the worst kind of axiomatic institutionalism that not even mainstream comparative government accepts as feasible, because it asserts an iron link between given institutions and a set of outcomes, without considering the full complexity of political and social life, including the role of material conditions.

It's impossible to say that Marx would have recognized the existence of laws governing political life, or laws governing the economy for that matter, because he was always insistent that his analyses in Capital took place at a given level of abstraction, with even the theories that are presented there often being supplemented with qualifications and an awareness of alternative outcomes (the counter-vailing factors to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, for example) and that they were no substitute for analysis of empirical societies - and so Marx explains in chapter 47 of volume three of Capital that, whilst it is "the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers" that serves as "the hidden basis of the entire social structure", this "does not prevent the same economic basis — the same from the standpoint of its main conditions — due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc. from showing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances".

This is not a statement in favor of there being axiomatic laws for any aspect of social life, it is a recognition that societies are empirically specific and highly integrated totalities - which is why you are also wrong to separate out the economic and the political as distinct levels - and that they need to be analyzed as such, and it is precisely this approach that Marx follows in texts such as The Eighteenth Brumaire as well as his journalism, where he seeks to understand the specific histories and features of individual societies, rather than judging them according to a set of abstract and axiomatic laws, not to mention in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, where one of his main points of criticism against the delegates is that, in speaking in terms of a "present-day state", they postulated as a law that a capitalist economy inevitably and universally gives rise to a single type of state apparatus, such that they failed, from Marx's point of view, to acknowledge the full range of political arrangements that existed across capitalist societies, and to analyze those arrangements in their empirical specificity.

Neither Marx nor anyone with any sense - and this includes mainstream political scientists - thinks that there are "laws" which govern political life, because to believe that is to ignore the complexity of societies and to reject empirical research and analysis in favor of abstract speculation. You also failed to deal with any of my points regarding utopianism in my last post, but that's to be expected.

It used to be called internationalism. It is what Jaures died for.

No, internationalism is the abolition of all nation-states, not the drawing-up of plans for Europe only.

Existing politics is based on excluding ordinary people from political power. Establishing democracy in Europe would amount to a political revolution. It would destroy the power of the nation states, the uncontrolled rule of finance and the unregulated power of the commission.

This is all back to front - it's not that establishing democracy would lead to the destruction of "the uncontrolled rule of finance" and so on, it's that it is only through the smashing of the institutions of the bourgeois states that currently comprise Europe and the seizure of the productive forces at the point of production, in the factories, in our schools, that individuals can have real control over their lives and their society, exercised through the democratic institutions that are forged in the process of expropriation itself, and not as a precursor to or consequence of it.

Your vision is one in which the transformation of political institutions - which takes place somehow, some way, who knows - opens up the possibility of transforming the economy, and as such it fails to acknowledge that revolution is above all the violent expropriation of the means of production through the extra-constitutional action of the working class, that is, through the physical capture of our workplaces and other centers of economic power, along with the disarmament of the armed bodies of men that make up the bourgeois state, with it being during the course of the elimination of the bourgeoisie in this way and the transcendence of wage-labour at the point of production that the working class also sets up the institutions that form the basis of the workers state and which are used for the task of reorganizing and planning the economy on a socialist basis - Soviets. In this sense, revolution is both an economic and political process, and it is this dialectic that you don't grasp.

Pray tell, how is the the establishment of your crackpot version of democracy, which then allows for revolution, supposed to come about?

RED DAVE

16th November 2010, 17:08

I take the view, one certainly shared by Engels and probably by Marx, that there are laws of motion that govern human society.Please give us a nice pithy quote from M or E illustrating what they mean by "the laws of motion that govern society.” I suspect that what they mean and what you mean are very different.

One can examine these on the economic level but also on the political level.How about both together, considering that Marxists treat them as a dynamic unity?

If one is looking at a proposed political structure you have to understand its laws off motion.The main motion I’m interested in for all previously existing political structures is motion out the door and onto the scrap heap of history.

All electoral systems are selective, ie, aristocratic.Considering that “aristocratic” refers to hereditary wealth or power, you are full of shit. And why are you using an abstract notion of electoral systems? The methods of election of the revolutionary proletariat must and will be different from all previous systems as they will be, for the first time in history, truly democratic. For example, a group of workers might decide to elect a completely inexperienced person to a position because they trust them and want to get them experience, to honor them, etc.

The more hierarchical they are, the more aristocratic they are.Oh really? And how do you take into account the revolutionary changes in consciousness that will be present under socialist democracy? What does this have to do with your bogus notion of aristocracy? Frankly, in all my years of a Marxist, and they are many, dealing with people from every conceivable faction, I have never seen such nonsense.

At each stage in the hierarchy the probability of an ordinary person progressing up the hierarchy goes down, and the probability of a nominee of a political party progressing goes up.If you have a static, essentially bourgeois concept of democratic structure and human consciousness, of course. But what does have to do with what the working class will do after the revolution?

Thus a hierarchy of workers councils appeals to small political sects as it is only through such a gerrymandered system that their dream of becoming peoples' commissars can be realised.Spoken like a true Stalinist. Is it true that you once belonged to a “small political sect: that required knowledge of at least two languages to become a member? That’s what I call having a real feel for the working class and working class democracy.

RED DAVE

Paul Cockshott

16th November 2010, 17:29

politics is struggle around state power. As such it is stuctured by the existence of states. The existence of the eu as a international protostate creates the opening for international politics. It would be as foolish to ignore the opportunity as it would have been foolish for socialists in the past to abstain from contesting power within nation states.

Paul Cockshott

16th November 2010, 17:35

Yes my membership of COBI is a matter of record. Cobi encouraged english speakers to learn other languages so as to be able to read the international left press. Politically it was a councilist group. I now argue against a council based state.

RED DAVE

16th November 2010, 17:59

politics is struggle around state power.Revolutionary politics is class struggle.

As such it is stuctured by the existence of states.As such, it is structured by the existence of class war.

The existence of the eu as a international protostate creates the opening for international politics.The existence of the European Union is an alliance of bourgeois states for the purpose of international exploitation of the working class. It is ceertainly "permissible" for revolutionaries to use the structure of the EU as an arena for class struggle. However, the "international protostate" of the EU is no more a possible seat of proletarian power than is a bourgeois state.

It would be as foolish to ignore the opportunity as it would have been foolish for socialists in the past to abstain from contesting power within nation states.Revolutionaries use the political structures of the bourgeois states as arenas of class struggle, not for the contention of power.

RED DAVE

Kotze

16th November 2010, 18:03

Palingenisis

16th November 2010, 18:11

Apparently some posters here forgot what was written in the Communist Manifesto about Feudal Socialism, Petit-Bourgeois Socialism, True Socialism, Bourgeois Socialism, and Utopian Socialism. Don't forget Bordiga's technocratic socialism as an anti-democratic form.

I know this is a bit off topic but where in Bordiga's writings can I find the technocratic aspects of his thought?

RED DAVE

16th November 2010, 18:17

@RED DAVE: Don't accuse someone of having "a static, essentially bourgeois concept of democratic structure and human consciousness" who immediately grasps that the organizational system you alluded to is a recursive fuckup process.

You have made better posts. :closedeyes:So you're saying that workers control of the economy, the essence of socialism, is "a recursive fuckup process"?

RED DAVE

Paul Cockshott

16th November 2010, 20:11

Paul Cockshott

16th November 2010, 20:38

we obviously have different ideas of what revolutions are. All historical revolutions have involved the seizure of power within a territorial state.

penguinfoot

16th November 2010, 20:51

we obviously have different ideas of what revolutions are. All historical revolutions have involved the seizure of power within a territorial state.

Is this supposed to be a response to me? Are you going to defend your assertion that Marx saw economic and political life as obeying laws of motion, when this is not even believed by mainstream political scientists, let alone Marx, who always stressed the need for empirical investigation? Are you going to defend your mechanical separation of the economic and political, when Marx sought to analyze societies as integrated totalities? Are you going to explain how the democratic reform of the EU according to your elitist theorizing is supposed to come about, given that it is apparently through these reformed institutions - and not the extra-constitutional action of the working class - that the expropriation of the private property is supposed to take place?

In any case, as far as this specific allegation is concerned, it's both empirically questionable, in that there have been seizures of power by the working class that have not been territorially contiguous with established states - the Canton-Hong Kong Soviet of 1925-26 is one of the first examples that comes to mind - and even if it were true, it doesn't mean that revolution should take place in the manner that you promote - through the reform of a capitalist alliance, that is, the EU, which is one of the most racist capitalist institutions to currently exist, and in accordance with a theory that sees socialism as being built within the borders of the EU rather than through world revolution.

Paul Cockshott

16th November 2010, 22:05

Is this supposed to be a response to me? No it was to dave.

Are you going to defend your assertion that Marx saw economic and political life as obeying laws of motion, when this is not even believed by mainstream political scientists, let alone Marx, who always stressed the need for empirical investigation?{/quote]
You could refer to Engels introduction to the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, or Marx's preface to Capital where he says the aim of the book is uncover the laws of motion of capitalist society.

I am a keen advocate of empirical investigation and have over the years attempted to carry out empirical tests of Marx's proposed laws of motion.
[quote] Are you going to explain how the democratic reform of the EU according to your elitist theorizing is supposed to come about, given that it is apparently through these reformed institutions - and not the extra-constitutional action of the working class - that the expropriation of the private property is supposed to take place?

I dont claim to be able to predict the form that the democratic revolution will take, but I can make some suggestions as to courses of action that may make it more likely.

The formation of a single European socialist party that contests politics across the continent.
Propaganda for direct democracy and for the exposure of the current political system as an anti-democratic aristocratic sham.
Supporting democratic demands by continent wide political strikes.
Demanding a constituent assembly of the people drawn by lot to radically restructure the EU

In any case, as far as this specific allegation is concerned, it's both empirically questionable, in that there have been seizures of power by the working class that have not been territorially contiguous with established states - the Canton-Hong Kong Soviet of 1925-26 is one of the first examples that comes to mind -
Please explain what you mean here

penguinfoot

16th November 2010, 22:38

You could refer to Engels introduction to the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, or Marx's preface to Capital where he says the aim of the book is uncover the laws of motion of capitalist society.

It's one thing for Marx to say that Capital is designed to provide an understanding of the essence of capitalist relations of production, or a pure version of capitalism which does exhibit certain laws, if you will, and quite another thing for you to say that there are actually laws of motion that govern the political and economic life of empirically given society or societies. In addition to Capital itself being full of recognitions that the processes he is analyzing are not given and that there are always countervailing factors to the most important tendencies of capitalist production, the countervailing factors to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall being the best example of this, due to the relative importance of these factors (increasing the length of the working day, stepping up the intensity of work, and so on and so forth) depending on the choices of individual capitalists and the bourgeoisie as a whole, Marx was never under the illusion that Capital was actually a valid description of any society - even England in the nineteenth century - or that it could ever be, as opposed being a work of analysis at a necessary level of abstraction.

He understood that societies are products of the historical process, that is, he understood that societies are highly complex integrated totalities (not bundles of levels, including the political and the economy, that are mechanically separated from one another, as you seem to believe) which need to be understood through empirical research, and that it is highly problematic to speak of there being laws that are binding for all societies, regardless of their highly particular and specific features. This is what he stresses in volume three, as I've already pointed out without a response, when he says that "due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc.", societies exhibit "infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances".

I don't know what's complicated or novel about this. Marx did not believe that empirically existing societies could be understood with reference to abstract laws of the kind that you believe in. Instead, he was committed to "analysis of the empirically given circumstances". Not even political scientists believe that there are eternal laws of economics or politics because they recognize the problems and issues that emerge from the use of the comparative method. For this reason, it's wrong of you to assert that such laws do exist, or to use their existence as justification for asserting that a council state will always result in party dictatorship - an argument that, as I've already pointed out, relies on the crudest form of axiomatic institutionalism, and rules out consideration of the complex history of the Russian Revolution and the social and political changes experienced by Russia during the Civil War.

Tell you what, why don't you tell us what some of the laws that govern political life are?

I dont claim to be able to predict the form that the democratic revolution will take, but I can make some suggestions as to courses of action that may make it more likely...

Putting aside the issue of why there needs to be such an emphasis on Europe or the EU, which is incompatible with the most basic understanding of internationalism, not to mention the absurdity of describing the EU as "aristocratic", this conception relies on a number of highly problematic assumptions, namely that there's a need to make appeals, in combination with economic pressure, to the bourgeoisies of Europe to restructure the institutions of the EU, and that these institutions, once restructured in accordance with a plan that you've set out in advance, are what will be used to restructure the economy along socialist lines.

Simply put, what happened to the overthrow of the state? Why the need to make these appeals? Why not just disarm the armed bodies of men that comprise the state apparatuses of Europe, at which point institutions such as the EU parliament, not to mention the legislatures of each sovereign state, become fictions, because they no longer have any means of enforcing their decisions? What happens at the point of production whilst workers are supposedly calling for the reform of the EU? Are workers supposed to just sit back until their reformed state comes to expropriate their factories? What happened to workers taking control of their workplaces and other institutions of economic power during periods of militant class struggle, and creating new institutions, Soviets, as they do so, these institutions being the ones that form the basis of the workers state and which are, once developed, charged with the task of planning an economy that is already socialist to a considerable extent, because the workers have booted the capitalists out of their workplaces, and have subject their workplaces to democratic control?

This is what I meant when I said that you have everything back to front. For you, it's a matter of - first democratic reform, secured whilst the economic power of the bourgeoisie remains intact, then, through the reformed state, the elimination of bourgeois property. No action from the working class except when they call for the state to be brought into being and presumably when they go to vote. No understanding of the dialectical nature of the revolutionary process, no understanding of how it combines economic and political conquests, no understanding of how it is in their ownership of the means of production that the power of the bourgeoisie ultimately lies, and most of all, no understanding of how it is at the point of production - through the physical seizure of the factories, the workshops, the schools, the infrastructure, and the creation of democratic institutions as part of this seizure - that the victory of the working class begins and ends.

Please explain what you mean here

Let me break this down for you. You asserted that "all historical revolutions have involved the seizure of power within a territorial state". I said that this was wrong because there are revolutions that have created worker-controlled societies in embryo that have not been territorially contiguous with any established capitalist state. I cited the Hong Kong-Canton Soviet, which bisected an international border between Hong Kong and southern China, as an example of this, the Soviet in question being referred to at the time as "Government No. 2" because if its success in establishing real democratic control over the area in which it operated.

Paul Cockshott

16th November 2010, 23:19

Lots of interesting and serious questions here about the armed forces, the meaning of aristocracy and about seizures of factories etc.

I understand myself to be putting forward something which is pretty much just Leninist Social Democracy, radicalised so that its aims are participatory democracy rather than a parliamentary republic. The entire preparatory period of Russian Social Democracy was oriented around the struggle for a democratic republic within the territory of the Russian Empire - another huge multi-national state. The Russian Social Democrats did not know how the democratic revolution that they anticipated would come about, but they still propagandised for it and set it as the primary aim of their programme.

You ask 'why not just disarm the armed bodies of men who comprise the states of Europe'. I assume you ask this in jest, for who is to do the disarming?

It is of course possible, in the absence of leadership, for the armed forces of a state to stand aside whilst state power changes. The army of the DDR did just that. For that to happen the army, and in particular its leadership, must believe that they lack the legitimacy to act to defend the existing economic and political order. In other words the existing political order must have become so discredited that it is seen as illegitimate even by the armed forces.

Another possibility is that the armed forces become demoralised as a result of defeat in a foreign war. The revolutionary instability in the aftermath of the first world war stemmed from this. In the EU case this can not occur unless a European army is first formed, then involved in a foreign war, and then defeated in that war. My own feeling is that the formation of a European army could conceivably be a path to revolution if that army were to be defeated in the course of overseas adventures. But it would be risky to rely on this as the only or most likely course of events.

The meaning of aristocracy. I am using it in its original Greek sense of meaning rule by the best. It is in this sense that Aristotle characterises all electoral systems as aristocratic. They are based on the principle of consciously choosing the 'best people' to be our rulers. Now the social definition of 'best' is never class neutral. It tends to favour the election of people who are better educated, more articulate than the average voter, and in doing so selects from a higher average social class. This is one of the invariant laws of politics. It is in this original Aristotelian sense that I say the EU is an aristocratic institution.

Seizure of factories. My reading of 20th century history is that such actions, unless coupled by an effective course of action to take over the central state power, have proved short lived and futile.

I note that the only example you give of a supposedly non territorial revolution was one occurring in a relatively small region of China. The fact that Hong Kong was at the time under temporary foreign occupation does not alter the fact that this example took place within the territory of China, a territorial state with a very long history.

Zanthorus

16th November 2010, 23:32

Apparently some posters here forgot what was written in the Communist Manifesto about Feudal Socialism, Petit-Bourgeois Socialism, True Socialism, Bourgeois Socialism, and Utopian Socialism.

This is perhaps one of the stupidest statements you've ever made, although it's still vying with the claim that the 1918 Soviet Constitution was equivalent to the Constituent Assembly envisioned by Lenin as the immediate outcome of the Russian revolution prior to 1917. The point about the first four kinds of 'socialism' is that they are not in fact anti-capitalist, at best they attempted to reform capitalism, at worst they tried to go back to pre-capitalist social forms. 'Utopian Socialism' is not a different vision of the end point, it is a different conception of how to get there.

Don't forget Bordiga's technocratic socialism as an anti-democratic form.

Like Palingenesis, I am waiting for the evidence that Bordiga was a 'technocrat'. He certainly believed that the members of the party constituted an elite part of the proletariat insofar as it comprehended Communist theory, programme and tactics, and that the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' would be simultaneously the dictatorship of the party. This is not technocracy in the sense in which it is usually used, however. I will have to reread Buick's work on Bordiga, but I can't remember him ever quoting anything from Bordiga to directly substantiate the claim that the rule of the party would continue on into socialism. I am inclined to distrust him, since he is an SPGB member, and they are a rabidly anti-Leninist organisation which even attacks the ICC on this point.

Paul Cockshott

16th November 2010, 23:32

I am new to all this, so just a question out of curiosity: why is democracy important for socialism? If anything, wouldn't democracy be an impediment to socialism?

If by democracy you mean a multi-party electoral system, then you are probably right, if you mean participatory democracy, democracy in the original sense, then you are wrong. A good defence is given by Stefanos Kourkoulakos in For a New Athens.
(http://bibliotecavirtual.clacso.org.ar/ar/libros/cuba/if/marx/documentos/22/For%20a%20new%20Athens.pdf)

RED DAVE

16th November 2010, 23:42

we obviously have different ideas of what revolutions are.We sure as shit do. Yours seems to be some kind of weird social democratic nonsense.

All historical revolutions have involved the seizure of power within a territorial state.Yeah, so? How does that justify your weird shit about the European Union or your bizarre statements about your alleged mathematics of the impossibility of democratic workers control?

RED DAVE

Paul Cockshott

16th November 2010, 23:55

We sure as shit do. Yours seems to be some kind of weird social democratic nonsense.

You are of course right I am trying to put forward an updated form of Leninist Social Democracy, now that must be really weird.

Yeah, so? How does that justify your weird shit about the European Union or your bizarre statements about your alleged mathematics of the impossibility of democratic workers control?

RED DAVE
There are two different issues here.

I am focussing on Europe because I live there, and because to talk about world revolution when there is no world state against which to revolt strikes me a empty phrase mongering on which no practical politics can currently be built.
The EU is the largest international framework within which a political revolution can currently be aimed for.

I am not arguing for the impossibility of democratic, and thus predominantly working class, political control. I am saying that the institutional form of the Soviet system, which you are still advocating, has proven to be a historical dead end. It probably did provide, even till its last days a higher degree of political participation than we have in the West, but it led inevitably to one party rule, to an aristocracy that degenerated into oligarchy.

JamesH

17th November 2010, 01:59

It's possible to run with this, although personally I would express the concept of relations of production in more analytical terms as embodying both the degree to which the producers control their own labour power and the degree to which the producers control the means of production, so that capitalism is defined in terms of producers having absolute control over their labour power and being separated from the means of production. If, as you say, capitalism can be defined in terms of how surplus value is extracted, then on the basis of the first chapter of Capital volume one we are informed by Marx that capitalism differs both from pre-capitalist societies (or at least feudalism) and also the future communist society, in that under capitalism it is not immediately clear to producers how much of their working day is devoted to the production of the amount of value that is embodied in the labour power that they sell to the capitalist and which they receive in its full value in the form of a wage and how much is devoted to the production of surplus value for the capitalist, this being the remainder of the working day once the portion devoted to covering the outlay on variable capital has been covered, with it being this ambiguity - or mystification - that led Marx to analyze the exact nature of the labour process, including the process of exploitation deploying his concept of science as something whose necessity arises from the fact that appearance and inner essence do not always coincide with one another. In this connection Marx makes clear that feudalism is different from capitalism and transparent insofar as it was immediately obvious to serfs how much of their output they had to hand over to the lord, and he also says that it will be obvious under communist or socialist society, or "a community of free individuals".

Why, one might ask? Because the total product of the community is distributed "in accordance with a definite social plan" which "maintains the proper proportion between the different kinds of work to be done and the various wants of the community" - in other words, because communism embodies rational planning, which makes clear how the output of the community is distributed, including how much output is set aside for purposes other than consumption, these purposes being outlined more fully in Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme, and yet, lest it be thought that the Soviet Union was therefore socialist simply because it involved planning of some kind, what is important about Marx's description of planning in this instance, is that, in order for production relations to no longer be mystified, in order for the extraction and distribution of surplus value to no longer take place in the way that it does under capitalism, it is necessary as a matter of logic that the plan of the community be accessible to individuals and that they have a role in drawing up that plan, in order that social relations might be genuinely transparent. It is precisely in this sense that the Soviet Union and other such states could not have been socialist or communist because the plan was not accessible to ordinary individuals and ordinary individuals did not have input into its creation, instead, social relations were still mystified, and in that respect they were capitalist, as it would have been possible for Marx to see as socialist or communist any society in which the relations of production were not transparent to the producers.

Certainly, the extraction and division of the surplus product was mystified in the Soviet Union, especially as workers were still paid in ruble wages. But I don't think this is enough to claim that it was not socialist because, even though Soviet socialism shared this obscuranist aspect with capitalism, it contained enough differences to separate them. As Paul Cockshott explains in "Towards a New Socialism:"

"...the social content of these ‘monetary forms’ changed drastically. Under Soviet planning, the division between the necessary and surplus portions of the social product was the result of political decisions. For the most part, goods and labour were physically allocated to enterprises by the planning authorities, who would always ensure that the enterprises had enough money to ‘pay for’ the real goods allocated to them. If an enterprise made monetary ‘losses’, and therefore had to have its money balances topped up with ‘subsidies’, that was no matter. On the other hand, possession of money as such was no guarantee of being able to get hold of real goods. By the same token, the resources going into production of consumer goods were centrally allocated. Suppose the workers won higher ruble wages: by itself this would achieve nothing, since the flow of production of consumer goods was not responsive to the monetary amount of consumer spending. Higher wages would simply mean higher prices or shortages in the shops. The rate of production of a surplus was fixed when the planners allocated resources to investment in heavy industry and to the production of consumer goods respectively. In very general terms this switch to a planned system, where the the division of necessary and surplus product is the result of deliberate social decision, is entirely in line with what Marx had hoped for. Only Marx had imagined this ‘social decision’ as being radically democratic, so that the production of the surplus would have an intrinsic legitimacy."

RED DAVE

17th November 2010, 02:13

We sure as shit do [have different concepts of revolution]. Yours seems to be some kind of weird social democratic nonsense.
You are of course right I am trying to put forward an updated form of Leninist Social Democracy, now that must be really weird.Yeah, I can just see Vladimir Ilyich putting forward the notion of random selection of delegates to the European Union, or whatever the fuck it is you have in mind.

Your version of social democracy is a hell of a lot closer to Bernstein than it is to Lenin.

Yeah, so? How does that justify your weird shit about the European Union or your bizarre statements about your alleged mathematics of the impossibility of democratic workers control?
There are two different issues here.Only two. :D

I am focussing on Europe because I live there, and because to talk about world revolution when there is no world state against which to revolt strikes me a empty phrase mongering on which no practical politics can currently be built.Uhh, dude, that's what an international is for: to coordinate revolution on a world scale.

The EU is the largest international framework within which a political revolution can currently be aimed for.I strongly suggest that while you keep one eye on the EU and one eye on world revolution, you keep your third eye focused on GB.

I am not arguing for the impossibility of democratic, and thus predominantly working class, political control.Yes you are. And in doing so, you are in the finest stalinist/maoist tradition.

I am saying that the institutional form of the Soviet system, which you are still advocatingAre you referring to the soviet system that the Bolsheviks advocated during the revolution or the bureaucratic abortion created by Stalin and his ilk? Or don't you understand that there was a difference?

has proven to be a historical dead end.Figured you say that. Sniffing the heady air of stalinism for a few decades does tend to addle the mind.

It probably did provide, even till its last days a higher degree of political participation than we have in the West, but it led inevitably to one party rule, to an aristocracy that degenerated into oligarchyDo you read what you write?

Do you realize that you have, at the very least, in one lousy sentence, (1) confounded revolutionary Russia and Stalinist Russia as if they were qualitatively the same; (2) confounded level of political participation with socialism; (3) stated that workers democracy leads to stalinism; (4) resurrected your bizarre concept of aristocracy and voting; (5) somehow connected aristocracy, which you believe flows from workers democracy, with oligarchy and capitalism.

Quintuple wow! In all my years of Marxist debate, and they are many, I don't hink I've ever encountered a mind quite so cluttered and rigid at the same time. I think "frozen garbage" would be a correct metaphor.

Have you ever been involved in a concrete working class struggle from the inside or out?

RED DAVE

Die Neue Zeit

17th November 2010, 02:21

I know this is a bit off topic but where in Bordiga's writings can I find the technocratic aspects of his thought?

The Democratic Principle comes to mind, but one of his other works with "Totalitarian" or "Totalitarianism" in the title as well, I think. :blushing:

Kotze

17th November 2010, 02:23

Not only do some people not really read the posts they respond to, apparantly sometimes some people also don't read their own posts.
So you're saying that workers control of the economy, the essence of socialism, is "a recursive fuckup process"?Dave, you said this: "Blahblah on every level, from the workplace to the whatever regional, national and international organs are built, the working class is in control. Blah, working class will expand them from the workplace upwards."

Paul took that as a reference to a pyramidal voting system (and so did I, and so far you haven't given a reason to interprete that otherwise), that is a system where people elect people who elect people who elect people and so on. Paul: "Blah, the soviet system, when extended beyond the factory becomes a perfect vehicle for single party dictatorship because of its indirect system of election. Blah. Indirect elections amplify any inequalities in votes at lower level."

This is a true and also a really banal (at least to me) insight. A chain of legitimization easily begins a life on its own quite different from what those at the bottom want, especially if it's a long chain since gerrymanderlike distortions are possible at every level.

I find it quite telling how long it takes some people here who claim to like democracy to grok this. If you like democracy, why don't you know shit about it? Especially pathetic is the claim that workers will spontaneously find some great democratic solutions, they just don't know them yet because they are alienated. There are lots of criteria combinations that have been proven impossible to obtain. It's not just that known methods fail to satisfy the entire wish list and there is some great method that does the trick somewhere waiting in the ether to get discovered by somebody (somebody who is only shit at math because he is alienated from it by The Man I suppose), it has been proven that such a method cannot exist.

Here is an example:
1. If there is an option ranked top by more than half the voters it should win.
2. Voters should never be under pressure to put a lesser evil over or equal to their favourite.
Guaranteeing both criteria in cases with more than 2 options is impossible.

So pyramidal voting sucks. But with very direct elections the mass media stands between candidates and the huge electorate. A very short legitimization chain with random selection as its first step bypasses the mass media and makes direct communication between voters and candidates possible, while it also makes it easier to use better and admittedly somewhat complicated voting methods. This would be a great improvement over both what western countries nowadays have and the pyramidal voting system.

But there are some further problems with electing people in general: What is perceived as charisma does not exactly correspond to problem-solving skills (eg. being huge) and many among the skilled, especially shortly after the overthrow of the old order, won't necessarily have the general welfare in mind. Power-hungry people are disproportionally attracted to positions of power, duh. So it might be better to randomly select people and oblige them to serve for some time, with randomly selected juries judging them after seeing some results and sending those deemed incompetent home earlier.

However, this interferes with proportionality. A group that was initially representative of different currents in society will over time get more and more bland. For making laws, I prefer that there is a diversity of groups that work out competing proposals how to deal with specific challenges, so instead of the jury deciding to send home early the oddballs, it decides which proposal to adopt.

The constitution of a future society won't list all laws and won't even need to list all boards, but it should contain meta-rules about the decision process structure of boards, that is a categorisation scheme of how direct or indirect a decision process is, with randomly selected juries regularly checking boards and deciding about making their structure more direct or less direct (boards with less direct structure getting checked at shorter intervals), and an absolute upper limit to how indirect the structure can be.

Die Neue Zeit

17th November 2010, 02:29

This is perhaps one of the stupidest statements you've ever made, although it's still vying with the claim that the 1918 Soviet Constitution was equivalent to the Constituent Assembly envisioned by Lenin as the immediate outcome of the Russian revolution prior to 1917. The point about the first four kinds of 'socialism' is that they are not in fact anti-capitalist, at best they attempted to reform capitalism, at worst they tried to go back to pre-capitalist social forms.

True Socialism was anti-capitalist and didn't attempt to reform capitalism, but its approach was one that neglected the political struggle (or rejected it because it didn't focus on the true and economic struggle). A descendant of True Socialism is indeed the more extreme left-Syndicalism of the likes of Sorel.

BTW, the Communist Manifesto didn't mention that Petit-Bourgeois Socialism / Distributism (basically equal ownership of private property) was very much a legitimate form of "socialism" before industrial development. That was discussed somewhat in Conrad's articles on ancient Israel and Judah.

Contemporarily speaking, I mentioned those "socialisms" because I was making a polemic against the use of the word "socialism" to describe the lower phase of communism.

Amphictyonis

17th November 2010, 03:42

Has anyone ever told you that your posts sound really arrogant?

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index.htm

Paul Cockshott

17th November 2010, 08:58

Have you ever been involved in a concrete working class struggle from the inside or out?Yes. I played a leading role in initiating the Scottish anti poll tax union, being its first Edinburgh convenor, proposing and getting that branch to accept the slogan of 'Pay no Poll Tax', and for 3 or 4 years I was out on the streets every weekend campaigning and organising. This was the most successful campaign in Scottish left politics of the last quarter century. I later played a role in initiating the successfull campaign against water privatisation, in that context I suggested raising the demand for a plebiscite on the issue -- the tactic which won the campaign.

My political views today came from these experiences.

RED DAVE

17th November 2010, 12:45

Dave, you said this: "Blahblah on every level, from the workplace to the whatever regional, national and international organs are built, the working class is in control. Blah, working class will expand them from the workplace upwards."Glad you find the notion of working class democracy funny. Who's your favorite comic? Dennis Miller?

Paul took that as a reference to a pyramidal voting system (and so did I, and so far you haven't given a reason to interprete that otherwise)[.]I don't have the time to poke around with what I wrote, but my concept of workers democracy, as I hope I've made clear, requires a completely different consciousness, a truly revolutionary consciousness, in which decisions are made, in whole and in part, by workers, on all levels.

[T]hat is a system where people elect people who elect people who elect people and so on. Paul: "Blah, the soviet system, when extended beyond the factory becomes a perfect vehicle for single party dictatorship because of its indirect system of election. Blah. Indirect elections amplify any inequalities in votes at lower level."

This is a true and also a really banal (at least to me) insight. A chain of legitimization easily begins a life on its own quite different from what those at the bottom want, especially if it's a long chain since gerrymanderlike distortions are possible at every level. I'm groping for a concept here, but decision-making will be made as part of a cooperative gestalt rather than a competitive hierarchy. But anyway, what does this have to do with revolutionary democracy and revolutionary consciousness? Jack shit! Of course, if you apply bourgeois, hierarchic thinking, a corporate mentality, to the process of workers democracy, you'll get some kind of pecking order. How about thinking outside the bourgeois, elitist box for awhile?

I find it quite telling how long it takes some people here who claim to like democracy to grok this. If you like democracy, why don't you know shit about it? Especially pathetic is the claim that workers will spontaneously find some great democratic solutions, they just don't know them yet because they are alienated.No, the workers will find new solutions to ancient problems in the process of making revolution, overthrowing the old society and building a new one. I imagine there will be a good deal of fumbling around and improvising, all done is a revolutionary spirit. Or don't you have any notion of revolution involving and building a new consciousness?

There are lots of criteria combinations that have been proven impossible to obtain. It's not just that known methods fail to satisfy the entire wish list and there is some great method that does the trick somewhere waiting in the ether to get discovered by somebody (somebody who is only shit at math because he is alienated from it by The Man I suppose), it has been proven that such a method cannot exist.I will not even begin to speculate as to what you mean here.

Here is an example:
1. If there is an option ranked top by more than half the voters it should win.
2. Voters should never be under pressure to put a lesser evil over or equal to their favourite.
Guaranteeing both criteria in cases with more than 2 options is impossible.What does this have to do with revolutionary democracy?

So pyramidal voting sucks. But with very direct elections the mass media stands between candidates and the huge electorate.Why are you believing that the media under socialism will take the same form, have the same lying and stultifying content and work for the same purpose as under capitalism? Is it impossible for you to conceive that the media under a workers regime will be completely different from the media under capitalism?

A very short legitimization chain with random selection as its first step bypasses the mass media and makes direct communication between voters and candidates possible, while it also makes it easier to use better and admittedly somewhat complicated voting methods. This would be a great improvement over both what western countries nowadays have and the pyramidal voting system.Pseudo-utopian gobbledygook. Reminds me of the worst aspects of Bellamy's system.

But there are some further problems with electing people in general[.]I agree. We need to elect robots and animals. My shih-tzu would make a great Commissar of Education.

What is perceived as charisma does not exactly correspond to problem-solving skills (eg. being huge) and many among the skilled, especially shortly after the overthrow of the old order, won't necessarily have the general welfare in mind.What a putrid and cynical thing to say. Worthy of a good stalinist. The workers as a class, the very people who run the world, will have little trouble doing a fine job consciously and deliberately doing so in a revolutionary manner.

Power-hungry people are disproportionally attracted to positions of power, duh.Revolutionary democracy gives power to us all, duh.

So it might be better to randomly select people and oblige them to serve for some time, with randomly selected juries judging them after seeing some results and sending those deemed incompetent home earlier.Why don't you just frankly admit that you're a right-wing utopian elitist of some sort and get it over with.

However, this interferes with proportionality. A group that was initially representative of different currents in society will over time get more and more bland. For making laws, I prefer that there is a diversity of groups that work out competing proposals how to deal with specific challenges, so instead of the jury deciding to send home early the oddballs, it decides which proposal to adopt.Groups are cool, but whatever happened, in your scheme of things, to classes, workers councils, etc.? Frankly, you and Paul have some of the most bizarre, elitist notions I've ever seen coming from people who call themselves leftists.

The constitution of a future society won't list all laws and won't even need to list all boards[.]Are we talking about socialism here? Are we talking about a society being restructured from bottom to top by the revolutionary working class? Because to me your concept sounds like a bunch of investors working out the rules and regs of a board of directors of a corporation.

ut it should contain meta-rules about the decision process structure of boards, that is a categorisation scheme of how direct or indirect a decision process is, with randomly selected juries regularly checking boards and deciding about making their structure more direct or less direct (boards with less direct structure getting checked at shorter intervals), and an absolute upper limit to how indirect the structure can be.(1) Fuck this shit.

(2) I strongly suggest that you put the above into a pamphlet and distribute it at the next union meeting you attend.

(3) I have never heard such crap in my life.

[B]RED DAVE

Kotze

17th November 2010, 14:43

my concept of workers democracy, as I hope I've made clear, requires a completely different consciousness, a truly revolutionary consciousness, in which decisions are made, in whole and in part, by workers, on all levels.Does your concept, however vague it is, entail that people vote for people who then vote for people and so on, yes or no? If the answer is yes, then the criticism applies. The problem of that structure, which was pointed out to you (and several times at that) is not something that is solved by being conscious about it while using it, it is solved by doing something else.
No, the workers will find new solutions to ancient problems (...) I will not even begin to speculate as to what you mean here.There are some ancient problems in the field of voting that are mathematically proven to be unsolvable. I have already a fairly good idea what these limits are. I gave you an example. So the obscurantist cop-out that I can't already know this or that because we haven't lived through a revolution doesn't work here.
Why are you believing that the media under socialism will take the same form, have the same lying and stultifying content and work for the same purpose as under capitalism?I don't aim for a society where this will be the case in the long run, but we have to get there some way. My proposals have a modular quality, that is while they if adopted together are more than the sum of their parts since they have aspects that reinforce each other, they are intended to already have some good effects if partially applied in less-than-ideal conditions, so there is some redundancy in measures against bad stuff happening. Take the possible system I talked about where the candidates have to directly interact with voters and answer their questions, made possible by only allowing a random subset to vote.

Situation A: Mass media is shit.
Situation B: Mass media isn't shit.
In situation A, having candidates directly interact with voters reduces the power of the mass media which is a good thing. In situation B, what is the harm? You can pay everybody for their time and it's still much cheaper than millions taking part in the same election.
Frankly, you and Paul have some of the most bizarre, elitist notions I've ever seen coming from people who call themselves leftists.Population lottery is elitist ^_^;

Vladimir Innit Lenin

17th November 2010, 15:39

You're also asking questions which reveal your ignorance of the whole of the Marxist tradition. You're asking people to specify the exact ways in which societies should allow for workers' control and the ways those societies should defend themselves against external aggression when Marx always argued strongly against the idea that it is possible or valuable to draw up accurate blueprints of what future societies will look like, because he believed that the creation of those societies was immanent in the historical process and that alienated individuals living under capitalism could not possibly imagine the range of institutional forms and social arrangements that would come into being through the process of revolution - this is one of the main points behind his critique of the utopian socialists and is why he restricted his vision of the communist society primarily to critical analyses of capitalism.

Learn some Marx, then come back. Unless you'd like to tell us how the base areas in India are a communist society in miniature, which you keep claiming but have never proved.

I think the point that is being made, is that if you do not specify the political aspects of your theory (i.e. produce a certain specificity to your proclamation of Socialism as a completely bottom up political/economic tradition), then you leave the door open, when and if revolution occurs, to a bureaucratic takeover, as there are not clearly set boundaries in terms of what does and does not constitute workers' control of the means of production.

I feel the left, in its revolutionary and economic intellectual grandeur, sometimes falls down because it ignores the machinery of politics. That is, we focus too much on economic, rather than political democracy. We all know and can accept that our theory is based on the theory of the existence of two classes - the ruling and the ruled. To that end, we have pretty much exhaused a lot of the economic arguments relating to Capitalism, its drawbacks and the alternatives - democratic planning, economic workers' councils and so on.

However, what we lack is an agreed upon political system. By that, I mean that across the Marxist left there is not really agreement on a specific 'political' means of ownership. Obviously, this will vary in each country according to geographical and economic/social-historical factors. However, we need to establish our support for democratic, federal, worker-controlled institutions. By that, I mean we must say that it is not enough to proclaim 'workers' control' as 'the workers controlling the economic and political means from the lowest to the highest level.' We need to realise that political institutions are connected - the lowest must control the highest. There must be a pyramid-style, federal system of workers' self-control. Only if we have emphasis on this political cornerstone, can we really avoid the top-down, bureaucratic centralism that has occurred in some of the 20th century Socialist states, as they can point to any arbitrary local council and say 'look, worker dominated = we are Socialist'.

We must be absolutely explicit - bottom-up or it's not the Socialism that will last and improve lives the world over, as ultimately, there is no point reliving the 70 year existence of the USSR.

Milk Sheikh

17th November 2010, 15:43

If by democracy you mean a multi-party electoral system, then you are probably right, if you mean participatory democracy, democracy in the original sense, then you are wrong. A good defence is given by Stefanos Kourkoulakos in For a New Athens.
(http://bibliotecavirtual.clacso.org.ar/ar/libros/cuba/if/marx/documentos/22/For%20a%20new%20Athens.pdf)

What exactly is a participatory democracy and how does it differ from the democracy we know? Is it viable, considering the huge populations?

RED DAVE

17th November 2010, 16:02

We must be absolutely explicit - bottom-up or it's not the Socialism that will last and improve lives the world over, as ultimately, there is no point reliving the 70 year existence of the USSR.Exactly. I'll go into this more later, but the point is a dynamic revolutionary democracy. Kotze and PC can crap around all they want, but what they are dealing with is a profound lack of belief in the role of the working class in the revolutionary transformation of society and a faith in a static approach to democracy combined with bogus mathematics.

Do I know how the working class will organize itself under socialism? No. But what I do know is that:

(1) Revolutionary consciousness will transcend previous consciousness.

(2) Bourgeois social science is designed to denigrate and defeat the working class's right and ability to govern.

(3) Historical experience has shown, again and again, the creativity of the working class in its ability to self-organize, from the Paris Commune to the Russian Revolution, Revolutionary Spain, Hungary '56, France '68, etc.

(4) Stalinism and Maoism are the bearers of a profound lack of belief in the working class.

(5) Every revolutionary democracy must fail -- except the last one.

Much more later.

RED DAVE

Zanthorus

17th November 2010, 17:16

True Socialism was anti-capitalist and didn't attempt to reform capitalism, but its approach was one that neglected the political struggle (or rejected it because it didn't focus on the true and economic struggle). A descendant of True Socialism is indeed the more extreme left-Syndicalism of the likes of Sorel.

The True Socialists didn't neglect political struggle, they neglected what Marx and Engels saw at that time as a necessity, the idea of supporting the bourgeoisie whenever it acted in a revolutionary way against Feudalism. Marx and Engels saw their polemics against the bourgeoisie at the time as giving amunition to reactionaries.

Contemporarily speaking, I mentioned those "socialisms" because I was making a polemic against the use of the word "socialism" to describe the lower phase of communism.

Well, carry on then ;)

Paul Cockshott

17th November 2010, 19:05

Dave said
v#(2) Bourgeois social science is designed to denigrate and defeat the working class's right and ability to govern.

True enough, but the defence I am giving of direct participatory democracy is hardly bourgeois social science. Bourgeois social science does all it can to obscure and denigrate the history of democracy in the ancient world. It was Marxists like Moses Finlay and CLR James who focussed positive attention on it.

(3) Historical experience has shown, again and again, the creativity of the working class in its ability to self-organize, from the Paris Commune to the Russian Revolution, Revolutionary Spain, Hungary '56, France '68, etc.
On the general point of creativity you are right, but so far the creativity in the modern world has not come up with a political form that allows stable working class rule. Hungary in 56 and France in 68 hardly offer any long term positive lesson.

The only relatively sucessful form of working class rule has been communist party dictatorship, that survived longer than any other form, but how long that can last, even in Cuba and China is an open question. I think we should be willing to extend our historical horizons in looking at working class creativity. As Kourkoulakos points out the working people of ancient Greece came up with forms of rule by the poor that were stable and long lasting. It is these examples that I am drawing on. They seem unfamiliar to you because bourgeois culture has imposed something of a historical blackout on them.

(4) Stalinism and Maoism are the bearers of a profound lack of belief in the working class.
So you assert, but Maoists themselves said something very different as even a cursory reading of Peking Review during the late 60s or early 70s would show. The issues abound with statements about having faith in the working masses and relying on their creativity. This faith in mass creativity was the foundation of Chinese economic and social policy in those days.

Paul Cockshott

17th November 2010, 19:21

What exactly is a participatory democracy and how does it differ from the democracy we know? Is it viable, considering the huge populations?

The key principles are

That everyone is capable of, and has a duty to take part in the governing of their community.
That this can take place either by the whole population voting on important issues, or , by taking your part in a jury that functions as an administrative body.
There should be no monarchs, ( whether these are called King, First Consul, Lord Protector, First Secretary, Prime Minister, President, etc). Instead the government should be formed of a committee of ordinary citizens selected by lot, and serving for no more than a year.
There should be no judges, courts should be run by sovereign juries.
All fit citizens have a duty to take part in the defence of the community and serve in the event of war.
The armed forces should be made up of the mobilised citizenry.

The point about selection by lot is that it is the only reliable way of getting a statistically representative assembly or committee. Since the working people are the majority of the population, they will necessarily be a majority on any such randomly selected body.
Voting by the whole population on key issues is easy nowadays using mobile phones.
You would have debates by a randomly selected studio audience on tv, ( no polticians at the front, just ordinary people ) and then the whole population would vote on the motion by mobile phone.

syndicat

17th November 2010, 20:07

syndicat

17th November 2010, 20:28

The key principles are

That everyone is capable of, and has a duty to take part in the governing of their community.
That this can take place either by the whole population voting on important issues, or , by taking your part in a jury that functions as an administrative body.
There should be no monarchs, ( whether these are called King, First Consul, Lord Protector, First Secretary, Prime Minister, President, etc). Instead the government should be formed of a committee of ordinary citizens selected by lot, and serving for no more than a year.
There should be no judges, courts should be run by sovereign juries.
All fit citizens have a duty to take part in the defence of the community and serve in the event of war.
The armed forces should be made up of the mobilised citizenry.

I don't think these are the key principles. These are practical suggestions, not principles. A problem you avoid here is that not all decisions affect everyone equally. For example, the decisions about the labor process in a particular workplace affect people there most of all. There are some decisions that affect others in the society, such as what is made, or the surrounding community, such as pollution effects. So, where there is a common sphere of decisions that affect a particular group in a roughly equal way, it makes sense to have direct selfmanagement there. Self-management means each person not only participates but has the skills and information to be able to participate effectively....something that your list leaves out.

Capitalism generates a hierarchical division of labor that systematically fails to develop potentials in the working class.

But self-management has to have base units where there are assemblies...direct democracy where the people involved deliverate and decide. And there has to be in principle roughly equal acess to the means to develop one's potential, such as the skills and knowledge needed to effectively participate.

Other base units might be neighborhoods where there are assemblies. In the history of revolution both neighborhood assemblies of residents and workplace assemblies have played a role where the working class has asserted itself into history, trying to take control of the decisions that affect them.

We could distinguish workplace self-management from social self-management, where the latter is collective control over the public affairs of a region. Either way there needs to be a way to extend the direct democracy-based self-management to broader areas, both industrially and in terms of public affairs.

Now, I would agree that "representative democracy" so-called has to go. But the replacement is delegate democracy. This is where there are controls on what the delegate does by the base direct democracy.

First, that significant decision-making power stays with the base assemblies. For example, if there are decisions made at some delegate congresss, the base has the right to force a discussion and vote at the level of the base assemblies. This is a crucial power that you don't mention.

Second, that the base assemblies develolp their own plans and proposals and send these along to the congresses with their delegates. A problem with the idea of selection by lot is that there is no assurance the person selected will back the proposals that have been approved by the base.

Third, the delegate isn't a professional representative. they continue at their old job and are remunerated for time to do the political delegate work at the same rate of pay as their regular job. They still live and work among their colleagues and neighbors.

Fourth, that economic planning, including planning for social budgets, starts with the base assemblies. Or in other words, workplaces and neighborhoods start with their own plans, including for example proposals for social provision throughout their city, region, etc.

other than what i've said here, i don't disagree with the rest of your proposals. i agree with the idea of sovereign juries for trials, tho I think there is the issue of knowledge about the laws and how to run a trial properly. but it could be a jury of people selected by lot from a pool of people who've been trained in this way, combined with widespread training of this sort.

at this late date, i think it's a mistake to say, as Red Dave does, that we leave the structure of the authentic socialism to be spontaneiously worked out by the working class in the event. i think the discussion of the vision or aim has to have occurred from some time within the working class. otherwise highly knowledgeable people with their own agenda will be in a stronger position to obtain a result more favorable to them. The Spanish ex-Euro-communist Fernando Claudin, in a review of "Los anarquistas y el poder" (a history of the anarcho-syndicalist movement's struggles around power in 1936), says that the reason the working class so widely expropriated the capitaliists and set up their own structures of self-management in the Spanish revolution is that the anarchists had preached seizure of the means of production for decades and labor congresses had discussed their plans for self-management also for decades.

Paul Cockshott

17th November 2010, 20:43

I agree with what Syndicat says about the need for subsidiary assemblies in workplaces and localities to deal with local issues. I do not have his faith in the mechanism of delegation, it introduces one again the principle of indirect representation and I fear it will lead to the dominance of delegate positions by professional politicos.

Paul Cockshott

17th November 2010, 20:48

I am also dubious about localism in planning. This is the mistake the Kruschov made when he localised planning and caused a great deal of disruption. The firms that will be taken over are not generally locally based but are already either national or international.

I view these as initially being converted too coops which then merge to form great industrial syndicates and that planning occurs initially at this level, moving to the formation of a planning body functionally like GOSPLAN but one formed by the voluntary merger of the syndicates: free association of producers. GOSPLAN incidentally was a very small coordinating body with only 2 to 3 thousand people working for it in the 50s.

Kotze

17th November 2010, 21:52

A problem with the idea of selection by lot is that there is no assurance the person selected will back the proposals that have been approved by the base.If selection by lot is not used as something to select a single person that makes and carries through decisions, but rather for an assembly, the group in the assembly will be more representative of the base than what you will get with any voting process.

We could have an exciting voting process with ordinary people being candidates, direct discussions between candidates and voters, very expressive ballots, a voting method that is proportional and quite robust against strategic voting, and legally binding platform statements — but the point remains.
the delegate isn't a professional representative. they continue at their old job and are remunerated for time to do the political delegate work at the same rate of pay as their regular job.Yes.
i agree with the idea of sovereign juries for trials, tho I think there is the issue of knowledge about the laws and how to run a trial properly.In general, when it comes to randomly selected groups, I am in favour of replacing them gradually, so those leaving can instruct those coming in. One idea I had especially for trials is that a jury member whose verdict vote is at or near the jury's median opinion gets to be a guide/moderator at another trial.

syndicat

17th November 2010, 22:39

I view these as initially being converted too coops which then merge to form great industrial syndicates and that planning occurs initially at this level, moving to the formation of a planning body functionally like GOSPLAN but one formed by the voluntary merger of the syndicates: free association of producers. GOSPLAN incidentally was a very small coordinating body with only 2 to 3 thousand people working for it in the 50s.

well, you're talking about central planning which is inherently inconsistent with workers self-management. such a body doesn't have the tacit knowledge of workers at the base nor any way to obtain accurate consumer preferences. it will lead to imposition of on site managers so that the elite planners have people on site who will do their bidding.

the original body GOSPLAN evolved from was Vasenkha, an elite planning body created top down by the Council of People's Commissars in Nov 1917. it was made up of union bureaucrats, leading party members, and engineers and managers. it certainly wasn't an expression of "worker control."

i don't know what you mean by "localism in planning." What i proposed is that decision making scope has to depend on who is most affected. there are some issues about infrastructure and defense and the like where some common plan and policies need to be worked out. but the local assemblies need not be conceived as discussing only what affects them locally. the idea is for proposals for larger regions to be discussed also and proposals work their way up from the base.

syndicat

17th November 2010, 22:50

If selection by lot is not used as something to select a single person that makes and carries through decisions, but rather for an assembly, the group in the assembly will be more representative of the base than what you will get with any voting process.

We could have an exciting voting process with ordinary people being candidates, direct discussions between candidates and voters, very expressive ballots, a voting method that is proportional and quite robust against strategic voting, and legally binding platform statements — but the point remains.

you see, the basic problem is that you still believe in "representative democracy." you just want to tinker with the election details. this will still lead to domination by an elite. it's just gaining a position in the elite is selected by lot. I suspect that what would happen is that over time they'd campaign to eliminate the election by lot feature, so that they can continue in office.

where we need to focus the power is in the assemblies at the base, in the workplaces and neighborhoods. and in the election of local deelegates for the local coordinating committees who continue to work alongside their coworkers, and are termed out, that is, required to be rotated out.

this also means that a significant amount of the decision-making power needs to be retained at the base level. this is why planning needs to start at this level, with workers making their own plans for their workplaces, and people in local assemblies making the plans for their own communities, cities.

the advantage of a program of participatory planning, such as advocated by Hahnel & Albert, is that the "adjustment" process that leads to plans becoming integrated and consistent over a broader area doesn't involve putting power in some elite body (however it is elected) but requires the base assemblies to adjust their own plans in response to the plans of others. the idea should be to minimize the amount of decisions that need to be made at the level of delegate bodies that are concerned with the whole revolutoinary territory or large regions.

Kotze

18th November 2010, 00:01

you just want to tinker with the election details.I suggest you look up what the word election means.

syndicat

18th November 2010, 00:27

selection by lot is a form of election. they're still representatives, making decisions for others.

18th November 2010, 08:02

The title of the thread is slightly misleading for our resident spotters. I first thought this was about the 2006 split in Workers Power (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers'_Power_(UK)) :p

Communist

18th November 2010, 08:13

The title of the thread is slightly misleading for our resident spotters. I first thought this was about the 2006 split in Workers Power (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_Power_%28UK%29)
I deleted the word 'split'...
:unsure:

Paul Cockshott

18th November 2010, 12:45

i don't know what you mean by "localism in planning." What i proposed is that decision making scope has to depend on who is most affected. there are some issues about infrastructure and defense and the like where some common plan and policies need to be worked out.

If one is talking about continental economies like the USSR or EU a large part of all production is destined to meet the needs of people who are very far away from those doing the production. The collapse of the economy in the USSR when the political union was broken up after 1991 was in part due to the fact that factories in one republic were designed to supply uses in very distant republics. When the political union broke down, and gosplan was broken up the entire linkage between geographically separated units no longer functioned and production became impossible.
Who are the 'locality' that Airbus Industrie or Volkswagen supply?

Paul Cockshott

18th November 2010, 12:47

selection by lot is a form of election. they're still representatives, making decisions for others.
election and sortition are both forms of sampling, but are distinct. They both use representation, but sortition uses representation in the sense of statistically representative. In the case of election, the 'representation' is an ideological fiction. It gives a fairly baised sampling as looking at the gender or racial composition of any elected body will show

Die Neue Zeit

18th November 2010, 14:41

The title of the thread is slightly misleading for our resident spotters. I first thought this was about the 2006 split in Workers Power (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers'_Power_(UK)) :p

I deleted the word 'split'...
:unsure:

Now why would there ever be a Theory thread on that small group? :lol:

RED DAVE

18th November 2010, 15:01

The point about selection by lot is that it is the only reliable way of getting a statistically representative assembly or committee.This completely circumvents revolutionary consciousness. Frankly, in all my years as a leftist, I have never seen anything so ridiculous. You will search the history of Marxism oer the past 150 years or so in vain to find anything as dumb as this.

Since the working people are the majority of the population, they will necessarily be a majority on any such randomly selected body.You are also excluding consciousness from choice. How foolish can you get. Would you get married this way?

Voting by the whole population on key issues is easy nowadays using mobile phones.[/quote}True, and this makes the concept of workers democracy even more credible and makes the question of consciousness even more crucial.

[QUOTE=Paul Cockshott;1927668]You would have debates by a randomly selected studio audience on tv, ( no polticians at the front, just ordinary people ) and then the whole population would vote on the motion by mobile phone.This is the incorporation of bourgeois standards into revolutionary media. The entire image here is right out of standard election debate: studio audience, politicians, etc.All that's missing is the moderator with capped teeth.

Is this all that we'll able to do after the revolution with the most powerful media of all time: stage a bourgeois debate? Shit! I've been in better grab-asses at a union meeting in a local shop.

RED DAVE

RED DAVE

18th November 2010, 15:06

Either the workers as a class run the show or they don't. We can speculate, tinker and bullshit all we want, but that's the bottom line. In China, the USSR, Cuba, etc., the workers did not/do not, have control of the economy.

I trust the working class, in the process of mass revolution, to work out the details. The present consciousness, including the consciousness of revolutionaries, is inadequate to judge what the economy of the entire world is going to be like once the proletariat takes power.

RED DAVE

syndicat

18th November 2010, 19:28

As you should know, Red Dave, revolutionary consciuosness or class consciousness is likely to still be uneven at the time a revolutionary transformation is on the agenda. Questions of organization have to be dealt with in the process of building the kind of grassroots, worker-run movement in the workplaces and communities that will both facilitate the development of class consciousness, by breaking thru fatalism that is the main barrier to it now, and be an expression of that developing consciuosness. And part of this developnent is working out and discussing ideas about what we want to achieve.

Developing a vision of what we want is part of deeping the critique of the present system, of building an understanding that it's possible to have a society without domination and exploitation. To say we shouldn't talk about this is to say you want workers to buy a pig in a poke. After a century of failure of state socialism in both its social democratic and Leninist forms, that's just not plausible. so, dave, your opposition to envisioning the structure of a socialist alternative is counter-productive, it seems to me.

k:

What is perceived as charisma does not exactly correspond to problem-solving skills (eg. being huge) and many among the skilled, especially shortly after the overthrow of the old order, won't necessarily have the general welfare in mind.

And it doesn't seem to me you offer a solution for this. First, part of the solution lies in the takeover of industries by the people working there who do possess, collectively, the skills necessary to continue production. Second, we would have to move immediately to re-organize work so as to eliminate the power of the bureaucratic class of managers and high-end professionals, and to democratize knowledge and skill via both learning on the job and training. Third, the power of direct democracy, of the assemblies, in the workplaces and neighborhoods is the means to ensure participation and decision-making for collective control.

Power-hungry people are disproportionally attracted to positions of power, duh.

but your solution is the wrong one. instead of eliminating the positions of power, you try to come up with a scheme of how to put people in these positions who aren't power hungry (because selected by lot). I think it would be more appropriate to think of how to avoid having a hierarchical power structure.

paul c:
You would have debates by a randomly selected studio audience on tv, ( no polticians at the front, just ordinary people ) and then the whole population would vote on the motion by mobile phone.

you're still talking about a minority of the population selected to make decisions for others. this is not popular power.

syndicat

18th November 2010, 23:33

In addition we take seriously Marx's aphorism that the liberation of the working classes must be the work of the working classes themselves. this is reflected in our advocacy of direct participative democracy rather than cabinet or party government and also affects our philophy of how a transition to socialism has to take place. Instead of the old Social Dmocratic emphasis on the direct action of the state in nationalising and taking over private companies, we advocate the establishment of positive legal rights for labour. These rights will, when collectively exercised by workers, end the exploitation of labour by capital.

because you place legal rights before their exercize, it seems you are assuming first order of business is seizing state power and then "giving" workers their "rights." This is NOT the working class achieving its liberation through its own efforts. That requires that workers seize the means of production and then build the institutional structure from the bottom up, based on the firm foundation of their control over production.

If one is talking about continental economies like the USSR or EU a large part of all production is destined to meet the needs of people who are very far away from those doing the production. The collapse of the economy in the USSR when the political union was broken up after 1991 was in part due to the fact that factories in one republic were designed to supply uses in very distant republics. When the political union broke down, and gosplan was broken up the entire linkage between geographically separated units no longer functioned and production became impossible.
Who are the 'locality' that Airbus Industrie or Volkswagen supply?

I understand the argument for central planning. But it's fallacious.

Let's suppose that people propose what they want as part of the planning process. You could even have individuals or households submit plans. Or local distribution centers. And for common or public goods, communities make proposals or requests. All that is required here is that there is a worker group who collect all the proposals by worker self-management orgs (based on assemblies) and the various levels of governance including neighborhood assemblies, city wide conferences of delegates etc. This worker group aggregates data from the plans and publishes it. Pricing rules can be used to adjust prices based on projected demand and supply. Then we let the local workplace groups adjust their plans, and we let households, communities, cities, regions adjust their plans...all based on budgets. As prices for the requested products shift according to projeced supply and projected demand, budgets will need to be adjusted. Thus planning for what worker groups propose and what households, communities, etc request is mainly concentrated in the local bodies, which adjust their plans. So a factory making parts for a car will adjust based on requests from the assembler, based on projected demand for cars. Projected demand for cars will be aggregated from local requests for cars. but the gruop who aggregate the data and work out the price changes aren't giving orders. they're just publishing the info about projected supply and projected demand and the projected prices that fall out of this. consumer and producer groups still have to adjust their own plans.

There are some kinds of requests for production that do need to be worked up for larger areas, such as infrastructure such as railways or electric power systems, etc. The input to this should be derived from the delegate system and requests from the base assemblies. The delegate system comes into play to evaluate the proposals. Every single decision can't be sent back to the base assemblies. But there is still the negotiation between the requestor (say a coordinating committee and congress for a regional federation) and the worker organization that is to do the work. Otherwise you end up with a managerial hierarchy and imposition of plans from above.

JamesH

19th November 2010, 03:57

where we need to focus the power is in the assemblies at the base, in the workplaces and neighborhoods. and in the election of local deelegates for the local coordinating committees who continue to work alongside their coworkers, and are termed out, that is, required to be rotated out.

But even at this level, why retain aristocratic institutions like elections? Isn't a majoity vote more preferrable? Surely it would better represent the will of the majority of workers in the workplace.

Die Neue Zeit

19th November 2010, 06:09

I trust the working class, in the process of mass revolution, to work out the details. The present consciousness, including the consciousness of revolutionaries, is inadequate to judge what the economy of the entire world is going to be like once the proletariat takes power.

There's a difference between writing every single detail and working out a sufficiently detailed outline. The latter is needed, not fuzzy stuff about socialism. Spontaneity isn't good at sufficiently detailed outlines.

Paul Cockshott

19th November 2010, 07:44

syndicat and dave misunderstood what I said about tv debates. I said there would be no vips or ploiticians it would be the audience debating among themselves then all the viewers in the country vote on the issue.

Paul Cockshott

19th November 2010, 08:27

one thing that those advocating elections should remember is that the existing political parties are not going away. If you have hierarchical elections the cdu, northern league, tories, liberals etc will all contest them, and the structure of indirection you propose will be even worse than what exists now.

RED DAVE

19th November 2010, 14:57

The key principles [of participatory democracy] are

That everyone is capable of, and has a duty to take part in the governing of their community.
That this can take place either by the whole population voting on important issues, or , by taking your part in a jury that functions as an administrative body.
There should be no monarchs, ( whether these are called King, First Consul, Lord Protector, First Secretary, Prime Minister, President, etc). Instead the government should be formed of a committee of ordinary citizens selected by lot, and serving for no more than a year.
There should be no judges, courts should be run by sovereign juries.
All fit citizens have a duty to take part in the defence of the community and serve in the event of war.
The armed forces should be made up of the mobilised citizenry.

The point about selection by lot is that it is the only reliable way of getting a statistically representative assembly or committee. Since the working people are the majority of the population, they will necessarily be a majority on any such randomly selected body.
Voting by the whole population on key issues is easy nowadays using mobile phones.
You would have debates by a randomly selected studio audience on tv, ( no polticians at the front, just ordinary people ) and then the whole population would vote on the motion by mobile phone.

What does this petit-bourgeois schema have to do with the revolutionary triumph of the working class, working class control of the economy and working class democracy?

Fabulous that someone who (presumably) considers himself a Marxist could describe the future system of socialism without mentioning the working class.

RED DAVE

Kotze

19th November 2010, 16:33

Fabulous that someone who (presumably) considers himself a Marxist could describe the future system of socialism without mentioning the working class."The point about selection by lot is that it is the only reliable way of getting a statistically representative assembly or committee. Since the working people are the majority of the population, they will necessarily be a majority on any such randomly selected body."
I found that in the text you are quoting, Dave. :bored:

RED DAVE

19th November 2010, 16:42

As you should know, Red Dave, revolutionary consciuosness or class consciousness is likely to still be uneven at the time a revolutionary transformation is on the agenda. Questions of organization have to be dealt with in the process of building the kind of grassroots, worker-run movement in the workplaces and communities that will both facilitate the development of class consciousness, by breaking thru fatalism that is the main barrier to it now, and be an expression of that developing consciuosness. And part of this developnent is working out and discussing ideas about what we want to achieve.Bring your ice skates to hell: an anarchist is explaining to a Trot that more structure is needed. :D

Developing a vision of what we want is part of deeping the critique of the present system, of building an understanding that it's possible to have a society without domination and exploitation.I do agree, but only in very broad terms.

To say we shouldn't talk about this is to say you want workers to buy a pig in a poke.Oink! :D

But seriously, to do much more than to sketch an outline, discuss principles of workers control and historic examples, is, in my opinion, to engage in the dread utopian fallacy. Beyond a certain point, because of the dynamics of the situations to be, it is fruitless to speculate. Just as an example, as I recall, prior to 1905, the RSDLP expected that the leading role in the revolution would be played by the labor unions and not the soviets.

After a century of failure of state socialismNo such thing There is either revolutionary, democratic socialism or something else.

in both its social democratic and Leninist forms, that's just not plausible. so, dave, your opposition to envisioning the structure of a socialist alternative is counter-productive, it seems to me.Again, every time I've seen someone or some group speculate in other than the broadest terms, they fall into idiosyncratic utopianism.

Such reaches into the future are best left to artists.

RED DAVE

Paul Cockshott

19th November 2010, 17:35

What does this petit-bourgeois schema have to do with the revolutionary triumph of the working class, working class control of the economy and working class democracy?

Fabulous that someone who (presumably) considers himself a Marxist could describe the future system of socialism without mentioning the working class.

RED DAVE

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.
What I am saying is just the same as in the CM, wining the battle for democracy raises the proletariat to the position of ruling class.

syndicat

19th November 2010, 18:22

me:
where we need to focus the power is in the assemblies at the base, in the workplaces and neighborhoods. and in the election of local deelegates for the local coordinating committees who continue to work alongside their coworkers, and are termed out, that is, required to be rotated out.

james:
But even at this level, why retain aristocratic institutions like elections? Isn't a majoity vote more preferrable? Surely it would better represent the will of the majority of workers in the workplace.

what you're saying here seems confused to me. What I am suggesting is the direct democracy of worker assemblies. When proposals are made, they presumably discuss it. If no one disagrees from a proposal, they don't need to take a vote. If there is disagreement, as there is likely to be, then it is majority vote that decides. When talking about the direct democracy of assemblies, this is majoritarian democracy.

There is still going to be some delegation of tasks. I think a term-limited election of a coworker who works with us is not likely to become a basis for an elite. Not if you keep in mind the other part of what I proposed: systemic re-org of jobs and training/education so that all the jobs require some skill, expertise, and expertise is widely shared among the workforce.

syndicat

19th November 2010, 18:27

me:
After a century of failure of state socialism
dave:
No such thing There is either revolutionary, democratic socialism or something else.

"Socialism" refers both to the aim...a certain kind of social formation...and to the movement ostensibly for it. "State socialism", as used by libertarian socialists, refers to those ostensible socialists who advocate socialism through the state, either the existing state or creation of a new one.

to do much more than to sketch an outline, discuss principles of workers control and historic examples, is, in my opinion, to engage in the dread utopian fallacy. Beyond a certain point, because of the dynamics of the situations to be, it is fruitless to speculate. Just as an example, as I recall, prior to 1905, the RSDLP expected that the leading role in the revolution would be played by the labor unions and not the soviets.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by "broad outline". For example, what is the nature of the bureaucratic class? How to prevent its consolidation out of a revolution? What are the conditions for workers being able to effectively self-manage production? To suppose that the kind of vague things that would have been accepted as adequate in socialist circles in 1915 are still adequate is a mistake. For example, I think there has to be what Kropotkin called "integration of labor," that is, the re-organizing of jobs so as to re-integrate the conceptualization and decision-making tasks with the physical doing of the work, so that workers have sufficient expertise and skill to effectively participate in the running of industries...that is, just the opposite of the logic of Taylorism. And the basing of self-management in the direct democracy of assemblies in the workplaces. And the basing of social self-management...control by the masses over public affairs...in the direct democracy of assemblies in neighborhoods.

A problem with the model of the Russian soviets is that they are based on only representation of people as workers. Other people are not represented. And I don't think you can have an adequate system of economic planning without an input mechanism for people as consumers of the products, that is, in their capacity as residents, households, local communities, or whole regions.

These things are fundamental. And I think there are other things that need to be said, in regard to things like breaking down gender inequality and about social control over use of the environmental commons, so that production organizations cannot shift costs onto others.

i've never seen anybody in your tendency write anything other than the most vague statements which really just amounts to handwaving. at this late date this is completely unacceptable. people need convincing that what we're talking about is feasible and worth fighting for, that it won't end up in just another dismal bureaucratic class regime as happened throughout 20th century.

Die Neue Zeit

20th November 2010, 03:53

As I explained here, delegation even by lot is subject to abuse:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/delegation-vs-representationi-t142506/index.html

Even all the discussions on replacing elections with random selections present the case as a matter of statistical representation. The part about sovereign commoner juries means that randomly selected representatives cannot be recalled because they've got facial piercings or inappropriate funky hair, something which extreme delegation would allow.

I updated my programmatic stuff to refer to cultural prejudice spilling over into the political arena: mob rule.

It should be noted that the advocacy of random selections replacing all elections, along with immediate recallability from any of multiple avenues, is nevertheless presented more within the framework of representation (of a statistical kind) than within the framework of delegation. Under the present circumstances, delegation would result in many popular recalls of those presenting any form of substantive policy or administrative changes, whether they're revolutionary, progressive, or even reactionary. Public officials would in essence be sitting ducks, and political programs could not be implemented. In more extreme forms, delegation would allow recallability on the basis of politico-cultural opposition to delegates having facial piercings or inappropriately funky hair, the kind of personalized mob rule that participatory democracy, demarchy, etc. should avoid.

RED DAVE

21st November 2010, 14:19

What I am saying is just the same as in the CM, wining the battle for democracy raises the proletariat to the position of ruling class.What do you mean by "the battle for democracy"? What I've seen you post about this seems to revive around a weird system for random selection of delegates to the European Union.

Comrade, when we are discussing workers power, we are discussing the tradition of the Paris Commune, the Bolshevik Revolution, Revolutionary Spain, Germany 1953, Hungary 1956, France 1968.

Again what the fuck are you talking about when you talk about "the battle for democracy"? In bourgeois democratic terms, the "the battle for democracy" is won.

If you are talking about going beyond bourgeois democracy, into workers power over the economy, then you are going far beyond "the battle for democracy"?

If you are talking about countries like Nepal where the bourgeoisie has not consolidated its revolution and bourgeois democracy doesn't exist, unless you take the Maoist position, "the battle for democracy" again goes far beyond bourgeois forms.

And, in addition, how do you view the struggle in the workplace? Frankly, your notions seem to be some bizarre combination of social democracy and stalinism. I have never seen you address the relationship between workers power and revolution.

Same goes for DNZ. Where do you ideas fit into the seizure of power by the working class?

RED DAVE

RED DAVE

21st November 2010, 17:47

"The point about selection by lot is that it is the only reliable way of getting a statistically representative assembly or committee. Since the working people are the majority of the population, they will necessarily be a majority on any such randomly selected body."

I found that in the text you are quoting, Dave. :bored:When we speak about working people in this way, as if they are part of a mass of voters, we are not speaking about the working class as Marxists conceive of it.

Let me say that I consider that the writings on these threads about workers power and workers control by PC and DNZ consititue social democracy.

I do not see in their notions anything that presupposes the revolutionary otherthrow of capitalism and the capitalist states. What I see is a lot of bullshit about elections in the bourgeois manner, TV, etc.

The establishment of socialism and the running of socialist society is the taks of the working class as a conscious revolutionary class, not as a bunch of voters.

Here are Paul's notions again:

The key principles [of participatory democracy] are

That everyone is capable of, and has a duty to take part in the governing of their community.
That this can take place either by the whole population voting on important issues, or , by taking your part in a jury that functions as an administrative body.
There should be no monarchs, ( whether these are called King, First Consul, Lord Protector, First Secretary, Prime Minister, President, etc). Instead the government should be formed of a committee of ordinary citizens selected by lot, and serving for no more than a year.
There should be no judges, courts should be run by sovereign juries.
All fit citizens have a duty to take part in the defence of the community and serve in the event of war.
The armed forces should be made up of the mobilised citizenry.

The point about selection by lot is that it is the only reliable way of getting a statistically representative assembly or committee. Since the working people are the majority of the population, they will necessarily be a majority on any such randomly selected body.

Voting by the whole population on key issues is easy nowadays using mobile phones.

You would have debates by a randomly selected studio audience on tv, ( no polticians at the front, just ordinary people ) and then the whole population would vote on the motion by mobileWhat does this have to do with socialism? We hear about, yes "working people" and "ordinary people" and "the whole population" but nothing about "the revolutionary working class."

RED DAVE

syndicat

22nd November 2010, 23:27

Cockshott's principles indicate the slippery nature of the phrase "participatory democracy." From a libertarian socialist point of view, this has to mean direct democracy. A necessary condition of the self-liberation of the working class is that workers en masse take over direct management of social production. If workers remain subordinate to some boss class, it's still a class system. And direct democracy of assemblies in workplaces is a necessary condition of authentic self-management.

direct democracy has arisen in numberous revolutionary situations because this happens when the rank and file try to insert themselves into the making of history.

Workers running particular workplaces or industries also need to be accountable to the mass of the population in matters that affect those outside the workplace, such as the people who consume the products or environmental effects on surrounding communities or region.

There are issues of overall governance of society. If self-management is to be generalized, this means also social self-management or collective self-government by the mass of the people.

The model of the Russian soviets is not adequate for this purpose because there are issues that affect people simply as members of communities, as well as being consumers of products, "consumers" of the air by breathing it, and so on. This suggests that there needs to also be the direct democracy of assemblies in neighborhoods (such as the notion of "free municipalities" proposed by the anarcho-syndicalist CNT in the Spanish revolution). these have also played a role in some revolutions, such as the section assemblies in Paris in 1789 and again in 1871, and the village assemblies in Spain in the '30s. We also have the example of the village assemblies in Chiapas at present, or the town assemblies in Bolivia during the fight against water privatization.

Now, it's an open question how these two bases of direct democracy...of rule by the masses (which is what "democracy" means in its Greek root...power of the common people) are to be linked or fit together.

Die Neue Zeit

23rd November 2010, 05:01

Same goes for DNZ. Where do you ideas fit into the seizure of power by the working class?

RED DAVE

Class-Strugglist Democracy and the Demarchic Commonwealth

“But much more important for Marxist thought is Aristotle's account in Books 3-6 of the Politics where he defines democracy as the rule of the poor over the rich whom they can outnumber in the Assembly. Demokratia is taken to be class rule rather than popular government, and demos is understood in the sense of the common people, not the whole of the people as Perikles, Demosthenes, and other Athenians preferred to believe.” (Mogens Herman Hansen)

The Greek word demokratia is a much more emphatic word than “democracy” in two very personal ways. First, I considered substituting the word “democracy” in the title of this chapter section and in other areas of this work with this Greek word. Second, upon reading the word demokratia for the very first time, I initially regretted not having used it at all, much less commented on it, in my earlier work. Does the word demokratia, unlike “democracy” and its politically correct connotations, actually present its own separate challenge to overcoming the crisis of theory regarding strategy and tactics (thereby meriting a separate chapter in that work)? In 2005, however, the British left-wing reformist Tony Benn noted that demokratia meant merely “people power” (implying the possibility of elites leaning upon it at times) and not “rule by the people” – demarchy. Regardless of the answer to this question, I decided against using that word and especially the –kratia suffix, given the sufficiency of the term “class-strugglist democracy.”

“Class-strugglist democracy” also has the two-fold advantage of expressing the full range of parallelism necessitated by participatory democracy (both in terms of so-called “dual power” and parallelism amongst different organs of participatory democracy) and suggesting the contention for power by more than two classes, including: coordinators, small-businessmen or petit-bourgeoisie, at least one class of semi-workers not developing society’s labour power and overall capabilities (lawyers, judges, and police officers in one group, the self-employed in another group, and unproductive workers such as full-time nannies in yet another group), and the various underclasses (the proper lumpenproletariat, the lumpenbourgeoisie, and the lowest class of beggars, chronic drug addicts on the streets, other homeless people, unemployables, and welfare cheats – the lumpen).

On the latter advantage, the contention for power can even be made by more than two class coalitions. The proletariat-led coalition in an imperialist power might include all the dispossessed classes: the coordinators (because they too are estranged from owning the means of production), the proper lumpenproletariat (preferring legal work to illegal work), and those dispossessed elements who nevertheless perform unproductive labour. The bourgeoisie-led coalition might include lawyers, judges, and police officers. Meanwhile, that underrated coalition led by the petit-bourgeoisie, which has formed the socioeconomic base for fascist movements, has included the self-employed, the lumpenbourgeoisie, and the lumpen.

That aside, I now refer back to the profoundly true and important musings in Mike Macnair’s Revolutionary Strategy on the long-lost minimum program of Marx himself, despite the radical republicanism of electing all officials:

This understanding enables us to formulate a core political minimum platform for the participation of communists in a government. The key is to replace the illusory idea of ‘All power to the soviets’ and the empty one of ‘All power to the Communist Party’ with the original Marxist idea of the undiluted democratic republic, or ‘extreme democracy’, as the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

[…]

Without commitment to such a minimum platform, communists should not accept governmental responsibility […] To accept governmental responsibility as a minority under conditions of revolutionary crisis is, if anything, worse than doing so in ‘peaceful times’: a crisis demands urgent solutions, and communists can only offer these solutions from opposition.

This merely confirms what Engels wrote in his critique of the Erfurt Program’s lack of any mention of a “democratic republic”:

If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown. It would be inconceivable for our best people to become ministers under an emperor […]

However, since what is suggested in this work rejects both liberal and radical republicanism, what should replace the “democratic republic” and “soviet power”? Fortunately, Engels himself suggested a term that has the potential to address class-strugglist anarchist criticisms of coordinated “workers’ states”:

We would therefore suggest that Gemeinwesen be universally substituted for state; it is a good old German word that can very well do service for the French ‘Commune.

The minimum program for the emergence of this demarchic “Commonwealth” surpasses broad economism by aiming for multiple struggles:

1) A two-fold political struggle of a minimum-maximum character, with politico-ideological independence for the working class as the immediate aim, and with the demarchic commonwealth fully replacing the repressive instruments for the rule of minority classes – the state – as the aim later on;
2) Economic struggles of a minimum-maximum character, with economic struggles promoting politico-ideological independence for the working class as an immediate aim, and with economic struggles directly for social labour later on – since the struggle for this “socialism” is indeed economic and not political; and
3) Peripheral sociocultural struggles of a minimum-maximum character around various issues, such as identity politics.

To tie this and the preceding commentary on participatory democracy and class issues together, listed below are demands based on the struggles of politico-ideologically independent worker-class movements in the past (the list of which is more comprehensive than the one provided by Macnair). Taking into account modern developments and critiques, the consistent advocacy of this core of a minimum program for political power – as opposed to the more common and orthodox “minimum program” for continued opposition even after complete fulfillment – emphatically solves the problem of broad economism throughout the class-strugglist left by being much greater than the sum of its political and economic parts. While individual demands could easily be fulfilled without eliminating the bourgeois state order, the complete, consistent, and lasting implementation of this minimum program in the pre-orthodox sense (as formulated by Marx himself) would mean that the working class will have captured the full political power of a ruling class, thus establishing the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat”:

1) All assemblies of the remaining representative democracy and all councils of an expanding participatory democracy shall become working bodies, not parliamentary talking shops, being legislative and executive-administrative at the same time and not checked and balanced by anything more professional than a sovereign commoner jury system that dispenses with judges altogether. The absence of any mention of grassroots mass assemblies is due to their incapability to perform administrative functions on a regular basis. Also, this demand implies simplification of laws and of the legal system as a whole, again dispensing entirely with that oligarchic and etymologically monarchic legal position of Judge and at least curtailing that legalese-creating and overly specialized position of Lawyer.

2) All political and related administrative offices shall be assigned by kleros (random selection or lot) as a fundamental basis of the demarchic commonwealth. This is in stark contrast to elections for all such public offices, the central radical-republican demand that completely ignores electoral fatigue. With this demand comes the possibility of finally fulfilling a demarchic variation of that one unfulfilled demand for annual parliaments raised by the first politico-ideologically independent worker-class movement in history, the Chartist movement in the United Kingdom.

3) All political and related administrative offices, and also the ability to influence or participate in political decision-making, shall be free of any formal or de facto disqualifications due to non-ownership of non-possessive property or, more generally, of wealth. The Chartists called similarly for “no property qualification for members of Parliament – thus enabling the constituencies to return the man of their choice, be he rich or poor.” While the struggle against formal property qualifications was most progressive, even freely elected legislatures are almost devoid of the working poor, especially those who are women. Unlike the Chartist demand, by no means does this demand in the grammatically double negative (“disqualifications” and “non-ownership”) preclude the very illiberal disenfranchisement of the bourgeoisie – and other owners of the aforementioned types of property – as one of the possible measures of worker-class rule. In fact, the original Soviet constitution deprived voting rights from the bourgeoisie and others even on more functional criteria such as hiring labour for personal profit.

4) All jurisdiction over regular socioeconomic politics shall be materially transferred to sovereign socioeconomic governments directly representative of ordinary people – separate from structures responsible for high politics, security politics, and all other related state politics. Once more, the separation of powers can exist in the wrong way, as is the case with the bourgeois separation of legislative and executive-administrative functions, or in the right way, in accordance with the participatory-democratic premise of parallelism. Also, associated with truly statist politics is the culture of state secrecy, something that permeates regular socioeconomic politics under present societies.

5) All political and related administrative offices shall operate on the basis of occupants’ standards of living being at or slightly lower than the median equivalent for professional and other skilled workers. On the one hand, formulations that demand compensation for such public officials to be simply no more than “workman’s wage” fail to take into account the historic worker-class demand for legislators to be paid in the first place, first raised by the worker-class Chartists, “thus enabling an honest tradesman, working man, or other person, to serve a constituency, when taken from his business to attend to the interests of the country.” On the other hand, even freely elected legislators, many of whom have “moonlighting” or additional sources of income through businesses or unproductive public speeches, tend to increase their collective level of expense allowances beyond the median equivalent associated with professional work. A combination of appropriate pay levels and expense allowances, mandated loss of other occupations (since these offices should be full-time positions), employment transition programs for occupants leaving office, and other measures can fulfill this demand.

6) All political and related administrative offices shall be subject to immediate recall from any of multiple avenues, especially in cases of abuse of office. Recall can be fulfilled effectively under a radical-republican system of indirect elections and hierarchical accountability, as opposed to the current system of direct electoralism (based on mass constituencies) that require significant numbers of constituents to sign recall initiatives. Nevertheless, additional avenues are necessary, such as from sovereign commoner juries sanctioning representatives who violate popular legislation, and from political parties. Like two of the preceding demands, this demand is best fulfilled when all such public offices are assigned by lot, thereby minimizing interpersonal political connections.

7) There shall be an ecological reduction of the normal workweek even for working multiple jobs – including time for workplace democracy, workers’ self-management, broader industrial democracy, etc. through workplace committees and assemblies – to a participatory-democratic maximum of 32 hours or less without loss of pay or benefits but with further reductions corresponding to increased labour productivity, the minimum provision of double-time pay or salary/contract equivalent for all hours worked over the normal workweek and over 8 hours a day, and the prohibition of compulsory overtime. In addition to the extensive analysis provided in the next chapter, it must be noted that proposals for an eight-hour day were made but not implemented within the Paris Commune, and that the development of capitalist production is such that time for workplace democracy, workers’ self-management, broader industrial democracy, etc. should be part of the normal workweek and not outside of it.

8) There shall be full, lawsuit-enforced freedom of class-strugglist assembly and association for people of the dispossessed classes, even within the military, free especially from anti-employment reprisals, police interference such as from agents provocateurs, and formal political disenfranchisement. If one particular demand could neatly sum up the struggle for the politico-ideological independence of the working class – before and even just after having captured the full political power of a ruling class – it is this one by far.

9) There shall be an expansion of the abilities to bear arms, to self-defense against police brutality, and to general self-defense, all toward enabling the formation of people’s militias based on free training, especially in connection with class-strugglist association, and also free from police interference by the likes of agents provocateurs. The aggressive advocacy of this demand separates class-strugglists from the most obvious of cross-class coalitionists, even if the likes of Bernstein pushed for this demand in less formal workers’ action programs.

10) There shall be full independence of the mass media from concentrated private ownership and control by first means of workplace democracy over mandated balance of content in news and media production, heavy appropriation of economic rent in the broadcast spectrum, unconditional economic assistance (both technical and financial) for independent mass media cooperative startups – especially at more local levels, for purposes of media decentralization – and anti-inheritance transformation of all the relevant mass media properties under private ownership into cooperative property. Although this is an applied combination of more general demands that are in and of themselves not necessary for workers to become the ruling class, a comprehensive solution to the mass media problem of concentrated private ownership and control (not to mention bourgeois cultural hegemony as discussed by the Marxist Antonio Gramsci) is a necessary component of any minimum program in the pre-orthodox sense.

11) All state debts shall be suppressed outright. Unlike the more transformative suppression of all public debts on a transnational scale, the minimum character of this demand was long established by the historical precedent of the 19th-century imperialist powers periodically going into debt to fund their wars and then defaulting upon them on an equally periodic basis.

12) All predatory financial practices towards the working class, legal or otherwise, shall be precluded by first means of establishing, on a permanent and either national or multinational basis, a financial monopoly without any private ownership or private control whatsoever – at purchase prices based especially on the market capitalization values of insolvent yet publicly underwritten banks – with such a public monopoly on money supply control inclusive of the general provision of commercial and consumer credit, and with the application of “equity not usury” towards such activity. The usage of the word “multinational” instead of “transnational” signifies the minimum character of this demand, given the multinational structure of the European Union and given that, as mentioned earlier, a single transnational equivalent should put to an end the viability of imperialist wars and conflicts more generally as vehicles for capital accumulation.

13) There shall be an enactment of explicitly confiscatory, despotic measures against all capital flight of wealth, investment strikes, and other elitist economic blackmail, whether the related wealth belongs to economic rebels on the domestic front or to foreign profiteers. Ultimately, the flight of gold from Parisian banks by those in control over same banks weakened the workers of 1871 Paris and financed the ruthless suppression of the Paris Commune.

[Note: Due consideration must, of course, be given to other political issues crucial to the beginning of worker-class rule, such as public monopoly over foreign trade, local autonomy, and the full or partial addressing of certain transformative issues like governmental transparency and genuine freedom of movement.]

REFERENCES

The Tradition of Ancient Greek Democracy and Its Importance for Modern Democracy by Mogens Herman Hansen [http://books.google.com/books?id=8lPaSAnZg28C&printsec=frontcover]

The Two Souls of Democracy by “Anarcho” [http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=962]

The minimum platform and extreme democracy by Mike Macnair [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/625/macnair.htm]

A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891 by Frederick Engels [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1891/06/29.htm]

Letter to August Bebel in Zwickau, March 1875 by Frederick Engels [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_03_18.htm]

The People’s Charter by the London Working Men’s Association [http://www.chartists.net/The-six-points.htm]