Lev Bronsteinovich: A Call-out

[Olentzero]

All right, Lev, I've had enough of this shit. This quote from you over in Brospierre's thread is the last straw:
Then there are the more reformist groups like the ISO... that actually talk about socialism in their formal programs, but on the ground, are always mucking around with liberals and who wind up supporting liberal bourgeois politicians.

This is your official "put up or shut up" notice. Using cites and quotes from the ISO's published materials - SW, the ISR, or whatever else you can find - defend your statement. I don't wanna see any of this 'implicit' or 'subtle' weaselling you crapped out over in CynicalIdealist's thread, I wanna see solid arguments backed up with hard evidence from the ISO itself that we 'wind up supporting liberal bourgeois politicians'.

If you can't prove, using the ISO's own words, that this is so, knock off the slams. You don't have to agree with our stances or our methods, but at the very least be honest enough to admit you're talking out your ass if you can't prove otherwise, and have the intellectual fortitude to change your ways.

Everyone else: This is not an invitation to start another "ISO did me a dirty" party. If you feel you've got something solid that backs up Lev's assertion, however, you're more than welcome to contribute.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

I will try to accommodate you on this. Are back issues available on the ISO website?

I really don't have the time to do a great deal of research, but I'm game. I really am flattered that you are willing to start a thread in my honor, however:).

Some of my distaste for your political line are historical. Your group and it's forbears /co-thinkers have bent to liberal public pressure for over half a century. Examples? Splitting with Trotsky over defense of the USSR at the outset of WWII; Not defending NK in the Korean War; Not defending the Chinese and Cuban Revolutions; Cheering for counterrevolution in the USSR and Eastern Europe. (I guess Cliff formally split from Trotskyism over the Korean War -- but his political father, in my opinion, has to be Max Schactman).

I agree that some of my assertions should be backed up by hard evidence to show that I am not just talking out of my ass. So, give me a little time and I will try to provide more detail.

[Olentzero]

Fair enough. The ISR has most, if not all, of its back issues online at isreview.org, and SW has articles going back to about 2005 or so, maybe earlier. Plenty to work with.

Also, if I may say so, if you consider yourself Trotskyist you hold some pretty Stalinist positions.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

You may say so, of course. I would beg to differ. What in particular are you referring to?

[Olentzero]

Um... everything. Especially the counterrevolution in Eastern Europe bit. Of course that could range anywhere from 1956 to 1991, but still, even at the earlier date there was nothing politically defensible about the USSR. Also - though I'd have to dig through Cliff's State Capitalism in Russia to be sure - I don't think Cliff stemmed from the Schachmanite tradition; I believe he explicitly rejected it. Of course Cliff was in England and Schachtman was in the US, so it would be interesting to hear why you think there was any interaction between them to start with.

Actually, oh yeah here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Cliff):
Cliff himself was insistent that his ideas owed nothing to those of Max Shachtman, or earlier proponents of the theory such as Bruno Rizzi, and made this clear in his Bureaucratic Collectivism - A Critique. True,
Nevertheless, in the 1950s his group distributed literature published by Shachtman's group and the theory of the 'permanent arms economy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_arms_economy)' which was considered one of the pillars of what became the International Socialist Tendency originated with Shachtman's groupbut this is a far cry from proving that Schachtman was Cliff's direct political forebear.

[Renegade Saint]

I find it hilarious that the ISO is responsible for the actions and stances of groups on issues that happened before the ISO existed.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Why? The ISO represents the current incarnation in the U.S. of a political tradition that stretches from Cliff and even earlier.

[eyeheartlenin]

Lev B wrote:


Then there are the more reformist groups like the ISO... that actually talk about socialism in their formal programs, but on the ground, are always mucking around with liberals and who wind up supporting liberal bourgeois politicians.

Now cde Lev B is free to write as he pleases, whether he chooses to back up what he writes or not, and anyone else on revleft is free to respond with agreement or disagreement, and those who disagree are also free to disprove any assertions that cde Lev B may make.

As for the ISO's "wind up supporting liberal bourgeois politicians," there is a plethora of quotes from the ISO's paper, [I]Socialist Worker, which would appear to show that the ISO was really quite taken with candidate Obama in the course of the 2008 election campaign, at http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/iso2-j19.shtml

That said, there is the caveat that the group that published the quotes, the SEP, has the reputation of being kind of nightmarish, but the quotes are pretty damning, if they're accurate.

To take but one example, on November 7, 2008, the ISO allegedly expressed the following opinion:


The sweeping victory of Barack Obama in the presidential elections is a transformative event in U.S. politics, as an African American takes the highest office in a country built on slavery.

"Transformative"? Really? People are free to judge for themselves whether the US has been "transformed" by three years of the current Democratic administration, with its record poverty rate, to take a random example, or its continuing what must be the longest war in US history, the military intervention in Afghanistan. Examples could easily be multiplied.

[Renegade Saint]

Why? The ISO represents the current incarnation in the U.S. of a political tradition that stretches from Cliff and even earlier.
And the Republican party represents the current incarnation of the Whig party. What does that mean? Nothing.

[Homo Songun]

I have personal friends who are politically in the Cliff tradition, and I find much that is admirable in their organizational abilities. I find the assertion that they are always "supporting liberal bourgeois politicians" unlikely at best. On the other hand, it is not even clear to me how "mucking around with liberals" is intrinsically bad "on the ground". Who else would they be trying to convert?

That said, there is a kernel of truth the ISO critic's accusation, in that the Cliffist groups I've met have a problem with pandering to common liberal prejudice. In my opinion it is because many of their theoretical positions enable a tendency towards right opportunism.

While the concept of "socialism from below" is a nice reminder of the only way socialism can actually come about, in the ISO's hands it can become an empty-sounding slogan meant to short-circuit difficult political questions. When liberals regurgitate ruling-class talking points about the "really-existing socialism", they use the slogan to resort to the no-true-scotsman fallacy in reasoning, rather than countering with a more nuanced materialist analysis. Ortho Trots at least try to demolish some of the more outrageous bourgeois propaganda claims about socialism, to their credit.

Similarly, they tend to go along with the periodic and ritual denunciations of whatever the imperialists and their media outlets have deemed is the rogue-state-of-the-week with distressing frequency. They are Leninist enough see through the ideological facade of "spreading democracy" and "fighting terrorism", so they end up coming up with terribly convoluted argumentation in order to keep catering to liberal sensibilities while still maintaining a plausibly revolutionary stance. The ISO's editorials on Libya, for example, were absolutely atrocious in this regard. History will prove them dead wrong on the Arab Spring.

That's my two cents. I enjoy working with them in general, and there are many things they do that other groups would do well to emulate.

[Olentzero]

eyeheartlenin, how about actually going to the source on these? Not that I'm denying the ISO ever said such a thing - I remember that article clearly - but a better approach would be to find the article itself and read through it to get a better idea of the context in which it was written, not to rely on another party's cherry-picked quote.

Here (http://socialistworker.org/2008/11/07/new-shape-of-US-politics), for example, is the article in question. As noted, the quote you cited is accurate, but further reading clearly demonstrates what SW meant by "transformative event":
Born in 1961--a time when racial segregation was the law of the South, civil rights workers were lynched, and police dogs and firehoses were used against Black children--Obama's rise is emblematic of how much has changed in the U.S., even in a country still disfigured by vicious racism that puts more Black men in prison than in college.
"What does it mean to me to have an African American elected president? I can't even put it into words," said Darrel Washington, a Black teacher in Chicago's elementary schools.It's pretty clear what is meant here - people got a charge, and justifiably so, from the election of a Black president who was born when Jim Crow was still on the books, and the Freedom Rides and Civil Rights Act were still just dreams.

At no point, however, does SW actually succumb to the illusion that Obama's election by itself will bring about change. In fact it's quite clear what they think:
A closer look at Obama's stated policy positions--as opposed to his soaring rhetoric--points to a big gap between the hopes and expectations of Obama voters and the cautious, moderate program he has put forward. Obama is, after all, a mainstream politician.
Will Obama call a halt to this colossal rip-off and fashion an economic program that puts the interests of working people at its center? Will an Obama administration use government ownership of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and shares in big banks in order to halt mortgage foreclosures? Will there be an economic stimulus program that creates secure, long-term jobs?
Obama's economic team shows no inclination toward such changes.
The same "realism" dominates Obama's foreign policy team... The style will change--more cultivation of allies, more international agreements--but the substance will not.Furthermore, in no less than two places, SW is explicit about where they think change actually comes from:
None of this is to say that no change is possible. Tens of millions of people want a new direction. The question is whether they can be organized to fight for it.
Given the multiple crises that beset the U.S., change is coming--but what kind, and in whose interest, depends on whether and how working people get organized to fight for it.That, I think, is more than enough to show exactly where the ISO stands on bourgeois liberal politicians.

Shmuel, your post is exactly the kind of post that adds little to the debate. You of course have a right to your own opinion, but if you're going to criticize the ISO it helps if you try to use their own words against them instead of just saying it's so and expecting us to believe you. Show us where you think what they said is wrong.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Well, exactly. This pandering is precisely what a reformist group does. They will talk about socialism to the right audience -- but when push comes to shove, they fold. Oh, and the quote about Obama's election being transformative can be found on their site. I have been collecting some doozeys. It really doesn't take much. I just casually looked through and found this kind of stuff:


Barack Obama speaks at an outdoor victory celebration in Chicago's Grant Park (Jewel Samad | AFP) THE SWEEPING victory of Barack Obama in the presidential elections is a transformative event in U.S. politics, as an African American takes the highest office in a country built on slavery.

Now come the hard questions--challenges greater than any president has faced since the Second World War.

What economic policies will Obama pursue as the worst financial crisis since the 1930s drives the world deep into recession? Will the man who made his mark as an opponent of the Iraq war make good on his promise to pull out U.S. troops? Will there be the kind of fundamental change that his supporters so clearly want?

For now, Obama's supporters are, justly, celebrating. Born in 1961--a time when racial segregation was the law of the South, civil rights workers were lynched, and police dogs and firehoses were used against Black children--Obama's rise is emblematic of how much has changed in the U.S., even in a country still disfigured by vicious racism that puts more Black men in prison than in college.

Anyone opposed to racism couldn't fail to be moved by the sight of Chicago's Grant Park on Election Night, where a multiracial crowd of 250,000 mixed joyously and celebrated the prospect of change. Entire families turned out to hear Obama's victory speech; union workers clutched pro-Obama signs; large numbers of immigrants without the right to vote came to the rally, too.

The spirit of the night was captured by groups of Black and white youths--many not yet old enough to vote--who traded chants of "O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!" across Michigan Avenue, the main street in one of the most segregated cities in the U.S.

"What does it mean to me to have an African American elected president? I can't even put it into words," said Darrel Washington, a Black teacher in Chicago's elementary schools. SW 11/7 2008

Do I have to explain why this is pandering to liberals? This is not OUR president. Gee, tune in next week -- will he declare the D of the P and abolish private property? The CO is to educate the more advanced workers and students about revolutionary politics. This should be embarrassing to the ISO. Okay, regarding support to bourgeois candidates here are more quotes:


Eight years ago, Nader was able to win millions of votes--and, more importantly, bring together people from different struggles to recognize their common commitment to an alternative to the political status quo. Unfortunately, this year, neither is likely to get a significant hearing.

McKinney and Nader do offer voters the chance to cast a protest vote against war, racism and corporate greed, even if they will not be able to break through the media blackout on their candidacies. That vote won't count for much in this year's electoral arithmetic, but it can be a marker for the future.November 7, 2008 | Issue 684 of SW

Nadar is a liberal independent and The Green Party is a rad/lib party, like in Germany. Both are on the WRONG side of the class line. But instead of explaining that, the ISO panders.

It took almost no effort to find this stuff. I'm sure there is plenty more where that came from. I'd be happy to find more if you like.

And about it not mattering from where your program and party come from is juvenile. Of course it matters. Cliff's movement was a rightward split from Trotskyism. Trotskyists militarily defend the deformed workers' states ruled by Stalinist parties. We defend them against imperialism unconditionally -- while calling for the removal of the Stalinist misrulers through political not social revolution. The IS in the US came out of the Shactmanite movement and later split with one piece becoming the ISO. You take the the position that the bureaucracies in Stalinist countries constituted a new class. Everything that has happened since the fall of the USSR and the reunification of Germany indicate that Trotsky was right and Schactman/Cliff were wrong about this. New classes do not exist for 70 years and disappear. In fact, in Russia, there are plenty of new bureaucrats -- but now they operate under capitalism. And you guys applauded this. This is your history -- live with it. If you want to understand it better read Trotsky's In Defense of Marxism

Finally, the SEP is the dregs of the old Healyite IC a group that accepted funding from several bourgeois Arab regimes including Saddam Hussein and Qaddafi (in fact, they were essentially press agents for Qaddafi for a while). They have a sordid history, about which I am way too familiar -- it is outside of the realm of this discussion, however.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Oh, I missed your post before I put mine in. So. . . somewhere in the article the do mention that Obama is probably not really so great. But you have to read carefully and that's the problem. OBAMA WAS AND IS THE FUCKING IMPERIALIST IN CHIEF -- HE IS A DEMOCRATIC PARTY HACK WHO WAS ELECTED TO BETTER SCREW POOR AND WORKING CLASS AMERICANS. If the ISO was clear about that, you wouldn't know it from that article -- It was pandering to the masses infatuation with Obama. Much better to shout the truth -- especially when it becomes more obvious with the passage of time. If it seemed to anyone that his election was going to transform anything they were being fooled and that, comrade, should have been EXPLICITLY spelled out. And that was no accident.

[Olentzero]

New classes do not exist for 70 years and disappear. In fact, in Russia, there are plenty of new bureaucrats -- but now they operate under capitalism.OK, first off, explain the Yeltsin phenomenon. Former Communist Party boss, made the smooth transition to President of Russia shortly after the fall of the USSR. What else explains it but the same class operating under new conditions?
And you guys applauded this.Now you're doing it again. Making assertions without backing them up. What have you got that, in your opinion, proves this?


So. . . somewhere in the article the do mention that Obama is probably not really so great. But you have to read carefully and that's the problem.No, you don't have to read carefully. I gave you a handful of quotes that don't require anything more than basic reading comprehension to understand. Here's another one from an article (http://socialistworker.org/2011/09/26/barack-obama-class-warrior) in September 2011:
So who is the real Barack Obama? The one who wanted to seek bipartisan and "reasonable" cuts in the social safety net in July and August, or the "fighter for the middle class" who emerged in September? It would be facile to say that Obama is both things. Four years of experience should teach us that the real Obama is the Obama of the "grand bargain"--while "class warrior" is the costume Obama dons when elections roll around.How much plainer language do you honestly need?

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Gosh, I was referring to the article at the time of Obama's election, when he was most popular with the rad/lib milieu. It is much more popular now that people have experienced Obama, to be critical of him (again, blowing with the milieu wind). And comrade, you should not need four bloody years to figure it out. Again, this is the language of a reformist press. "The real Obama"? The real Obama is and was and will always be a class warrior for the bourgeoisie. Just because SW says some things that are critical of Obama, and suggests that there might be other things needed like "organizing" doesn't let the ISO off the hook for there shameless pandering to liberals. This stuff is antithetical to the politics of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. I guess we just read it differently. To me this IS the plain language of reformism. A revolutionary press would have headlines denouncing Obama. This should not be shamefully nestled in the ninth paragraph of an article. (See SW 11/7 2008)

[ellipsis]

The ISO totally hurt my butt, I'm still walking funny.

Verbal warning to OP for homophobic language.

[Q]

And the Republican party represents the current incarnation of the Whig party. What does that mean? Nothing.

Well, until a few years ago the ISO still took orders from London and while they've been kicked out of the IST over some irrelevant tactical question, they're still quite cozy to the SWP UK I believe. So, it does matter I would argue.

[Olentzero]

Verbal warning to OP for homophobic language....

Seriously? It's homophobic? Wasn't aware of that, though Googling provided no firm references to it. shrug No skin off my nose, my vocabulary's rich enough to easily find more acceptable substitutes.

[Renegade Saint]

Well, until a few years ago the ISO still took orders from London and while they've been kicked out of the IST over some irrelevant tactical question, they're still quite cozy to the SWP UK I believe. So, it does matter I would argue.
I would question your characterization of "took orders" from the SWP, but yeah, 2001 is a few years ago. I'd say most of our current members weren't even yet members then.


And about it not mattering from where your program and party come from is juvenile. Of course it matters. Cliff's movement was a rightward split from Trotskyism. Trotskyists militarily defend the deformed workers' states ruled by Stalinist parties. We defend them against imperialism unconditionally -- while calling for the removal of the Stalinist misrulers through political not social revolution. The IS in the US came out of the Shactmanite movement and later split with one piece becoming the ISO.
Militarily? I hadn't heard that before. Yes, the state capitalism issue does matter because it's a current part of our program and practice. The stance that some defunct group took on the Korean war, however, does not. Nor are we responsible for what that/those groups did during the 50's.

I actually think being critical of our position on state capitalism is fair enough, my problem with most of our detractors is that most of the criticisms are barely disguised slanders and slurs (including some other ones in this thread).

We've never endorsed voting for Obama. Or any Democrat. End of story. That distinguishes us from a lot of the 'left'-from Chomsky to CPUSA-but apparently any time Obama's name is mentioned it must be accompanied by gnashing of teeth and tearing of sackcloth to be acceptably hostile.

[Q]

I would question your characterization of "took orders" from the SWP, but yeah, 2001 is a few years ago. I'd say most of our current members weren't even yet members then.

Including the ISO leadership?

Also, this brings up the topic of the "revolving door" problem regarding membership, or how difficult it is to retain membership by many groups. But I digress.

[Olentzero]

Just because SW says some things that are critical of Obama, and suggests that there might be other things needed like "organizing" doesn't let the ISO off the hook for there shameless pandering to liberals.Which you have yet to prove. (It's 'their', by the way.) I think it's quite clear that even in 2009 SW was critical of Obama, and the 'reading carefully' you assert was required really amounts to nothing more than actually reading further than the first few sentences of any given article. Seriously, you keep saying the ISO panders to liberals, but you haven't done much in the way of showing where that happens. eyeheartlenin did a better job than you did.

EDIT: Actually, let me modify that a little bit. You did bring up the Nader/McKinney issue, which does deserve some attention. Simply put, the position put forth there is not uncritical support - or, really, even support - for the Nader/McKinney ticket, but an action akin to looking at a barometer to see what the weather's going to be like later on. It's judging what the political climate might actually be like after the election. Seriously, your argument is like accusing us of pandering to sunbathers after looking at the barometer and saying "Looks like sunny weather later today."

[Olentzero]

Including the ISO leadership?I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to get at, here, but I was around for the split in 2000-2001, and I can say with some authority that the one thing the ISO leadership wasn't doing was taking orders from London. Hell, the other founding members of the DC branch were the ones that founded Left Turn after the split (i.e. the ones that were toeing London's line) and calling them a minority in the organization would be far too generous.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Militarily? I hadn't heard that before. Yes, the state capitalism issue does matter because it's a current part of our program and practice. The stance that some defunct group took on the Korean war, however, does not. Nor are we responsible for what that/those groups did during the 50's.


Well, comrade, I don't want to wax avuncular here, but you have some learning to do. You are involved in an ostensibly Trotskyist organization, but are unfamiliar with the position of military vs. political defense? It is one of the ABCs of Trotskyism. If you like, I could provide some links to help you out with that one.

But the idea of state capitalism (in it's mordern, third-camp incarnation) comes from somewhere and has some historical meaning. Someone did not just think it up since the dawn of the new century. You are part of that political tradition and are using that program.

And it matters big time. The logic, ultimately, is to support bourgeois democracies, like the US and the UK in their fight against the USSR and China because you deny the class differences in the respective states. It took Shactman a long time to make the descent from revolutionary to cheering the US role in the Vietnam War, but it was also predicted.

So, if there is more freedom of the press, say in the US than in China, then it follows to support US counterrevolutionary aims in China. That is if there is no meaningful difference in the nature of the states in question. The crime today, then, is not defending Cuba, China, North Korea and Vietnam against counterrevoluton. I oppose Stalinism because it is a nationalistic, bureaucratic set of ideologies that has setback world revolution.

Am I wrong in saying that you guys supported counterrevolution (you probably just called it "regime change") against the Stalinist regimes in the USSR and Eastern Europe?

Your group has never formally endorsed Obama, sure. But when he was popular in the rad lib milieu, your criticism was muted and mealy-mouthed. You were embarrassed not to be with all those folks who were cheering him. "Psssst, hey buddy, you know, this guy isn't so great. We should really organize. . . " This is counterposed to the revolutionary position for calling him what he is -- black front man for brutal US imperialism. Do you get the difference?

And if you did not explicitly endorse Obama, you certainly did seem to endorse the Green Party candidate as well as Ralph Nader. These are pro-capitalist politicians.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Which you have yet to prove. (It's 'their', by the way.) I think it's quite clear that even in 2009 SW was critical of Obama, and the 'reading carefully' you assert was required really amounts to nothing more than actually reading further than the first few sentences of any given article. Seriously, you keep saying the ISO panders to liberals, but you haven't done much in the way of showing where that happens. eyeheartlenin did a better job than you did.

EDIT: Actually, let me modify that a little bit. You did bring up the Nader/McKinney issue, which does deserve some attention. Simply put, the position put forth there is not uncritical support - or, really, even support - for the Nader/McKinney ticket, but an action akin to looking at a barometer to see what the weather's going to be like later on. It's judging what the political climate might actually be like after the election. Seriously, your argument is like accusing us of pandering to sunbathers after looking at the barometer and saying "Looks like sunny weather later today."

You know, zero, you have made a big deal "calling me out" for my comments about your org. But I think you really don't understand. Maybe it's the language? Revolutionaries aren't "critical" of Obama, we opposed him vociferously from the moment he appeared on the scene. Even in your defense of the ISOs revolutionary credentials you give yourself away.

On top of that, I correctly wrote "there." It gets me pissed that you are erroneous in correcting my grammar:).

[eyeheartlenin]

Cde Lev B wrote
... And if you did not explicitly endorse Obama, you certainly did seem to endorse the Green Party candidate as well as Ralph Nader. These are pro-capitalist politicians.

I remember the Year 2000 presidential election campaigns very well. The ISO went all out in backing Nader; they were really big Nader supporters that year. That was the year Workers Vanguard published an article blasting the Nader candidacy, for the simple reason that Nader is a union-busting creep, which can easily be documented. It should be added that when Nader later (in a different election year) accepted the support of the xenophobic, privatizing "Reform" Party and ran as their candidate in some states, the ISO still backed Nader, while asking people to vote for him via the Green Party ticket. What a great guy! One can readily see why liberals love him!

[ellipsis]

...

Seriously? It's homophobic? Wasn't aware of that, though Googling provided no firm references to it. shrug No skin off my nose, my vocabulary's rich enough to easily find more acceptable substitutes.


The discussion has been had on the forum, not sure what the ruling was, but some, including people in the BA that "butt hurt" is homophobic. I think it falls into a grey/gray area.

I like what you edited it to read better anyways.

Personally I have no experience with the ISO. They seemed focused, at least in the bay area on conferences and i don't know what else, although I know there must be more. I never encounter ISO folks on the streets, while RCP and PSL folks are around frequently, the two exceptions being at the general strike and may day, where they had literature tables.

So my criticism, in my limited experience, is that the ISO does not have a large enough street presence.

[Renegade Saint]

Well, comrade, I don't want to wax avuncular here, but you have some learning to do. You are involved in an ostensibly Trotskyist organization, but are unfamiliar with the position of military vs. political defense? It is one of the ABCs of Trotskyism. If you like, I could provide some links to help you out with that one.

But the idea of state capitalism (in it's mordern, third-camp incarnation) comes from somewhere and has some historical meaning. Someone did not just think it up since the dawn of the new century. You are part of that political tradition and are using that program.

And it matters big time. The logic, ultimately, is to support bourgeois democracies, like the US and the UK in their fight against the USSR and China because you deny the class differences in the respective states. It took Shactman a long time to make the descent from revolutionary to cheering the US role in the Vietnam War, but it was also predicted.

So, if there is more freedom of the press, say in the US than in China, then it follows to support US counterrevolutionary aims in China. That is if there is no meaningful difference in the nature of the states in question. The crime today, then, is not defending Cuba, China, North Korea and Vietnam against counterrevoluton. I oppose Stalinism because it is a nationalistic, bureaucratic set of ideologies that has setback world revolution.

Am I wrong in saying that you guys supported counterrevolution (you probably just called it "regime change") against the Stalinist regimes in the USSR and Eastern Europe?

Your group has never formally endorsed Obama, sure. But when he was popular in the rad lib milieu, your criticism was muted and mealy-mouthed. You were embarrassed not to be with all those folks who were cheering him. "Psssst, hey buddy, you know, this guy isn't so great. We should really organize. . . " This is counterposed to the revolutionary position for calling him what he is -- black front man for brutal US imperialism. Do you get the difference?

And if you did not explicitly endorse Obama, you certainly did seem to endorse the Green Party candidate as well as Ralph Nader. These are pro-capitalist politicians.
I assumed your use of "militarily" was in the usual sense-which would make no sense since I'm unaware of trotskyists ever using force of arms to defend a stalinist state.

I think you'll be hard-pressed to find any instances of the ISO supporting the US government over the Chinese government. I'm really not sure what you're on about. We enjoy some of the benefits of bourgeois democracy like the aforementioned freer speech (is this forum even available in the PRC, I haven't seen any posters from there?), but there's some things benefits to the Chinese system. For instance, in a David Harvey video he says "if you're a Chinese banker and the Chinese government tells you to lend, you lend!" (a factor helping them recover from the recession more quickly). If there's "no meaningful difference in the nature of the states in question" why would we support 'counterrevolutionary' aims in one over the other?

The 'counterrevolution' occurred a long time ago in China(capitalists can now join the CPC haven't you heard), so I'm not sure what defending China from 'counterrevolution' would even look like.

BTW, what's the difference between calling for 'political revolution' (as orthodox trotskyists do) and 'counterrevolution'?

Olentzero is doing a fine job with the "we weren't critical enough of Obama" argument, so I won't bother with that.

As to the ISO's support of Nader in 2000-I wasn't around then. I wasn't even in high school, so I couldn't really comment for sure.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Cde Lev B wrote

I remember the Year 2000 presidential election campaigns very well. The ISO went all out in backing Nader; they were really big Nader supporters that year. That was the year Workers Vanguard published an article blasting the Nader candidacy, for the simple reason that Nader is a union-busting creep, which can easily be documented. It should be added that when Nader later (in a different election year) accepted the support of the xenophobic, privatizing "Reform" Party and ran as their candidate in some states, the ISO still backed Nader, while asking people to vote for him via the Green Party ticket. What a great guy! One can readily see why liberals love him!

Just some fact-checking here. The ISO REVOKED support for the Nader campaign in 2004 when he sought political support from right-wing anti-war groups. Our organization was on the fence about supporting him that year already and we voted to support getting him on the ballot but not investing our time and organizational energy to helping the campaign as we did in 2000. His courting of libertarians and so on and his softness (or defensiveness) in taking on the Democrats and Kerry proved the side of the debate that said he was too isolated now (and the Green-party was already in full retreat) and would not be a rallying figure for people who were against the war and the Democrats. The anti-war movement was in decline but we thought that anti-war forces might rally behind Nader as a protest vote. Our whole perspective around these 3rd party efforts was in the hopes that a left-of Democrats (anti-Democrats) base could organize out of disgust with neoliberalism around some 3rd party "progressive" campaign. It was never about supporting Nader or the Greens as the vehicle to socialism but as a vehicle to trying to help drive a wedge in the hold of the Democratic party over people, to help nurture a left independent of the Democrats.


MANY MORE people are considering a vote for Ralph Nader as a protest against war and corporate control of Washington than anyone would have guessed when Nader announced his independent presidential campaign in February. But Nader's recent moves--his acceptance of an endorsement by the right-wing Reform Party USA and his all-too-friendly meeting with Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry--have done a disservice to his supporters and severely undermined the case that he represents a left-wing alternative to the Washington status quo.
...
Socialist Worker was a proud supporter of Nader in the 2000 election. We believe his campaign was a lightning rod for millions of people fed up with corporate domination of the U.S. political system. Nader himself was no socialist and had political weaknesses on a number of questions. But, by and large, he spoke out for an unapologetic left-wing alternative.


Because of his enthusiasm for the Reform Party endorsement and his overtures to Kerry, the same cannot be said today. This is why we can't recommend a vote for Nader at this time.

[Jimmie Higgins]

As to the ISO's support of Nader in 2000-I wasn't around then. I wasn't even in high school, so I couldn't really comment for sure.

I was a Nader supporter and global justice activist a couple of years before joining the ISO. When I joined members spent a lot of time trying to convince me of two things: 1) why the election of Nader WASN'T the reason for their support and why revolution is necessary for real change 2) that Imperialism was not simply military intervention and was still a factor and corporations weren't more powerful than states. For the second one I kept thinking, why do they keep wanting to debate me on this question, we both agree that big business is the problem, why does this question of the state matter?

A few arguments brought me around to the electoralism question and 9/11 quickly convinced me that what these folks were arguing about imperialism and the role of the state in capitalism was correct.

[Olentzero]

On top of that, I correctly wrote "there." It gets me pissed that you are erroneous in correcting my grammar:).You spelled 'there' correctly, yes, but you didn't use it correctly. Go look up the difference between 'their' and 'there' sometime.


Cde Lev B wrote

I remember the Year 2000 presidential election campaigns very well. The ISO went all out in backing Nader; they were really big Nader supporters that year. That was the year Workers Vanguard published an article blasting the Nader candidacy, for the simple reason that Nader is a union-busting creep, which can easily be documented. It should be added that when Nader later (in a different election year) accepted the support of the xenophobic, privatizing "Reform" Party and ran as their candidate in some states, the ISO still backed Nader, while asking people to vote for him via the Green Party ticket. What a great guy! One can readily see why liberals love him!Yeah, I was around for both those campaigns, and you miss the point entirely. We didn't support Nader because we honestly thought he would change things if, on the off chance, he got into the White House; we supported him because he represented a real chance for a third party to break the political duopoly still enjoyed by the Republocrats. Even then (http://www.isreview.org/issues/14/election_2000.shtml#socialists) - in 2000 - we weren't hesitant in our criticisms, and we were quite clear what we thought the limitations were.

The 2004 election brought out a lot of debate within the ISO, and I still remember the huge amount of internal wrangling that went on up through our summer conference that year. It wasn't a foregone conclusion from Day One early that spring when Nader announced his candidacy again that the ISO would support him; in fact it really wasn't decided until our summer conference - and a large discussion attended by almost everyone at the conference - that we would do so. People rightly had problems with Nader approaching the Reform Party to get on the ballot in states where the Green Party wasn't or couldn't be, but others felt that as long as he was on the Green Party ticket (and that whole Cobb thing was a huge mess) there was still the possibility of getting a third party into the political arena on a long-term, if not permanent, basis.

Socialism won't come through the ballot box, and the ISO has never said it will. But on the other hand, a multi-party system in the States would give the radical left a better opportunity to get its message out to the general public. That was why we supported the Nader campaign.

EDIT: Seems Jimmie has proved me wrong on the 2004 election. I know we didn't even bother discussing Nader in 2008 because he'd completely abandoned the Greens, but I was quite sure we decided to provide limited support for Nader in 2004.

EDIT 2: theredson, in some cities, like DC, the situation is reversed. There were a number of parties I never saw except at major demonstrations, whereas the ISO always found somewhere to be.

[Jimmie Higgins]

So my criticism, in my limited experience, is that the ISO does not have a large enough street presence.Dude, tell the Marxists you meet with politics similar to ours to join us then:D

But in general, yeah there are far too few of us for the tasks at hand - and I don't mean just ISOers. RCP is better about being flashy, but from my perspective we do a lot of movement work and have been heavily involved in coalitions and one of our members led one of the marches to shut down the port - of course at that same march, someone forgot to bring the banner we made, but we're all human and luckily it looks like struggle will be with us for a while so we'll have more opportunities to learn and participate and build more.


EDIT: Seems Jimmie has proved me wrong on the 2004 election. I know we didn't even bother discussing Nader in 2008 because he'd completely abandoned the Greens, but I was quite sure we decided to provide limited support for Nader in 2004.We did initially support him and I helped collect signatures for him in Berkeley which in the rightward shift of "Anybody But Bush/There wouldn't have been a war if Nader hadn't run and Gore won" was an experience along the lines of what trying to get an openly gay candidate on a ballot in the 1980s may have been like. I had people take the petitions from me and try and destroy them and I was spit on byKerry supporters . Hmm, yes, somehow I think if we wanted to "pander to liberals" I don't think supporting Nader who liberals hated with passion usually reserved for Bush would have been the way to go. Instead, as I explained and as we explained in publications at the time, we were hoping that a prominent challenge to the Democrats could be the beginnings of an independent left. Occupy is doing that instead and is much superior, but in 2004, how could we know that the unorganized class anger that we believed was building up due to the hold of the 2 parties and their agreement on war and neoliberalism would only find expression now? I think we were right in 2000, wrong in 2004, but we quickly made a switch when we saw what we had hoped to come from such a campaign was not attracting or galvanizing the anti-war movement. Of course some others on the left said we ditched Nader in order to provide cover for Kerry (as if any group on the radical left is that influential anyway), so also sometimes no matter what, there are criticisms.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Damn, you guys are being slippery. The revolutionary comrades on this thread keep on saying it and you keep missing it. You say "we don't support bourgeois candidates" and when we point out specifically where you did, you tell us WHY you did. You crossed the class line and are shameless about it. Yeah, the even more rightwing liberals were pissed, how brave to support Nader. Oh wait, then you stopped supporting him. What a source of revolutionary pride that must be. Marxist revolutionaries recognize the class line, comrade. If you don't cross it, than you don't have to be sorry about it. And the ISO will do it again. If some kind of rad/lib petite bourgeois third party comes out of the Occupy movement, you will support that, albeit "critically." The concept of critical support as put forth by Trotsky extends ONLY to working class parties, period. Again, an ABC.

Look, you guys might really believe that this is the right way for revolutionary groups to put forward politics -- and you might favor socialist revolution. But your groups will ultimately stand in the way. You don't see it -- you are so steeped in it.

That is why we dismiss the ISO as a revolutionary organization. You are deeply influenced by the petite bourgeois rad/lib milieu that you muck around in. So when Obama was first elected, in your main article in SW you were lame in your "opposition" to him. Certainly, no one could tell that it was revolutionary opposition. The later article was even worse, really -- I mean "the class warrior Obama"? Were you joking? Duh, he wasn't really for the working class? Duh, he's exposed his true colors. It's either stupid or cynical.

I go back about 35 years in radical politics. Your group is much larger than it was, but is substantially the same as it was back when Cal Winslow was your head honcho in the US. Everything I have said about you is borne out in the examples I have cited. Groups that soft pedal their program to the world will ALWAYS bow to pressure. In fact, that is a form of bowing to that pressure. Maybe you think you are being smart and somehow will ease liberals into becoming revolutionaries by spoon feeding them pieces of revolutionary program one dollop at a time.

Groups that were significantly to the left of the ISO and made of much sterner stuff have bowed to pressure from non-revolutionary forces in times of upheaval and crisis (e.g. The POUM in Spain). If you lacked the cojones to tell the masses from day one that Obama is imperialist pig in chief, what kind of cowardly crap would you pull when the class struggle erupts and lives are on the line? Would you have had headlines explaining that Franco isn't really that good for Spain?

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Oh, and zero, you are quite correct about my misuse of the "there." Sorry about that. I used the word twice, once correctly and once incorrectly. One out of two is pretty bad. So I retract my objection to your grammatical correction. Your politics, however, remain reformist.:)

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Junior Revolutionary -- You really need to learn about the Trotskyist concept of military defense of the deformed/degenerated workers' states before you get into a discussion about it. China is not a capitalist country -- although the bureaucracy there does a great deal to put counterrevolution closer. So if the ISO takes a "pox on both your houses" view of China vs. the US, you are still on the wrong side of the class line. You should defend the gains of the Chinese Revolution that still exist. It will not be popular among liberals, for sure, but hey, communist politics rarely are.

[#FF0000]

just wanna jump in and point out that "butthurt" isn't homophobic

[Jimmie Higgins]

just wanna jump in and point out that "butthurt" isn't homophobic
Yeah I've never really thought of this as a homophobic slur - then again if it's really even questionable I might consider not using it in a political discussion if in doubt.

[ellipsis]

theredson, in some cities, like DC, the situation is reversed. There were a number of parties I never saw except at major demonstrations, whereas the ISO always found somewhere to be.

I would imagine that most parties have the sense not to grovel at the feet of the federal government and legitimize the centrality of its power by "going to Washington."


Dude, tell the Marxists you meet with politics similar to ours to join us then:D

But in general, yeah there are far too few of us for the tasks at hand - and I don't mean just ISOers. RCP is better about being flashy, but from my perspective we do a lot of movement work and have been heavily involved in coalitions and one of our members led one of the marches to shut down the port - of course at that same march, someone forgot to bring the banner we made, but we're all human and luckily it looks like struggle will be with us for a while so we'll have more opportunities to learn and participate and build more.

RCP has no street cred as far as i can tell, maybe is different in the east bay, but all the SF RCP folks are dinosaurs. Flashy≠effective. The most common peace of trash i saw in OGP on the day of the strike was the RCP newspaper; so bad you can't give it away.


just wanna jump in and point out that "butthurt" isn't homophobic

Warning for off topic post.

Homophobic or rape humor, its one of the two and I won't tolerate either.

"My arguement is so superior and it so clearly humiliates you that i might as well have anally raped you as a means of shaming as it would be the same effect."

outside of this thread anybody can provide me with a counter definition, but merely saying that I am wrong is not a valid argument.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I would imagine that most parties have the sense not to grovel at the feet of the federal government and legitimize the centrality of its power by "going to Washington."I don't think they "went there" I think they just live there - there's an impoverished city part, not just the government part.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Jimmie Higgins, the reason we are not understanding each other here is that we are speaking different languages. You say, with indignation, "hey we pulled support when Nader took on too much right-wing baggage." And you argue, you never thought or even suggested he would fight for socialism. Therefore it doesn't bother you that your organization told people to vote for this pro-capitalist politician -- and devoted resources toward that end. Anyone suggesting that would be rightly thrown out of the organizations that I have been involved with. It ain't revolutionary, it ain't Marxism and it ain't Trotskyism. It is reformist/liberal BS. Yes you are to the left of the Democratic Party, BFD. But not that much -- oh, deep in your hearts you are for socialism, you just don't really want to harp on it. Christ. Read Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Cannon and get a clue.

[ellipsis]

I don't think they "went there" I think they just live there - there's an impoverished city part, not just the government part.

You're probably right. I just generally think any kind of rally on the mall is a legitimation of the state; also left over rage from reading letters to the editor in the bay area papers "why don't they go protest in washington? why are they camping?".

Like I said, I don't really have direct experience with the ISO, so I'll with hold reservation until I do, rather than dismissing the group in a dogmatic/sectarian way like some are prone to.

[eyeheartlenin]

Originally Posted by Socialist Worker editorial about dropping support for Nader
MANY MORE people are considering a vote for Ralph Nader as a protest against war and corporate control of Washington than anyone would have guessed when Nader announced his independent presidential campaign in February. But Nader's recent moves--his acceptance of an endorsement by the right-wing Reform Party USA and his all-too-friendly meeting with Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry--have done a disservice to his supporters and severely undermined the case that he represents a left-wing alternative to the Washington status quo.
...
Socialist Worker was a proud supporter of Nader in the 2000 election....

I would be interested to find out the date that the SW editorial above was published, because I distinctly remember going to an ISO forum and denouncing Nader and the Reform Party, and my recollection is that an ISO'er responded by urging those present to vote for Nader, but not on the Reform Party line.

Any information will be gratefully received.

[Olentzero]

I would imagine that most parties have the sense not to grovel at the feet of the federal government and legitimize the centrality of its power by "going to Washington."As Jimmie said, and as I noted in another thread (http://www.revleft.com/vb/socialislism-one-dynasty-t166741/index.html), the ISO has an 18-year history of building a branch in Washington DC, not just going down there whenever there was a demonstration called. I helped found the branch, and for a good 13 years I watched it grow from a membership of four to a multi-racial, mixed gender branch of a good 30 or so comrades. No other organization on the far left came close; the Spartacist League was around for a while back in the '90s but faded, ANSWER was there for anti-war work but really didn't seem all that active outside that area, and the only thing I remember seeing of the PSL were stickers on lampposts.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Yes we speak two different languages: I don't condescend to people who have been nice enough to explain where they are coming from politically, I don't act ageist and condescending towards younger comrades; and I don't slander groups I have fundamental political disagreements with. Your first post in this thread had it spot-on. You disagree with some of our overall views of the USSR. This is the main issue the rest of this circumstantial crap ("oh that article that argues faith is misplaced in Obama wasn't hard enough for my liking, so you guys must be liberal" give me a fucking break) is smoke and mirrors. So because of this fundamental difference in viewpoint, you have developed this concept that we must be liberals. If our politics appeal to more people, it must be because we are hiding our politics or not challenging liberal ideas since you are obviously the true keeper of the flame and all those who disagree with your point of view are in the muck or slippery or liars:rolleyes:. Could it be that we can make marxist arguments that are more appealing to people because we actually try and engage people around us in radical politics and arguments and don't go: "DUH, Obama's an imperialist, didn't you know that you 23 year old Starbucks worker who is unfamiliar with radical politics. Duh!" "Why are you a dupe for being excited by a black man being elected in a racist country, don't you know anything about the history of the Democratic party or Marxist theory student/worker/activist?


Damn, you guys are being slippery.Slippery? You mean like promoting the idea that we support Obama and then when you get called on it and can't provide anything other than out of context descriptions like "transformative election" you move on to talking about the Greens or Shackman or some other circumstantial charge?

Most of your criticisms and the criticisms of certain sectarian groups are really just smoke and mirrors and so the slipperyness is in making these side little accusations and labels that can't be proven but can create a sense of doubt. These debate tactics are like when politicians call up supporters of their rivals and say, "why didn't so and so say he forced his wife to have an abortion?". If the accuser gets called on it, they can fall back and say, oh I wasn't really saying that, I was just raising a question. Your logic is the same:

"ISO are liberals who support Obama."
"Actually our paper made a case for why hope is misplaced before during and after his election"
"Well, why weren't they stronger in their condemnations? It's because they capitulate to liberals".

Here's the real deal below:


Some of my distaste for your political line are historical.

Ahh, so really the issue is hardly ever those insinuations but a more fundamental political disagreement that is actually worth talking about. The rest, in my opinion, is slippery sectarian bullshit left over from 30+ years of low political struggle where radicals were isolated and demoralized and turned inward, nasty, and dogmatic trying to keep the flame of radical political traditions alive.

For Stalinist and Maoist groups usually calling everything they disagree with "bourgeois" or whatnot comes from not being able to defend their shitty politics and say, "Hey wasn't stalin great" in public so instead they said, "it's the damn trots who are in the way, it's those liberal anarchists who prevent workers from fighting!"

For people who were trotskyists and anarchists, I think they just turned inward and worshiped the proper political line or tactic respectively without any real way to test it in practice.


The concept of critical support as put forth by Trotsky extends ONLY to working class parties, period. Again, an ABC.What working class parties? I wasn't an ISO member in 2000, but I'm not aware of any time that the ISO made a case for "critical support" for the Greens in this sense. We supported the campaign "with criticisms" of the limits of electoralism and while clearly stating that he and the Green party aren't socialist. The approach was like to a social movement because, as I said, in 2000 we thought this would be the expression of some of the street demonstrations and in 2004 that his protest candidacy could help organize the left of the anti-war movement. "Critical support" and a lot of the other theories developed by revolutionaries came out of revolutionary times when there were mass reformist parties and much larger revolutionary currents and CP-dominated or Dem-Soc-dominated trade unions. It wasn't like the ISO was trying to win the whole organizational apparatus of the Greens to the ISO.

It's as though you are complaining about our how poor our flight navigation plan is while looking at our blueprints for wings we are trying to build for our plane. The US left isn't even in a position to seriously begin discussing some of these concepts in a meaningful way. Like I said before, what mass reformist worker's parties?

Our view was simply that breaking the monopoly of the democrats on social movements would be a step forward in US workers being able to develop independent politics. A campaign that was explicitly a challenge to the Democrats would potentially be a positive step and would attract the seeds of an independent left in the US (people in social movements who were sick of the Democrats, people in the labor movement who were tired of their union's support of Democratic politicians who uphold Taft-hartly and promote neo-liberal policies). So the goal was not party-building (other than the hope that some good people who were convinced of our politics might join) but trying to help develop an independent left in the US.

We think that a rebuilt left will give space to working class radical leaders to develop, space for political groups to develop and this would be where an organic working class vanguard would be. It didn't happen with the anti-globalization movement, the anti-war movement (least of all of them) but from Egypt to Wisconsin to Occupy, we are potentially seeing that develop now. In Oakland the militant labor left is organizing though the occupy movement and in small ways bringing together rank and file militants with movement activists and radicals and so on - a family member of Oscar Grant led a march of labor to shut down the ports - very interesting connections beginning to form between different areas of class struggle. If struggle continues and radicalizes than these movements could be laying the foundation for future movements more directly related to the working class out of which a real vanguard begins to emerge.


Look, you guys might really believe that this is the right way for revolutionary groups to put forward politics -- and you might favor socialist revolution. But your groups will ultimately stand in the way. You don't see it -- you are so steeped in it.Who knows maybe even you might be sincere about wanting to see revolution but your political dogmatism will mean that the movements that might be able to achieve that have come and gone while you were standing on the sidelines.

Was that condescending in tone? Yeah I don't like it when people do that to me and my comrades either.


That is why we dismiss the ISO as a revolutionary organization. You are deeply influenced by the petite bourgeois rad/lib milieu that you muck around in.You mean social movements and class struggle - right now waged mostly by people with illusions in liberalism or Democrats? Well show me where the class conscious mass struggle is and I'll happily go organize there.


So when Obama was first elected, in your main article in SW you were lame in your "opposition" to him. Certainly, no one could tell that it was revolutionary opposition. The later article was even worse, really -- I mean "the class warrior Obama"? Were you joking? Duh, he wasn't really for the working class? Duh, he's exposed his true colors. It's either stupid or cynical. First of all this is just more insinuation and your opinion dressed up as if it were somehow objectivly true. Your argument basically boils down to: even though the article is against Obama, I didn't think it was forceful enough so therefore you guys are all a bunch of reformists. Please.

Second, so when some worker comes up to you and says, "hey wow, I never thought a black man would be elected in the US!" or "Why isn't Obama actually fighting to have a healthcare system?" you say, "Duh, he's a representative of the bourgeois. Duh, don't you know anything?"

Really, the only difference the ISO has with the general analysis of the Democrats and Obama specifically is tone and how you approach someone who has misplaced hope in him. We also published a book in 2008 to argue that the Democrats are the graveyard of social movements and not allies to workers or fighting oppression. Oh wait, we didn't do a televised book tour so obviously we are hiding our politics, duh.:rolleyes:


I go back about 35 years in radical politics.And the scars of all that working class retreat and ruling class momentum really shows.


Groups that were significantly to the left of the ISO and made of much sterner stuff have bowed to pressure from non-revolutionary forces in times of upheaval and crisis (e.g. The POUM in Spain). If you lacked the cojones to tell the masses from day one that Obama is imperialist pig in chief, what kind of cowardly crap would you pull when the class struggle erupts and lives are on the line? Would you have had headlines explaining that Franco isn't really that good for Spain?First of all seriously what masses are reading SW? What masses give a fuck about what any group on the radical left has to say about anything? We are starting from a low point, your whole political conception seems to be: well the ISO is bigger than other groups, so it must be the Menshiviks, us real revolutionaries must then be the Bolsheviks.

Second, after Egypt's uprising our name for Obama was "orchestrator of the international counter-revolutionary effort" - not quite keeping the liberal line of "but he wants to help democracy".

Third really Franco and Obama? I even argued against people comparing Bush to Hitler. I don't think any workers who related to the leftist politics or working class struggle had any illusions in Franco bringing about progressive change whereas I have no doubt that tomorrow's revolutionaries were probably yesterday's hoper-changer kids.

Again our view was not to "hide criticism" or "bow to pressure" but simply to make a case that empathized with people's hopes while also arguing that they were misplaced - which works much better than your approach: "Hey worker, you're a dupe! Duh"

Fourth. "What kind of cowardly..." hmm, again complete conjecture... if LBJ isn't elected maybe the a-bomb will be dropped, can you trust that other guy? I don't think actually fighting for political ideas in movements and helping to build movements that could develop a renewed tradition of working class militancy and new organization is cowardly at all. I think the cowardly thing is using the impurity of X Y Z occupy or social movement or whatnot as an excuse for standing on the sidelines and telling everyone else that they are wrong but not having the spine (since not all people have balls and testicles don't make someone brave or cowardly) to try and build movements and show in practice the value of radical politics is cowardly. The fear that somehow trying to convince people with liberal ideas will infect you is cowardly. Calling people's sincerity and politics into question indirectly and spreading opinion as fact on the internet is cowardly.

I mean shit, I can understand if you're feeling defensive about a "call-out" thread, but if you are so experienced and knowledgeable, why not a little grace and patience and more importantly, not tossing around lazy slurs at other groups that are backed by nothing but your impressions and straw-men or bits and pieces of articles out of context (and actually counter to the full argument of the piece). There are the real political arguments about China and so on that could clarify different positions rather than these insinuations.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Hey Jimmie, take it easy. It's nothing personal. To the younger comrades I am saying that if you call yourself a Trotskyist and you don't understand Trotsky's line of military defense of Stalinist countries, then you are missing something very important. I don't think it is condescending to say that you should read "In Defense of Marxism."

I have to go to work so I will address more of your comments in a bit. Buck up, comrade, I will return to the SW website and find more things that bolster my arguments. Of course, you get pissed when I say you support pro-capitalist politicians, demonstrate the support quoting from your press, and you then accuse me of slandering your party. So I don't know if I can satisfy your stringent standards for proof. I shall try.

[Olentzero]

The only thing we're accusing you of, and quite rightly, is a gross misinterpretation of the quotes you provide. Seriously, it looks like you find the first thing you find objectionable (usually under the heading "doesn't denounce quick enough or hard enough") and stop reading. One does not simply denounce one's way into revolution. I mean, you may feel like you're keeping the revolutionary tradition alive through sheer effort of individual will alone because no other party is revolutionary enough for you, but ultimately you condemn yourself to political irrelevance.

The ISO, whatever political faults it may have (and I have enough experience with them to say that pandering to bourgeois liberalism is not one of them) is nevertheless striving to make itself politically relevant; its growth over the last two decades is testament to its success in that regard.

I really do get the feeling that any other arguments you come up with are going to be in the same vein: either unsubstantiated assertions or misinterpretations of quotes. Despite my original post, I seriously doubt your failure to put up will convince you to shut up, and I feel three pages has been enough time and effort spent. From here on in, threads like this tend to get stupid and pointless, to say nothing of Godwin's Law kicking into effect.

So yeah, I'm gonna say I'm done. Jimmie's last contribution is something I pretty much agree with wholeheartedly, and I really have nothing further to add.

Except for #FF0000 - seriously, don't belabor that point here. I'm asking you nicely; please, take it somewhere else.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

No you misunderstand, again. I am not saying that the ISO is bigger, therefore it must be Menshevik, I say, you are bigger AND your politics are Menshevik. I mean, really, the left in the US is so terribly small, that even if the ISO is ten times the size of the SL, so what? Although my guess is that they probably have a similar number of real cadre, but who knows, maybe the ISO has twice or three times the membership. What does that mean? Bupkis. It really says nothing about either org.



How the fuck can I "grossly misrepresent" quotes? They are quotes! They read to me like the half-baked stuff of crass reformism. To you, they are sterling bits of revolutionary propaganda. That's why we have chosen to work with the groups that we do.


The Socialist Worker website only goes back a few years -- I was hoping to find some of your horrible stuff around events in Iran in 1979-1980. I'm pretty sure that you were very enthusiastic about the Mullahs, but I did want to find a quote before simply asserting that.



You certainly did support counterrevolution in the USSR and Eastern Europe that has led to, among other awful things, immiseration of the working class in that region. I know that you and your cothinkers believe the counterrevolution occurred in the 1930s. A time when there was absolutely no change in the basic socioeconomic picture in the USSR -- impressionism then, impressionism now.


But okay, I will stop throwing bricks


I will leave you with a quote from the SW site that was reposted today. I just need to add, that King was never a proponent of socialism or socialist revolution. In fact he greatly added to the legitimacy of the Democratic Party at a time when it was in real trouble with African Americans. If he had second thoughts, why that's great -- but uncritically quoting this pacifist liberal is, you guessed it, pandering to rad/lib prejudices. Ding ding ding! Thanks for playing!




America has elected an African American president--something that would have been impossible only a generation ago. But King's words remind us of a further "turn" that America has yet to take. A new generation will have to take up this challenge.
In the final pages of Where Do We Go from Here? King calls on a bit of Biblical poetry to urge his readers to build the kind of determined movement that could make their dreams a reality:

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism. With this powerful commitment, we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain."
Amen.
SW January 19, 2009

[Olentzero]

Thanks for finally offering unmitigated proof that you're a complete fucking idiot.

[Homo Songun]

Sorry, I'm not buying it that the ISO is liberal just because they endorsed Nader or because they had a nuanced position on the Obama phenomenon. All that tells me is that they were engaging with the world of politics beyond the kiddie pool of Trotskyism. After all, the set of liberals is not contiguous with the set of people who support Nader. Or Obama for that matter. I do think they have problems in that area, but only because of their positions on things beyond superficial tactical questions like whom to vote for in a given election.

BTW, what are the basic documents for state-capitalist theory a la the ISO tradition, for people that want to know more?

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

What working class parties? I wasn't an ISO member in 2000, but I'm not aware of any time that the ISO made a case for "critical support" for the Greens in this sense. We supported the campaign "with criticisms" of the limits of electoralism and while clearly stating that he and the Green party aren't socialist. The approach was like to a social movement because, as I said, in 2000 we thought this would be the expression of some of the street demonstrations and in 2004 that his protest candidacy could help organize the left of the anti-war movement. "Critical support" and a lot of the other theories developed by revolutionaries came out of revolutionary times when there were mass reformist parties and much larger revolutionary currents and CP-dominated or Dem-Soc-dominated trade unions. It wasn't like the ISO was trying to win the whole organizational apparatus of the Greens to the ISO.

It's as though you are complaining about our how poor our flight navigation plan is while looking at our blueprints for wings we are trying to build for our plane. The US left isn't even in a position to seriously begin discussing some of these concepts in a meaningful way. Like I said before, what mass reformist worker's parties?

Our view was simply that breaking the monopoly of the democrats on social movements would be a step forward in US workers being able to develop independent politics. A campaign that was explicitly a challenge to the Democrats would potentially be a positive step and would attract the seeds of an independent left in the US (people in social movements who were sick of the Democrats, people in the labor movement who were tired of their union's support of Democratic politicians who uphold Taft-hartly and promote neo-liberal policies). So the goal was not party-building (other than the hope that some good people who were convinced of our politics might join) but trying to help develop an independent left in the US.

So, you don't call pro capitalist politicians socialists. You just tell people to vote for them. Hmmm. It's not critical support, it's just support for their campaigns, like supporting a social movement? And I'm not supposed to suggest that you read Lenin or Trotsky on electoral politics? This sounds like an excuse to play in the electoral sandbox with some left-leaning liberals, while supporting anti-working class politicians, ooops, I mean pro-capitalist campaigns, critically.

The job of revolutionaries is not to build reformist or liberal movements, even if these are opposed to Dems and the GOP. You could try reading Trotsky or Cannon on CP suppport to the La Follette Campaign in the twenties for a start. Let me be clear. I am not trying to be ageist. I was not alive in the 1920s. But one does need to understand the history of their organization and of the rest of the left. That is if we are not to make the same mistakes over and over and over again.

[Olentzero]

BTW, what are the basic documents for state-capitalist theory a la the ISO tradition, for people that want to know more?Well, the foundation is Tony Cliff's State Capitalism in Russia (http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1955/statecap/), which is a very in-depth look and requires a more than passing familiarity with Marxist economic theory. There's also Russia: From Workers' State to State Capitalism (http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/Russia-From-Workers-State-to-State-Capitalism), a collection of articles from leading ISO and SWP members. That's all I can think of off the top of my head at the moment.

EDIT: It looks like CLR James also wrote on the subject, and his writings are about to be reprinted (http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/The-Dialectics-of-State-Capitalism).

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Thanks for finally offering unmitigated proof that you're a complete fucking idiot.

That will teach me. Tsk tsk. Resorting to ad hominen attacks should be beneath you. You scream that I slander you and your group as reformists that pander to liberals. Your CO makes it easy to show. Do you think MLK really had a positive impact on the development of a revolutionary movement in this country? Was he a socialist? How do you feel about Malcolm X? He was not overly fond of King, you know. Listen, I know the truth hurts, man.

And yes, the State Cap view is a big problem. Leads to major betrayals like hailing Lech Walesa and Solidarity in Poland -- a movement that has set the Polish working class back a few decades, at least. Oh yeah, that happened too long ago to matter.

However, the LRP also have a third-campist line, but at least they don't write articles fulsomely praising King. I consider them to be much more serious, albeit wrongheaded, about being revolutionaries.

And these are dark political days, indeed (that's my age and cynicism speaking). I know Lenin said, in speaking to Russian Emigre students in Switzerland in 1916 that he would never live to see the Russian Revolution. So extremely unexpected things can happen. But things are where they are. And look, I hope you ISOers are correct that the Occupy Movement leads to big things, that would be great -- but I fear wherever they go, you will be tailing them.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Shmuel, I never said the were liberal, I said that they pander to liberals. They couch their ostensibly socialist program in terms that are designed to appeal to liberals. They tail liberal or rad/lib movements and frequently offer tepid and vague criticism. They are dead wrong about State Capitalism -- but that is a discussion for another time. I consider them reformists -- or course they beg to differ. Compare Workers Vanguard, or the Internationalist to the Socialist Worker -- and by all means find out more about what these different groups stand for.

[Renegade Saint]

You certainly did support counterrevolution in the USSR and Eastern Europe that has led to, among other awful things, immiseration of the working class in that region. I know that you and your cothinkers believe the counterrevolution occurred in the 1930s. A time when there was absolutely no change in the basic socioeconomic picture in the USSR -- impressionism then, impressionism now.
For there to have been a 'counterrevolution' between 1989-1992 it would have to be one class throwing out another and supplanting itself as the ruling class. What's amazing about the fall of the USSR and the Eastern European states is the continuity. In Russia Boris Yeltsin was president, followed by KGB officer Vladimir Putin-and current and former KGB/SVR officers are well known to be influential in government (in fact the difference between the SVR and KGB is so slight they still call themselves "Chekists"). The former factory mangers simply bought the factories and became capitalists. In several of the central Asian states the former general secretaries of the Communist party became president (in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan they're still in office). One ruling class wasn't thrown out and replaced with another with the fall of the USSR, the same one simply took a different name. Whatever you want to call the collapse of the USSR, it wasn't a 'counterrevolution'.

Olentzero, lets not resort to name-calling if possible.
(http://www.revleft.com/vb/member.php?u=37186)

[Lucretia]

I just wanted to chime in on this issue of the ISO "supporting" Obama. While Jimmie is technically correct that the ISO did not endorse Obama, or say that Obama's election represented progress for the revolutionary socialist cause, that fact does not exhaust the entire issue. And this is what I think the critics on this thread are getting at. When you say that Obama's election was "transformative," that puts a positive gloss on his election -- even if you claim that its positiveness is restricted to the fact that a black man is president in a country with a shamefully racist history. That the praise is based on identity politics rather than class politics should raise a red flag (no pun intended) for revolutionary socialists. After reading an article that mentions that Obama represents the bourgeois class, but that his election is "transformative" and "historic," it is very easy to come away with a lukewarm position of indecisiveness about what to make of Obama. After all, his election is a little bit negative and a little bit positive. In my opinion that is not an advisable representation for a revolutionary socialist party to put forward regarding its attitude to bourgeois candidates winning elections. There are already enough news outlets pointing out the "historic" nature of Obama's victory, so we don't need Leninist news articles echoing this celebration. We should devote what space we have to thoroughly and relentlessly pushing the stick back in the other direction, showing our entire government is a slave to capital. Instead of doing this, the ISO always insists on adding the positive "transformative" line to its criticisms, watering them down, in a way that at least to me appears a way to curry favor with those in liberal currents.

[Lucretia]

That will teach me. Tsk tsk. Resorting to ad hominen attacks should be beneath you. You scream that I slander you and your group as reformists that pander to liberals. Your CO makes it easy to show. Do you think MLK really had a positive impact on the development of a revolutionary movement in this country? Was he a socialist? How do you feel about Malcolm X? He was not overly fond of King, you know. Listen, I know the truth hurts, man.

And yes, the State Cap view is a big problem. Leads to major betrayals like hailing Lech Walesa and Solidarity in Poland -- a movement that has set the Polish working class back a few decades, at least. Oh yeah, that happened too long ago to matter.

However, the LRP also have a third-campist line, but at least they don't write articles fulsomely praising King. I consider them to be much more serious, albeit wrongheaded, about being revolutionaries.

And these are dark political days, indeed (that's my age and cynicism speaking). I know Lenin said, in speaking to Russian Emigre students in Switzerland in 1916 that he would never live to see the Russian Revolution. So extremely unexpected things can happen. But things are where they are. And look, I hope you ISOers are correct that the Occupy Movement leads to big things, that would be great -- but I fear wherever they go, you will be tailing them.

This is laughable. The idea that state capitalist theory inexorably leads to Walesa is as absurd as the idea that Marx's value theory invariably leads to Stalin's gulags. For some one who seems relatively knowledgeable about the history of Trotskyist groups in the US, you should be aware that other groups besides the ISO and the LRP have had a state cap line in describing what you would call stalinist "workers states" (there's a contradiction in terms), and their record indicates that whatever serious mistakes the ISO makes in its approach to politics is most certainly not some kind of logical extension of a state cap line.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Before the "collapse" there was a collectivized planned economy, wealth was not inherited, there was a monopoly on foreign trade and people had a right to education, medical care a place to live and more. Nobody owned the factories that were appropriated by the nascent bourgeoisie. Classes, according to Marx have a definite relationship to the means of production. So this "class" of bureaucrats, that benefited from, but did not own the factories then became factory owners. Their relationship to the means of production changed and as a result, so did their class status. That they were miserable creatures before and after, there can be no doubt, but class is a material, rather than a moral category.

According to your tendency, when did China restore capitalism? I really don't know and would be interested to hear about that. Cuba? Or were China and Cuba always "state capitalist"?

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Okay Lucretia, which "state cappers" denounced Walesa once his CIA/Papal connections became known? Are there any groups that took a position against Solidarity? I'd be interested to know. Still, if you were not concerned with preserving the gains of the overthrow of capitalism, it was a lot easier to follow Walesa. If it is already capitalism, there is nothing to defend. But if you can find an example, I will certainly have something to consider.

[Lucretia]

Before the "collapse" there was a collectivized planned economy, wealth was not inherited, there was a monopoly on foreign trade and people had a right to education, medical care a place to live and more.

It's the same empiricist arguments every time I cross swords with you Ortho-Trots. Planning takes place in large capitalist corporations which control different aspects of the same industry through vertical integration. Capitalism is not, nor has it ever been, exclusive of planning. As Engels wrote in his critique of the Erfurt Program: "I know of capitalist production as a social form, as an economic stage; and of capitalist private production as a phenomenon occurring one way or another within that stage. What does capitalist private production mean then? Production by a single entrepreneur, and that is of course becoming more and more an exception. Capitalist production through limited companies [corporations] is already no longer private production, but production for the combined account of many people. And when we move on to the Trusts, which control and monopolize whole branches [of industry] , then that means an end not only to the private production, but also to the planlessness." Note that he does not say here that the end of planlessness represents the end of capitalism or the end of class society or the transformation of a national economy into a workers' state.

As for your statement about universal education and health care, name me a Western European country that doesn't have this. Do we consider them "workers states" on this basis, too? Elimination of inheritance laws? Congratulations -- you have a capitalist system where the managers and beneficiaries of capital have a greater chance of coming from different families. How egalitarian.


Nobody owned the factories that were appropriated by the nascent bourgeoisie. Classes, according to Marx have a definite relationship to the means of production. So this "class" of bureaucrats, that benefited from, but did not own the factories then became factory owners. Their relationship to the means of production changed and as a result, so did their class status. That they were miserable creatures before and after, there can be no doubt, but class is a material, rather than a moral category.This is the one thing that the Ortho-Trot has in common with the most extreme Stalinist: the idea that state control of the economy is somehow progressive or represents socialism, even in cases where the state is clearly not under workers' control. In making this claim, Ortho-Trots are substituting the concept of property relations for the Marxist conception of social relations of production. They are literally viewing property relations in abstraction from the social relations of production. And as Marx put it, "To try to give a definition of property as of an independent relation, a category apart - an abstract eternal idea - can be nothing but an illusion of metaphysics or jurisprudence." So we have countries that are categorized according to the form in which property is held, without any regard to who manages and controls that property. What is sadly comical about is that in the states in question, the property was not controlled by workers, yet the economy is called a planned socialized economy under a workers' state.


According to your tendency, when did China restore capitalism? I really don't know and would be interested to hear about that. Cuba? Or were China and Cuba always "state capitalist"?Sorry, but I do not have a "tendency." I am not the member of any group.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

I just wanted to chime in on this issue of the ISO "supporting" Obama. While Jimmie is technically correct that the ISO did not endorse Obama, or say that Obama's election represented progress for the revolutionary socialist cause, that fact does not exhaust the entire issue. And this is what I think the critics on this thread are getting at. When you say that Obama's election was "transformative," that puts a positive gloss on his election -- even if you claim that its positiveness is restricted to the fact that a black man is president in a country with a shamefully racist history. That the praise is based on identity politics rather than class politics should raise a red flag (no pun intended) for revolutionary socialists. After reading an article that mentions that Obama represents the bourgeois class, but that his election is "transformative" and "historic," it is very easy to come away with a lukewarm position of indecisiveness about what to make of Obama. After all, his election is a little bit negative and a little bit positive. In my opinion that is not an advisable representation for a revolutionary socialist party to put forward regarding its attitude to bourgeois candidates winning elections. There are already enough news outlets pointing out the "historic" nature of Obama's victory, so we don't need Leninist news articles echoing this celebration. We should devote what space we have to thoroughly and relentlessly pushing the stick back in the other direction, showing our entire government is a slave to capital. Instead of doing this, the ISO always insists on adding the positive "transformative" line to its criticisms, watering them down, in a way that at least to me appears a way to curry favor with those in liberal currents.

Yes. Thanks for the clarifying post, Lucretia. I too never claimed that they endorsed Obama. But their frequent Socratic discussions about the relative merits or problems with him made me somewhat ill.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

I was addressing the question about China and Cuba to comrade Saint, but okay then, in your own humble opinion, Lucretia - when was capitalism restored in China, Cuba, Vietnam? Or were they always capitalist?

I think you confuse democratic forms with the class nature of the state. There can be regimes (e.g., Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy) where there is no democracy, the bourgeoisie as a class do not exert much political control, yet they are capitalist, bourgeois states. Why can that not be true for worker's states?

[Lucretia]

I was addressing the question about China and Cuba to comrade Saint, but okay then, in your own humble opinion, Lucretia - when was capitalism restored in China, Cuba, Vietnam? Or were they always capitalist?

I think you confuse democratic forms with the class nature of the state. There can be regimes (e.g., Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy) where there is no democracy, the bourgeoisie as a class do not exert much political control, yet they are capitalist, bourgeois states. Why can that not be true for worker's states?


Because socialism, unlike capitalism or any other class society, is not a system that functions independently of, in spite of, workers' control. The very essence of socialism is workers' control, a set of political relations. They are not some secondary issue that can be done away with, like whether a capitalist is able to exert direct control over a government dominated by private capital accumulation. This, by the way, is why bourgeois revolutions are possible even where capitalists do not exercise leadership functions. It's the point Marx made about capitalism being out of the control of even capitalists. You cannot have a socialist revolution in which the working class is not at the helm (under the leadership of the most class-conscious of those workers, of course).

[Renegade Saint]

Before the "collapse" there was a collectivized planned economy, wealth was not inherited, there was a monopoly on foreign trade and people had a right to education, medical care a place to live and more. Nobody owned the factories that were appropriated by the nascent bourgeoisie. Classes, according to Marx have a definite relationship to the means of production. So this "class" of bureaucrats, that benefited from, but did not own the factories then became factory owners. Their relationship to the means of production changed and as a result, so did their class status. That they were miserable creatures before and after, there can be no doubt, but class is a material, rather than a moral category.

According to your tendency, when did China restore capitalism? I really don't know and would be interested to hear about that. Cuba? Or were China and Cuba always "state capitalist"?
1. I'm not sure why you put collapse in quotes, that's pretty clearly what happened.

2. Lucretia already answered a couple of your points pretty easily.

3. The state owned the factories, that's pretty simple. Who "owned" (ie, controlled) the state? Clearly the workers didn't. The bureaucracy/apparatchik did, ergo they owned/controlled the factories-and operated them to their benefit. The name (manager-->owner) of their relationship to the means of production changed, their actual level of control did not.

4. I don't know the specific year, if any, that China became state capitalist. But I would dearly love to see you argue that China is any kind of workers' state currently. That would be truly hilarious. Keep in mind that capitalists are allowed to join the Chinese Communist Party.

5. If you believe that a state can be a "workers' state" without the workers controlling the state, and you believe that a state can be a "bourgeois state" without the bourgeoisie controlling the state, what exactly are your definitions of "bourgeois state" and "workers' state"?

[Lucretia]

5. If ... you believe that a state can be a "bourgeois state" without the bourgeoisie controlling the state, what exactly are your definitions of "bourgeois state" and "workers' state"?

A bourgeois state is not defined according to who occupies the offices of government. It is defined by whether the governing regime facilitates and is compatible with capital accumulation. Such a regime does not necessarily have to be democratic; in fact, as our other interlocutor pointed out, it is perfectly compatible with a fascist government. One of the points Marx made in the Eighteenth Brumaire and that Trotsky made with his theory of permanent revolution is that a bourgeois revolution does not necessarily require the carrying out of democratic "bourgeois" tasks. In fact, that they can relinquish political control altogether for as long as it does not impinge upon their economic interests.

This all boils down to the key point that capitalism is a system over which no particular person or even group of people - including capitalists - has control. As Marx said, capitalists are just as alienated as workers are, though their class interests make them feel at home in such an alienated state. Socialism is the negation of this alienation, a system in which all the people collectively control decisions relating to production and distribution. Because of this, it cannot be defined as an economic system abstracted from the relations of power within it. And a socialist or workers' economy cannot be carried out by political surrogates acting in the people's supposed interest as fascist officials might do for the capitalist class.

[workersadvocate]

I've read these sort of debates for a long time, and used to get caught up in them.

But now, I believe that the problem has been that the Dems and middle class politicos annd upwardly mobile students and union/social movement bureacrats seemed like the only thing going in America, so the left (mostly middle class itself in composition and outlok) tried to find some niche in the available political marketplace and build sects like small businesses. Problem is, the vast majority of the working class was nowhere near this middle class political marketplace where the US Left lives (how few left groups are set up at community college, but of course they're there with several competitors at all the more exclusive higher costing colleges).
It's great that the left has this or that politics published on the papers they sold to otger leftist and middle class political dabblers. State capper, degenerated workers state, proletarian paradise on the other side of the world...I think it all been branding and competition between small enterprises for a bigger share of the middle class political turf.

Hey, what about the working class! Did the Left forget all about us while having fun with the middle class college kids and the professors and the union bureaucats and civil rights burescrats and middle class professional "progressive" celebs and who ever else they've been enclaving with (enclaving meant in a derogatory way as reversing of the "slumming"epithet--it's what I call middle class leftists who avoid the working class itself whenever possible in favor of the better off 33%.. politically akin to "white flight", and BTW it ain't an accident about why the demographics of middle class left groups are they way they are)?
Now, that's where I start. Fuck what they say...what do they do? What have they become as a result? I won't bother looking up shit in past newspapers to argue about. If the group is basically nowhere near the working class and poor people, not primarily made up of such people at every level in their group's hierarchy, and isn't spending the vast majority of its efforts and resources REGULARLY in the working class and poor
communities, then it doesn't matter what shit they wrote in their newspapers and books.
It's just a political small enterprise then, from the same "heart of America" middle class which gave us the Tea Party and Stormfront not to mention oodles of obnoxious reactionary and wannabe elitist "trends". They look down at working people...we look at these naked emporers and wonder if they'll kiss the asses of the proletariat in power the way they've tossed the salads of the bourgeoisie! Too incapable to be big cappies, yet too stupidly narcissistically stuck up to side with and serve the working class majority and leave the middle class shit behind. The US Left has for decades based itself on a class of people who probably make the worst candidates for consistently siding with and serving the working class. That "heart if America" will leave you high and dry almost everytime, because it is organically materialistically ideologically anticommunist to the core, and good proletarian revolutionaries will probably come to hate that 'America' and bury it at the soonest opportunity, like many working people feel who've had to suffer under that class of narrow narcissistic stuck up mini-lords and supposedly more intelligent/civil/moral/beautiful/cool people. It nakes about as much sense to base the left on that class as it would make to base the anti-apartheid stuggles in South Africa mostly on the better off
Afrikaners who had black servants making their beds and slaving away in their farms and mines! Yeah, I sense quite a few similarities actually. If you do to, then it's not enough to just write a paper criticizing the left. Time to start over, where we should have been all along, based mostly within and most efforts directed in working class and poor communities. Left who loves the middle class, lives among them and prefers to deal with them...does not compute, unless it really isn't left at all.
Of course, then somebody says now 'I used to be from the working class, but I pulled myself up from my own bootsteps, got a position in the middle class, they're lazy but I'm not, blah blah blah...' I look at current social being, and it usually predicts the sort of consciousness and activity to be found. It's amazing how prospects of upward mobility and a few crumbs can radically change one's outlook and deeds. They think they're "somebody" now because bourgeis society gaves them some puny acknowlgement, rationalize that they must be more deserving then the rest of the working class, and their outlook on class changes accordingly. Yes, this is the firm human material from which to construct a revolutionary left in the top imperialist power center in the world...lol!

This problem has plagued almost every existing left tendency, and certainly has not been limited only to America. It's a class problem first...the political problems and internal left bullshit tend to stem from that class problem. We got the ingredients to make yet another cake, but what is called for instead is a spicy-delicious chicken dish with corn, potatoes, spinich, and a bottle of white wine. We're sick of cake!

[Renegade Saint]

A bourgeois state is not defined according to who occupies the offices of government. It is defined by whether the governing regime facilitates and is compatible with capital accumulation. Such a regime does not necessarily have to be democratic; in fact, as our other interlocutor pointed out, it is perfectly compatible with a fascist government. One of the points Marx made in the Eighteenth Brumaire and that Trotsky made with his theory of permanent revolution is that a bourgeois revolution does not necessarily require the carrying out of democratic "bourgeois" tasks. In fact, that they can relinquish political control altogether for as long as it does not impinge upon their economic interests.

This all boils down to the key point that capitalism is a system over which no particular person or even group of people - including capitalists - has control. As Marx said, capitalists are just as alienated as workers are, though their class interests make them feel at home in such an alienated state. Socialism is the negation of this alienation, a system in which all the people collectively control decisions relating to production and distribution. Because of this, it cannot be defined as an economic system abstracted from the relations of power within it. And a socialist or workers' economy cannot be carried out by political surrogates acting in the people's supposed interest as fascist officials might do for the capitalist class.
Thank you. I wasn't under the impression that a bourgeois state must be democratic, in fact they usually aren't (any number of right-wing dictatorships/military governments in Latin America come to mind). So I guess I was half right, it's possible to have a bourgeois state where the bourgeois doesn't dominate, but a workers' state without workers' control is an oxymoron.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

So, Lucretia, you are arguing that in a workers' state, the form is more important than the underlying substance? Or maybe it is inextricable from it? BTW, no argument that there was ever anything close to socialism in the USSR or any of the deformed workers' state.

[Lucretia]

So, Lucretia, you are arguing that in a workers' state, the form is more important than the underlying substance? Or maybe it is inextricable from it? BTW, no argument that there was ever anything close to socialism in the USSR or any of the deformed workers' state.

It's just the opposite. My point is that you can have a form of state-controlled economy, but if it lacks the substance of workers' power, then it is not a workers' state or a workers' economy, or a transitional economy, or any such thing. If accumulation for the sake of competition occurs by dispossessing the workers of control over the means of production and paying them a wage, what you have is a capitalist class society, even if exploitation is carried out by bureaucrats who are crafting a plan for extracting surplus rather than an individual entrepreneur who requires no such plan.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Jimmy Higgins wrote:

I don't condescend to people who have been nice enough to explain where they are coming from politically, I don't act ageist and condescending towards younger comrades; and I don't slander groups I have fundamental political disagreements with. Your first post in this thread had it spot-on. You disagree with some of our overall views of the USSR. This is the main issue the rest of this circumstantial crap ("oh that article that argues faith is misplaced in Obama wasn't hard enough for my liking, so you guys must be liberal" give me a fucking break) is smoke and mirrors. So because of this fundamental difference in viewpoint, you have developed this concept that we must be liberals. If our politics appeal to more people, it must be because we are hiding our politics or not challenging liberal ideas since you are obviously the true keeper of the flame and all those who disagree with your point of view are in the muck or slippery or liars:rolleyes:. Could it be that we can make marxist arguments that are more appealing to people because we actually try and engage people around us in radical politics and arguments and don't go: "DUH, Obama's an imperialist, didn't you know that you 23 year old Starbucks worker who is unfamiliar with radical politics. Duh!" "Why are you a dupe for being excited by a black man being elected in a racist country, don't you know anything about the history of the Democratic party or Marxist theory student/worker/activist?Comrade -- you are the one who is being condescending. I would speak with great patience to a politically naive 23 year-old. But I wouldn't solidarize with him or her around the great progress people of color have made in the US as demonstrated by the election of Obama. I would say directly what I believe about Obama. Not some apologetic mealy-mouthed objection. If it scared him/her away now, maybe in a couple of months or years, he or she would recall that line of thinking. You would slyly tip toe around the issue. Who knows? Maybe you can fool him/her into being a Leninist. Wouldn't you rather trust that maybe the 23 year-old might be able to understand big boy/girl politics?

I have less patience with you and Olentzero because you are already ostensibly Marxist Revolutionaries. I feel you should know better. I do agree that it has a great deal to do with Cliff's State Cap position, that it flows from that, but I don't have the time or inclination at the moment to get into a big debate about that today.

Finally I don't call you names AND I never said you were liberals -- rather that you PANDER to them. It is a major difference. You don't call Obama an "imperialist swine" because you are afraid it would offend people. Comrade, revolutionary politics offend people.

[Lucretia]

Jimmy Higgins wrote:
Comrade -- you are the one who is being condescending. I would speak with great patience to a politically naive 23 year-old. But I wouldn't solidarize with him or her around the great progress people of color have made in the US as demonstrated by the election of Obama. I would say directly what I believe about Obama. Not some apologetic mealy-mouthed objection. If it scared him/her away now, maybe in a couple of months or years, he or she would recall that line of thinking. You would slyly tip toe around the issue. Who knows? Maybe you can fool him/her into being a Leninist. Wouldn't you rather trust that maybe the 23 year-old might be able to understand big boy/girl politics?

I have less patience with you and Olentzero because you are already ostensibly Marxist Revolutionaries. I feel you should know better. I do agree that it has a great deal to do with Cliff's State Cap position, that it flows from that, but I don't have the time or inclination at the moment to get into a big debate about that today.

Finally I don't call you names AND I never said you were liberals -- rather that you PANDER to them. It is a major difference. You don't call Obama an "imperialist swine" because you are afraid it would offend people. Comrade, revolutionary politics offend people.

I agree with half of this. Obviously, per my earlier comments, I find the other half patently untrue and illogical.

Over time I believe I've come to pinpoint my biggest issue with the ISO: it's their idea that at least one of the goals of the organization (and apparently it's what JH believes it the purpose of their theoretical journal) is to build a broad progressive left. Related to this is their justification for their minimum program, that intervening alongside liberals in the struggle for small reforms on the basis of building a broad progressive left (around such figures as, say, Ralph Nader during a presidential election year) will help organize workers and make them more confident in their ability as a class-conscious group.

From a Leninist perspective the problems here are clear. Party building should consist of organizing the most class conscious workers around an explicitly revolutionary program, not around a series of reforms that will just help make workers more class conscious. The end purpose of this is have a political party that arouses in the working class not just class consciousness, but revolutionary consciousness. This is one of the pivotal lessons Lenin learned after 1914. It is perfectly possible to be class conscious, to be organized as a class, but not to be organized with a revolutionary consciousness and around a revolutionary program. The error in the ISO's praxis is in attempting to separate class consciousness from revolutionary consciousness through the pursuit of a minimum program. The thinking seems to be that once the workers are made class conscious, they can then be turned to a revolutionary program. But the relationship between the revolutionary program and class consciousness is that they should be dialectical in Lenin's revolutionary theory. It is through propagandizing a revolutionary program that a class is to be made conscious, and it is through winning confidence in their abilities as a class that the revolutionary program becomes a real possibility. The ISO seems to want to separate these dialectically intertwined aspects of the same process into a chronological series of steps--first you encourage the workers to be class conscious, then once you've done that you convert them to a revolutionary program. (Note that I am not saying that the ISO does not attempt to propagandize around Marxism as an abstract theory, encouraging workers to join the group. I am talking about propagandizing around a concrete political program of a revolutionary nature.)

Members of the group might claim that this is not what they do, but if you browse any thread in which ISO members make remarks on the importance of reforms, that is the explanation you will be given -- it's about workers gaining confidence, but there's no real content to what the workers confidence should be directed to, certainly no talk of revolutionary consciousness.

How you think this theoretical error is necessarily related to the theory of state capitalism is baffling. Take the Revolutionary Socialist League, for example. They held to a state cap line but also emphasized the importance of a transitional program, thereby avoiding these kinds of mistakes.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

How you think this theoretical error is necessarily related to the theory of state capitalism is baffling. Take the Revolutionary Socialist League, for example. They held to a state cap line but also emphasized the importance of a transitional program, thereby avoiding these kinds of mistakes. It's a good question, and I'm not sure I can do it justice at the moment. It has always been my feeling that, in the US at least, the third campist views were capitulations to the intense anti-soviet, cold war pressures. As, I'm pretty sure you know, the first big grouping to break with Trotsky/Cannon over this was the Shachtman group the Workers Party, that resulted from the split in the US SWP in 1941 (Led by Shachtman, Abern and Burnham -- for details see In Defense of Marxism, by LT and Struggle for a Proletarian Party, by James Cannon). The opposition in the SWP went into opposition in response to the Hitler/Stalin pact and the Soviet invasion of Poland and Finland. While one might take issue with these particular things undertaken by the USSR, Trotsky points out that it is utterly impressionistic to change one's view of the class nature of the USSR based on these events and further militarily defends the USSRs war on both fronts. Cannon and Trotsky underscore that one big change the pact and military adventures did bring about, was in the view of the rad/lib intellectual milieu in the US. The USSR went from being viewed as fundamentally progressive, to being viewed as fundamentally evil at that point, by the rad/lib intellectual crowd.

To be sure, there was a lot going on in the SWP -- Cannon and Shachtman had had major fights prior to this -- and Shachtman and Abern had been there with Cannon at the founding of the US LO. And it took Shactman a long time to degenerate into an anti-communist (many predicted 20 months, whereas it took 20 years -- For Burnham, it took about 20 months). But once they had capitulated to the pressure to abandon Soviet Defensism, I think they were on their way.

In the US, the question of the USSR loomed much larger than it may have in other countries -- there was tremendous pressure to abandon defense of it. And I think that capitulating to pressure like this tends to lead in a certain direction. But groups that gave in to this kind of pressure usually became reformist like the ISO or the Cliffites. I remember the RSL as a left split from the IS, but I don't think they were around for very long -- I don't remember their views on Iran or Afghanistan, but would certainly be interested if you know.

Here are another batch of scattered thoughts about the USSR which should at least cause one to wonder as to how they might be imperialist:

The living standard in many of the "satellite" countries was higher than in the USSR
The Soviet Union gave aid (albeit in a very fucked up manner) to:
North Vietnam, Cuba, the Spanish Republic during the civil war, the PRC, and the PDPA in Afghanistan. In each of these struggles they were on the progressive side, the one that revolutionaries would give military support to. The US on the other hand, an actual imperialist country IMO, is always on the reactionary, side. No exceptions. This does not seem like a random distribution.

[Renegade Saint]

Finally I don't call you names AND I never said you were liberals -- rather that you PANDER to them. It is a major difference. You don't call Obama an "imperialist swine" because you are afraid it would offend people. Comrade, revolutionary politics offend people.
Did you read that in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People? Because that's exactly what titling articles with shit like that does. If you want to write a paper by revolutionary leftists, for revolutionary leftists go ahead. But that's the only audience you'll ever reach. Anyone who is not a committed revolutionary already will be instantly alienated and probably won't read any further. Our paper is aimed at, say, the 33% of people who say they favor socialism over capitalism. Many/most of them aren't politically developed enough to know that (and why) Obama is an imperialist swine-and screaming it at them won't convince them. On the other hand, if you meet people where they are (for instance, excited at the election of a black president) and explain why that fact won't make any difference in the lives of black people, let alone the working class as a whole, they're much more willing to listen. If you want to call that pandering, that's your prerogative.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Did you read that in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People? Because that's exactly what titling articles with shit like that does. If you want to write a paper by revolutionary leftists, for revolutionary leftists go ahead. But that's the only audience you'll ever reach.

Nah, I never read the book, but I did see the movie:). At a time when the left consists entirely of tiny propaganda groups, you should be looking to connect with the most politically conscious elements of the populace. Your press has no mass influence. At a time of revolutionary upsurge, with a mass readership, you might wax more didactic. Look I think being all socratic, like asking, "Is Obama really fighting for the working class?" is pandering, when you already know and are looking for a certain answer. I do think it is much better to say -- Obama was elected, because he can better enforce stark austerity on the working class and poor than an old white male, like McCain.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Shmuel, I never said the were liberal, I said that they pander to liberals. They couch their ostensibly socialist program in terms that are designed to appeal to liberals. They tail liberal or rad/lib movements and frequently offer tepid and vague criticism. They are dead wrong about State Capitalism -- but that is a discussion for another time. I consider them reformists -- or course they beg to differ. Compare Workers Vanguard, or the Internationalist to the Socialist Worker -- and by all means find out more about what these different groups stand for.

Yes, by all means read what the groups have to say and make your own decision about if Worker's Vanguard's hailing of the red army's war in Afghanistan or the US's intervention in Haiti are really the revolutionary positions to support.

Or you know, Socialist Woker's "mucking around" with workers who have some liberal viewpoints and trying to win them to a Marxist understanding is the way to go. If trying to tap into the discussions and debates going on with people "Why is Obama not all Change and Hope after all?", "Why are things getting worse for Blacks under Obama?" and provide our take is better than lecturing people in a mechanical way.

The first time I ran into the Sparts, by the way, was a protest against David Horowitz shortly after 9/11. They had a banner that said "All Power to the Soviets". If the point was to piss off Horowitz, it was an inspired sign, if it was to try and win people to marxist politics... what Soviets are there now that should take power? It's a silly annecdote, but I think it shows the difference in approach. One stands on the sidelines telling people we have the right ideas you should listen to us, while we say, ok, you're right to want to fight, you're right to want change, but we think there are some politics and tactics that are necessary to carry that struggle forward, we want to work with you and try and prove it in action.

Struggle has been low or in retreat, class consciousness exists at a low knee-jerk level at best for most people in the US, it's not pandering to recognize that and want to try and move from that starting point to a more advanced level. You can say "all power to the soviets" but that literally means nothing when there isn't even an independent or militant working class movement capable of even organizing a rank and file alternative. It shows that groups like the Sparts and people like Lev seem more interested in posturing to other people on the Left and trying to show their credentials as the "real revolutionaries" rather than actually trying to make the case in existing movements and existing groups of workers about why these politics are both the best for advancing the struggle now and the ones ultimately needed to change things from this shitty system. How these differences play out is that the ISO argues against liberals and NGOs and participates in struggles and tries to promote our politics in the context of thses struggles whereas other groups like to denounce other tiny groups in WSW or whatnot or go around trying to disrupt the propaganda efforts of other tiny groups or try and poach members of other tiny groups. It's insular, not very effective, and mostly just turns people off to the left rather than turning them onto these politics.

You can write articles about MLK or Malcolm X's class colaborationist politics, but at this stage of the game when most people aren't debating which way forward for a non-existent black power movement, it's better to use Malcolm X or MLK or the CP or the Populists or IWW to show people that it is possible for major fight-back, it's better to fight from without rather than within the system etc.

Our analysis and criticisms of MLK and Malcolm and Grarvyism and the BPP are not all that essentially different than most of the radical left and we have a basic book that goes through those politics. The point of an article on MLK called "the MLK they don't talk about" is not to go through that history and theory, but to try and make an argument around the "passive dreamer" image of MLK that all the politicians and media people were sure to promote on that holiday.

So really it's a question about tone and approach. I think for you Lev, really everything about us goes back to those fundamental disagreements about state-capitalism and so all this other stuff is an attempt to find evidence for your forgone conclusion and it wouldn't matter at all how our articles approached this or that question.

You claim that we will inevitable capitulate to imperialists and capitalists etc but maybe that's only because the politics you identify with already capitulated to USSR's imperialism, apologizing for Red Army Tanks and calling the manufacturing and capitalist giant of the world, China, deformed workers states. Really there are socialist features that can be salvaged and must be saved in China... you mean like the 2nd international and German SWP wanted to save the socialist reforms and gains in Germany before WWI? The ISO doesn't support the embargo on Cuba or any US attack on so-called socialist countries - or Iran etc, but we also don't go around pretending that they are somehow just deformed states which could merely have political changes to bring about socialism. The Chinese state is about as reformable as the US one is - workers will need to smash it and replace it with something new.

[Jimmie Higgins]

From a Leninist perspective the problems here are clear. Party building should consist of organizing the most class conscious workers around an explicitly revolutionary program, not around a series of reforms that will just help make workers more class conscious. I agree. But what revolutionary parties are there, what revolutionary vanguard is there to win to this, who are the mass reformist parties we are trying to counter-pose our own revolutionary politics to?

The ISO calls itself an organization and not a party for a political reason - we are more or less a large affinity group, a democratic collective around certain shared principles. A transitional program in the absense of movements is literally useless - it's propaganda and on that level it's ok, but it really isn't a program in any meaningful sense.

Our views are that the immediate things to be done are to try and help build a broader left with a revolutionary core. I think OWS is doing that right now and we could be seeing the beginnings of a new new left and so we want to see this movement grow and continue to mature. We also want to fight for a space for radical, specifically Marxist politics within that broader left.


The error in the ISO's praxis is in attempting to separate class consciousness from revolutionary consciousness through the pursuit of a minimum program. The thinking seems to be that once the workers are made class conscious, they can then be turned to a revolutionary program. But the relationship between the revolutionary program and class consciousness is that they should be dialectical in Lenin's revolutionary theory. It is through propagandizing a revolutionary program that a class is to be made conscious, and it is through winning confidence in their abilities as a class that the revolutionary program becomes a real possibility. The ISO seems to want to separate these dialectically intertwined aspects of the same process into a chronological series of steps--first you encourage the workers to be class conscious, then once you've done that you convert them to a revolutionary program. (Note that I am not saying that the ISO does not attempt to propagandize around Marxism as an abstract theory, encouraging workers to join the group. I am talking about propagandizing around a concrete political program of a revolutionary nature.)We don't believe there is a stage or formula for this, they are connected process like I said above, it's a combined process - of course we want to win people to revolutionary ideas and, we hope, specifically to the ISO itself. But we also see an independent left and the self-activity of workers as the way consiousness will develop on a mass scale. For all the work that comrades have put in over the years in recruiting in the ones and twos and winning marginal arguments (not to disparage, they were working in difficult times) a year of Egypt, Wisco, and OWS has done more to move consciousness forward than all the efforts of the revolutionary left over the last generation have done. That work wasn't in vain, it lays the groundwork and makes the possibility of building a mass revolutionary current more likely in an upturn.


How you think this theoretical error is necessarily related to the theory of state capitalism is baffling. Take the Revolutionary Socialist League, for example. They held to a state cap line but also emphasized the importance of a transitional program, thereby avoiding these kinds of mistakes.It's our "original sin" to him I think.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Okay, one last time -- As I said before, there is at least one third-campist group, the LRP, that I think is far more serious about revolution than the ISO. I disagree with their analysis of China, Cuba, etc., but I don't think they pander to liberals.

I think I said it before, but to be clear, third campism, as a wayward child of the Trotskyist movement, was born out of opportunism and bowing to public opinion. I think that's the organic connection. Burnham, Abern and Shachtman bailed on the USSR when the USSR was taking the most heat in lefty intellectual circles. And it caused a rupture in the world movement (the majority, per Trotsky's advice, was very careful to offer Shachtman et. al all kinds of factional rights and privileges -- they left the SWP).

I don't know the details of Cliff's decision at the time of the Korean War, but of course, I suppose you guys can elaborate if you'd like.

Of course, if you still think that these were good political decisions, then my argument would, necessarily seem "illogical." I am not saying that it is pre-ordained that third campists become mealy mouthed pandering reformists. I am saying that, historically, that has been the usual trajectory. And even in the best cases, like the LRP, you wind up supporting flamingly reactionary mullahs against Soviet Troops in Afghanistan based on the principle of defending the national rights. If you get it right on the class nature of the state, IMO, then you wind up supporting the side that won't kill people for teaching girls how to read. The PDPA were certainly not socialists, but the society they were trying to build was approximately 1200 years ahead of the islamic opposition.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Because socialism, unlike capitalism or any other class society, is not a system that functions independently of, in spite of, workers' control. The very essence of socialism is workers' control, a set of political relations. They are not some secondary issue that can be done away with, like whether a capitalist is able to exert direct control over a government dominated by private capital accumulation. This, by the way, is why bourgeois revolutions are possible even where capitalists do not exercise leadership functions. It's the point Marx made about capitalism being out of the control of even capitalists. You cannot have a socialist revolution in which the working class is not at the helm (under the leadership of the most class-conscious of those workers, of course).

Right-o. You cannot have socialism without workers control. I agree one hundred percent. And you can't have a proletarian revolution without the worker's at the helm (i.e., The October Revolution).

But what about the Chinese Revolution or the Cuban revolution -- I think it is wrong to say these were led by workers, even in the narrow sense that we would agree for the Russian Revolution. So was capitalism not overturned in Cuba and China. Were the peasants or their leaders state capitalists? This is where the state cap stuff does not make sense. And were the property and social overturns in China and Cuba from capitalism to capitalism of a different stripe? Even though in the process all capital was expropriated? Just doesn't make sense.

I make no excuses for what Stalin and his progeny have done in the world. They have a great deal to answer for. But as Trotsky said during the 1939-1941 fight in the FI, if you can't defend the gains that have already been won you will not be able to win any new victories.

[Lucretia]

I agree. But what revolutionary parties are there, what revolutionary vanguard is there to win to this, who are the mass reformist parties we are trying to counter-pose our own revolutionary politics to?

The ISO calls itself an organization and not a party for a political reason - we are more or less a large affinity group, a democratic collective around certain shared principles.

For the life of me I cannot understand why you keep insisting that it's okay to try to help build just a generic left just because there are no revolutionary parties. It's circular logic. A large reason that there is no meaningful revolutionary left in the US is that revolutionaries are too busy watering down their politics in order to build "broad left" or "progressive" coalitions.

Who are the mass reformist parties you are trying to counter-pose your own revolutionary politics to? How about the Democratic Party? Is your argument that the DP is not reformist or that it's not mass? Besides not voting for the Democrats, I see literally no difference in terms of on-the-ground action that differentiates the ISO from the Democrats. It's quite literally the same demands, and I just find it hard to believe that the ISO will be able to advance a revolutionary movement when its functional politics are virtually indistinguishable from the Democrats, and its goal is to just build a "broad left." Anyway, won't this "broad left" include the Democrats? Why not? How will you be able to justify excluding them to your target audience of "progressives" without literally making an argument on clear Marxian terms? This is why I think such a strategy is incoherent and will lead nowhere beyond where the "left" already finds itself.


A transitional program in the absense of movements is literally useless - it's propaganda and on that level it's ok, but it really isn't a program in any meaningful sense.But that's the whole point, isn't it? It is through the process of propagandizing for transitional demands that you make them realizable by building a movement focused on those demands. In order to make this work, the demands have to be similar but not identical to what workers already want and think is possible, what they are already prioritizing en masse (which is why the transitional program cannot be set in stone like a mathematical formula, but has to be a living idea). The transitional program pushes them to ask for more rather than accepting their demands as they are.


Our views are that the immediate things to be done are to try and help build a broader left with a revolutionary core. I think OWS is doing that right now and we could be seeing the beginnings of a new new left and so we want to see this movement grow and continue to mature. We also want to fight for a space for radical, specifically Marxist politics within that broader left.This might not be fair, but I get the feeling you're just rattling off a pat response without really having thought through the implications of it. You claim that the goal is to build a broad left with a revolutionary core, but these are two different tasks in tension with one another--at least with the way the ISO is attempting to do it. On the one hand, it is pushing its member to engage in an extra-electoral political practice that is identical to non-revolutionary leftists, but then it wants to use that process to create a specific cadre of people dedicated to a revolutionary program. The two are fundamentally at cross purposes. If workers simply struggling for reforms through their-self activity, on its own, led to the formation of a sizable revolutionary cadre, such a cadre would already exist. There's been enough self-activity for a while now. And I wonder if it will ever reach the level where the ISO leadership thinks its time to begin engaging in a revolutionary politics. It just all seems very Kautskyite to me.

The ISO is adopting wholesale as its program, rather than trying to innovate, whatever grassroots struggles liberal democrats happen to be pushing at the moment, and it publishes articles that put forward generic "left" analyses in its theoretical journal. (Take the article on the occupy movement in the latest issue of the ISR, which wasn't published by a member of the ISO, and from what I could tell wasn't published by a Leninist. It was filled with all sorts of banalities, and I cringe to think that ISO would try to use it as an educational tool for its members.) This is an excellent way of merging the ISO with the "broad left," involving ISO members in generically left groups with broadly progressive causes in a way that sort of resembles entryism. But I fail to see how it in any way is helping to create a revolutionary core. What it is successfully doing is taking people who are committed revolutionaries like you and miring them into writing and thinking and working in ways that won't offend (at least not too much) the progressive establishment, lest the "broad left" you're fighting for not be as large and united as it could be.

The fundamental issue here is that the revolutionary potential of a group is not judged by its size. So you can have the broadest left imaginable, but if it's just engaged in a random assortment of strategically disjointed "progressive" struggles, if it's united only around a minimum program, it's not going to get anywhere. Your response might be that once the left is large and united enough (I wonder what metric you'll use to determine that), then and only then will come time to lay out a transitional program. But do you really think if you have a mass reformist organization, forged around a minimum program, that you'll then instantaneously be able to convert them to a revolutionary program? You'll just be back where you started from -- on the margins on the left, trying to build a truly revolutionary core. My question is, why don't you start that now?


We don't believe there is a stage or formula for this, they are connected process like I said above, it's a combined process - of course we want to win people to revolutionary ideas and, we hope, specifically to the ISO itself. But we also see an independent left and the self-activity of workers as the way consiousness will develop on a mass scale.It's with your last line that we tread into dangerous territory. It is not only through the self-activity of workers that a revolutionary consciousness will develop (there you go leaving out the key term there again: revolutionary). That is the kind of faith in spontaneity that Lenin rightfully derided in What Is To Be Done? It is through a reciprocal combination of self-activity and agitation by a revolutionary cadre putting forward a revolutionary program -- even at a time when there's not a mass movement around such a program (how else could such a movement be built?).

And of course there is no set of stages or formulas for this. There's not permanent list of issue around which to try to innovate reformist demands into transitional ones. It has to happen in response to movements on the ground, but it has to do more than simply mirror them for the sake of building a generic SPD-style left.

[Lucretia]

Okay, one last time -- As I said before, there is at least one third-campist group, the LRP, that I think is far more serious about revolution than the ISO. I disagree with their analysis of China, Cuba, etc., but I don't think they pander to liberals.

I think I said it before, but to be clear, third campism, as a wayward child of the Trotskyist movement, was born out of opportunism and bowing to public opinion. I think that's the organic connection. Burnham, Abern and Shachtman bailed on the USSR when the USSR was taking the most heat in lefty intellectual circles. And it caused a rupture in the world movement (the majority, per Trotsky's advice, was very careful to offer Shachtman et. al all kinds of factional rights and privileges -- they left the SWP).

I don't know the details of Cliff's decision at the time of the Korean War, but of course, I suppose you guys can elaborate if you'd like.

Of course, if you still think that these were good political decisions, then my argument would, necessarily seem "illogical." I am not saying that it is pre-ordained that third campists become mealy mouthed pandering reformists. I am saying that, historically, that has been the usual trajectory. And even in the best cases, like the LRP, you wind up supporting flamingly reactionary mullahs against Soviet Troops in Afghanistan based on the principle of defending the national rights. If you get it right on the class nature of the state, IMO, then you wind up supporting the side that won't kill people for teaching girls how to read. The PDPA were certainly not socialists, but the society they were trying to build was approximately 1200 years ahead of the islamic opposition.

I think your biggest issue here is that you are confusing the validity of an analysis with the motivations people might have had for promoting it at a particular time. The Cold War is over, and nobody here is rejecting the degenerated workers state theory as a means of appeasing the State Dept. I reject it because I think it's wrong, independent of what motivations other people might have for rejecting it.

[Lucretia]

Right-o. You cannot have socialism without workers control. I agree one hundred percent. And you can't have a proletarian revolution without the worker's at the helm (i.e., The October Revolution).

But what about the Chinese Revolution or the Cuban revolution -- I think it is wrong to say these were led by workers, even in the narrow sense that we would agree for the Russian Revolution. So was capitalism not overturned in Cuba and China. Were the peasants or their leaders state capitalists? This is where the state cap stuff does not make sense. And were the property and social overturns in China and Cuba from capitalism to capitalism of a different stripe? Even though in the process all capital was expropriated? Just doesn't make sense.

I make no excuses for what Stalin and his progeny have done in the world. They have a great deal to answer for. But as Trotsky said during the 1939-1941 fight in the FI, if you can't defend the gains that have already been won you will not be able to win any new victories.

You make a key point in this set of remarks: the Cuban revolution and the Chinese revolution were not made by workers (and in any event, if the Chinese revolution had been led by workers, it would still have found itself in a similar if not worse predicament than Russia did). Since, as you acknowledge, the building of socialism requires workers' control and cannot be done bureaucratically, we have identified a very serious issue for people who want to pretend that either of these countries is socialist or is transitioning to socialism through leadership by a "dictatorship of the proletariat" (people always seem to forget that Marx and Lenin identified such a dictatorship as a revolutionary dictatorship, not a stagnant set of productive relations that remains in place in isolated countries for decades on end, long past the time any revolutionary movement existed).

You ask, "were the peasants or their leaders state capitalists?" then lament that theory of state capitalism doesn't make sense. In response I would remind you that the establishment of a new type of class society (including a new type of capitalism, like bureaucratic state capitalism) does not need to be the product of class-conscious members of that class, just as a bourgeois revolution does not need to be led by members of the bourgeoisie. There are cases where a revolutionary leadership might have every intention of establishing socialism but then runs head-on into something called imperialism and the international market, both of which will doom any attempt to establish socialism in one country.

What the isolation of a revolution like that means is that a country is forced, by objective factors, to engage in accumulation of capital to ensure that development keeps pace with the rest of the world. This accumulation might occur through the building up of arms (as in the Soviet Union) for the sake of military defense, but not necessarily. What many people forget is that countries cannot be autarkic, that in order to acquire through trade the goods necessary for its people to survive it must necessarily ensure that the production of the goods its trade on that market can be produced competitively (using the most modern technology, etc.).

As Chris Harman eloquently put the issue a number of years back regarding choices open to post-revolutionary states aspiring to become sociailist: But it cannot even begin to raise the productive forces to a level comparable to that of the advanced countries unless it is to begin down the Russian road – ie to take on the historic task of capitalism, not that of socialism. And in the medium term there is no way of avoiding the terrible alternatives facing a revolutionary regime so long as it remains isolated in one country. Either close its back on the world market and then suffer a decline in its productive forces and lose access to developments in technology taking place on a world scale, leading to economic stagnation and loss of popular support, or reach out to the world market, only to find its future dependent on the ups and downs of the world system (which is what has happened to Vietnam and, in reality, to Cuba, forced back in the late 1960s to the island’s pre-revolutionary dependency on the production of one commodity, sugar, for sale on world markets, something which led to economic devastation and acute poverty once the collapsing USSR withdrew its subsidies in the late 1980s.

But these facts point to an even more pressing issue of whether or not such accumulation and re-investment into new technology (i.e., capitalist innovation) can be performed democratically by the workers themselves -- even if we acknowledge that such a system is not "socialism." In other words, are they still nevertheless "workers states" with democratically controlled economies? Can there be a democratically controlled capitalism -- a system of competition against blind market forces, the responses to which are planned and implemented by the workers themselves?

The answer to this question is, theoretically at least, and for a brief period of time, yes. As Derek Howl noted in an astute article he wrote for International Socialism in 1990 titled "The Law of Value and the USSR": Supporters of the theory of the USSR being a "workers' state" sometimes argue that the pressure of military threats would force a workers' state to build arms to defend that workers' state. This is true, but they use this to argue that as military competition is universal it cannot be used to sustain the theory of state capitalism. This takes us to the heart of the political significance of the argument. The needs of any individual workers' state will be subordinate to the interests of the international working class and the relationship between the internal organisation of the workers' state and international pressure will be determined politically. Decisions to restrict immediate consumption to produce arms will be taken by the working class. They will not be the result of a blind drive to accumulate for the sake of accumulation.

In other words, the central question (as we are already in agreement in determining whether a society is socialist or objectively transitioning to socialism) is the political question of workers' power. If workers are setting a plan to accumulate for the sake of keeping the workers' state alive to act as a bridgehead or inspiration for other socialist revolutions, then clearly we still have a workers' state. But if workers are forced to produce at the behest of a ruling bureaucracy, unsupported by the workers, attempting through various plans they have concocted to keep the country competitive with the international market so as to maintain their own positions of authority, whether it think its actions are in the supposed interests of everybody in the country or not, the answer is the economy in question is a class society of a capitalist nature.

It takes extensive empirical research to determine precisely where a revolutionary or post-revolutionary country fits into this admittedly abstract model.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Right, there is no pressure on you from the state department, I get it. But one issue I was getting at, indirectly was this: The "state capitalists" don't exist before they take power. That's pretty unusual -- to have a revolution to create property relations that will benefit a class that is yet to exist. And again, doesn't it puzzle you that the USSR was consistently taking the progressive side in world struggles (I know, only to generally fuck them up)? These are perhaps not a fatal problems, but not a small ones. I'm afraid I will have to go back to the books to more centrally refute more of your core arguments.

And of course, you cannot build socialism in one country, especially an economically backward one. Perhaps the biggest deviation from Leninism that the Stalinists make is their consistent nationalism, or, if you will, anti-internationalism.

[Kassad]

I don't really want a part of this shit storm, but I wanted to say a few things because I've had a lot of experiences with the ISO, their revolving door membership and their politics.

Firstly, I think pandering to anti-union and anti-immigrant "leftists" like Nader can be very problematic. The primary problem is that it opens the door to the notion that socialism is something that can be achieved in the ballot box. Because the ISO tends to be primarily younger students, there isn't a really solid leadership basis in a lot of areas that can educate members in the fundamentals of class struggle. This is particularly true in Ohio, which is where I've had most of my experience with them. Thus, it's hard to maintain any real form of democratic centralism when half of the organization's leadership haven't been told to do much more than sell the newspaper. This is why so many ISO members are piss poor in the theory department. I think that the speakers at their annual conferences speak so much about the struggle and what's good on the streets, but what is really needed is to educate the next generation of leaders, which is something I do not believe the ISO does.

This is also really common because a lot of ISO folks I know haven't been taught to read Marx and Lenin, but instead to real Alan Maass', Sherry Wolf and Paul D'Amato's take on Marxism. This isn't just in the ISO, however. This is in the PSL as well. It's in the RCP. It's in virtually every socialist organization around right now, which is one of the many reasons revolutionary theory in this country is in the shitters. I'm no fan of just putting forward some dogmatic reading list from dead writers, but if you don't understand a lot of the fundamentals from alternative perspectives, then you aren't being taught to view Marxism as a science.

But back to Nader and the revolving door for a second: a lot of people in this country are conditioned to think that elections are the only time for political activism. We know this quite well. So when newer ISO members, who are new to revolutionary socialism and Marxism, are working on an electoral campaign as a primary means of organizing, that doesn't break the chain of bourgeois politics and it doesn't teach them how to organize on the streets in other non-electoral struggles. The ISO did a great job here protesting the anti-union bill, but after that, they fell off the face of the planet until the Occupy movement came around. There's no bridge between that divide and frankly, that's a pathetic showing for revolutionaries.

Here in Columbus, the ISO membership has never been the same people for two years in a row. Some faculty members have stayed around, but I don't recognize anyone at their meetings now that were around last year. It's usually about 3-4 people who go to a demonstration here and there to try to sell papers. At their meetings, the first thing people are introduced to are whatever the ISO's new book is. It really is run like a business and I've had dozens of people provide this same analysis from inside and outside the organization. Doesn't mean their meetings aren't informative, but I could've give less of a fuck what their newest book is. If I wanted that, I'd go to Haymarket Books' website, not a meeting.

ISO members also aren't taught the challenge some of the propaganda regarding Cuba, China and the former Soviet Union. Truthfully, I don't think there are any socialist countries in existence today either, but that doesn't mean just smack the 'state capitalist' stamp on these countries and move on. Be scientific. What successes did these revolutions have? Why did they fail? How can we organize as revolutionaries to correct those mistakes, but also confront the ones that we haven't even imagined yet. Because there will be contradictions and if we view Marxism through this rigid rose-tint, we're not going to be scientifically analyzing world events. That's going to make us out to be dogmatists. Again, not just the ISO on this one. Socialist groups have such a fetish for their political line that I'm sure aliens from another dimension couldn't convince them that they're wrong regarding a dialectical materialist analysis of Russian agriculture.

The current state of the left is shit and that's obvious. Hell, we're seeing the worst economic crisis in quite a long time, but you aren't seeing socialist groups begin to number in the thousands. It's because these groups are rooted in the past in a lot of regards. Hell, they're trying to teach a new cat tricks that the old dog used to do. It's a fucking mess and people need to put down their newspapers for a second and ask themselves why this is happening and what is going to dig us out of the trenches and actually put us on the offensive.

This critique isn't just for the ISO. It's for the vast majority of socialist groups out there that are trying the same shit they did in the 60's. Didn't work then, won't work now. We need to sincerely reconceive revolutionary theory before we can seriously claim to be a vanguard of any sort. My two cents.

[Jimmie Higgins]

For the life of me I cannot understand why you keep insisting that it's okay to try to help build just a generic left just because there are no revolutionary parties. It's circular logic. A large reason that there is no meaningful revolutionary left in the US is that revolutionaries are too busy watering down their politics in order to build "broad left" or "progressive" coalitions.Yes, that is why we see these tasks as linked - as you said a dialectical relationship. People need to be struggling for our politics to even be relevant and our politics are important for advancing these struggles. So this is why struggles with the potential to radicalize, workplace struggles, struggles against oppression, etc are things that revolutionaries should engage in these struggles.

It's not watering down your politics if you recognize that you are a tiny minority of opinion and want to try and change that - it means having to work with other forces, it doesn't mean that being in an anti-war coalition with a mix of ideas and not pulling out every time you loose a vote or whatnot "waters down your politics".

The "right ideas" don't mean anything unless people are engaged in struggle. We can tell people Obama and the Democrats are bourgeois and have for 30 years and it did less to expose Obama than a couple of months protests from his left. Better yet, if Marxists are there, working side by side with people in the movement arguing our perspective. If we're ignored, we've not gained or lost anything, if we win people's confidence then we can win a part of the movement to revolutionary politics, if we loose votes we can still be shown to be correct if our arguments play out. So in the occupy movement the arguments made by marxists about the cops with a bunch of liberals with bad politics around the police helped give radical politics a lot of credibility when the police or (here in Oakland) when politicians supposedly "on our side" (Quan) attacked.


Who are the mass reformist parties you are trying to counter-pose your own revolutionary politics to? How about the Democratic Party? Is your argument that the DP is not reformist or that it's not mass?It's in no way a reformist party, it's a bourgeois party not the German SWP or even the old UK Labour party.


Besides not voting for the Democrats, I see literally no difference in terms of on-the-ground action that differentiates the ISO from the Democrats.Frankly that's the most idiotic thing I've ever seen you write. The Democratic party organizes confrontations of the Minutemen, get's arrested at actions at the DNC!? Protests Obama? Kicks military recruiters off campuses?

You keep repeating this notion that participating in the broad left means that we join an anti-war movement and shut-up about imperialism or whatnot. No, we try and bring our politics into the movement in hopes of both spreading the movement and arguing for politics that will actually help advance the movement.


Anyway, won't this "broad left" include the Democrats? Maybe some induviduals, but that's what I mean by a Left, a left that's independent of the Democrats, I'm talking about something that looks like the 1930s or the new left, I think you take left to mean "Liberalism". There is no "left" to speak of in the US - at least not until the OWS movement which is beginning to create networks and alliances. It's mixed politically but there is a radical core open to revolutionary politics and learning quite quickly through struggle. This also happened in the 1960s where basically liberal movements of students sitting-in against segregation radicalized and paved the way for things like the black power movement.


On the one hand, it is pushing its member to engage in an extra-electoral political practice that is identical to non-revolutionary leftists, but then it wants to use that process to create a specific cadre of people dedicated to a revolutionary program. The two are fundamentally at cross purposes. If workers simply struggling for reforms through their-self activity, on its own, led to the formation of a sizable revolutionary cadre, such a cadre would already exist. There's been enough self-activity for a while now. And I wonder if it will ever reach the level where the ISO leadership thinks its time to begin engaging in a revolutionary politics. It just all seems very Kautskyite to me.These kinds of analogies exposes the delusions that some on the left have (not you personally, because I think you are picking up an analogy from others). Working class self-activity already? Strikes are at a low, unionization is a fraction of what it once was, social movements have been in retreat or in the arms of Democrat lobbying machines for DECADES now.

The German socialists, on the other hand, had MILLIONS of members and supporters, a whole culture around them, a "nation within a nation", and there was a lot of actions and movements that would make the 1960s look tame in many ways. The task when there are millions of people identifying with socialist ideas really is to put revolution on the table. Our task today is to try and get to that point where revolution can be on the table. This means propaganda, and participating in struggles to spread our ideas and try and prove them in practice. Again I believe that we are in the kind of era when what took decades to develop in the past will develop in years... 2011 was already like that and made "revolution" a present-tense word not a past and future-tense word. So as important as it was to try and be part of the anti-war movement and bring in an anti-imerialist view and whatnot


The ISO is adopting wholesale as its program, rather than trying to innovate, whatever grassroots struggles liberal democrats happen to be pushing at the moment, Bullshit. You make it sound like we are promoting "green jobs" and charter schools and bullshit. We participate in struggles we think can potentially advance the struggle or lead to working class movements and so on. So we get involved in fighting oppression, fighting the justice system, anti-war coalitions, immigrant rights, anti-racist struggles etc.

and it publishes articles that put forward generic "left" analyses in its theoretical journal. (Take the article on the occupy movement in the latest issue of the ISR, which wasn't published by a member of the ISO, and from what I could tell wasn't published by a Leninist. It was filled with all sorts of banalities, and I cringe to think that ISO would try to use it as an educational tool for its members.) This is an excellent way of merging the ISO with the "broad left," involving ISO members in generically left groups with broadly progressive causes in a way that sort of resembles entryism. But I fail to see how it in any way is helping to create a revolutionary core. What it is successfully doing is taking people who are committed revolutionaries like you and miring them into writing and thinking and working in ways that won't offend (at least not too much) the progressive establishment, lest the "broad left" you're fighting for not be as large and united as it could be.Yes we work in movements but the rest of this is a straw-man. You accuse us of entryism while others (anarchists usually) constantly argue that we "only sell papers" in movements and others complain that we are only intested in promoting our politics and conferences... it can't all be the same. Such criticisms are why I tend to get short when people make these kinds of imperssionistic charges... we can't be all these boogymen at once.


The fundamental issue here is that the revolutionary potential of a group is not judged by its size. So you can have the broadest left imaginable, but if it's just engaged in a random assortment of strategically disjointed "progressive" struggles, if it's united only around a minimum program, it's not going to get anywhere.A minimum program is what is the next thing that will help advance the struggles. Apparently our difference, then, is in our perspectives of what politics look like. I think political consciousness is low, class-consciousness is rare, and revolutionary consciousness the least of all. So to a general audience the arguments are pretty basic right now: the democrats are not your allies, without struggle there can be no change, this is a class society and workers have the power to shut down production, etc. For an audience like occupy it means that the arguments are more advanced: police, class Independence, the nature of the state etc. We are engaged in constant arguments and debates and fights in occupy, so that's why the SW occupy articles are about tactics of insurrectionist, why moral boycotts are a dead-end, the necessity to make OWS a class and anti-racism struggle.


But do you really think if you have a mass reformist organization, forged around a minimum program, that you'll then instantaneously be able to convert them to a revolutionary program?Strawman, we are not trying to build the ISO AS the broad left or a mass reformist organization. We hope to play a part in laying the groundwork for a vanguard party at some point, but what we do now is about how to get there. Without struggle there are no working class fighters who could become a revolutionary vanguard to be organized into a party.


You'll just be back where you started from -- on the margins on the left, trying to build a truly revolutionary core. My question is, why don't you start that now?We are, revolutionaries are always on the margins, I'm arguing that we shouldn't stand on the sidelines making ideological arguments because that's just not effective. We need to prove our politics in practice for them to be relevant.


It's with your last line that we tread into dangerous territory. It is not only through the self-activity of workers that a revolutionary consciousness will develop (there you go leaving out the key term there again: revolutionary). That is the kind of faith in spontaneity that Lenin rightfully derided in What Is To Be Done? It is through a reciprocal combination of self-activity and agitation by a revolutionary cadre putting forward a revolutionary program -- even at a time when there's not a mass movement around such a program (how else could such a movement be built?). And I think your conception is dangerous because it seems to suggest that a revolutionary cadre is created through smarties telling them how to be revolutionary, a party of followers rather than a revolutionary vanguard being developed through the intersection of real experiences in struggle and political theory.

[Jimmie Higgins]

If you get it right on the class nature of the state, IMO, then you wind up supporting the side that won't kill people for teaching girls how to read. The PDPA were certainly not socialists, but the society they were trying to build was approximately 1200 years ahead of the islamic opposition.

Making the world safe for democracy?

Restoring the rights of women in Afghanistan?

Spoken like a true imperialist? What are the class dynamics when an advanced country rules a provincial one that makes it positive? A dependent local ruling elite? Underdevelopment organic industrial development? If a working class develops, a working class that must face not only the local ruling repressive apparatus but potentially the military of the big power backing the and propping up the local elite?

I can't believe that someone who accuses me of not being a revolutionary because I support reforms from below as a way to advance the working class struggle is all in favor of reforms from above if they come from Russian tanks.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

No. You base it on class. Not impressions. The national question did not stand above the issue of what is best for the working class. But if you are an impressionistic type -- a country invading another country must be bad. Well, the PDPA in Afghanistan, a country with almost no proletariat, was the kind of regime you should like. They had a program of land reform, equal rights for women (including the reduction and ending of women being sold as chattal). The opposition? Cutthroat reactionaries, supported by the CIA. The regime, which was supported by the USSR (no doubt because they were making a killing on the sale of pistachio nuts) was losing the civil war -- so the Soviets, came into the country. Now, I don't think they were particularly concerned with the democratic rights of Afghan women -- probably more with not having NATO rockets on another border. However, if the net result was making Afghanistan an SSR, and bringing it's population into the modern world, it would have been a major progressive thing (compare tadzikistan, say to Afghanistan in 1980). Under the PDPA, women did not have to wear the veil, they could have jobs, go to school, serve in the military, serve in the government. Sadly, the Soviets abandoned the country and all kinds of good things happened at the hands of the "freedom loving Afghan rebels." Your organization called that a victory. A victory for whom, comrade?

And, the idea that the USSR was going to "underdevelop" Afghanistan is a riot. You can't develop a modern proletariat based in a society ruled by the likes of the Taliban. You are happy to let Afghan women be chattel -- as we wait a couple of centuries for there to be an organic growth of an Afghan proletariat, sufficiently powerful to throw out the mullahs. You are blinded by your state capitalist view here. No capitalist country would have intervened on behalf of the PDPA. Afghanistan is impoverished. It's only truly valuable resource is poppy production. No capitalist country would waste it's time supporting a progressive internal regime there -- much easier to deal with the war lords and mullahs if there is any reason to be involved. So you wind up in bed with the CIA on this one. Congrats.

And, obviously, to the extent that the entry of Soviet tanks in various places meant the overthrow of capitalism, I would be for it. Where it meant the crushing of a pro-socialist, incipient political revolution in Hungary, strongly against. The class line is what matters -- and we do not agree on where to draw it.

Did you support the North in the Vietnamese War? So did the Soviets
Did you support the Cuban Revolution? So did the Soviets
The Chinese Revolution? So did the Soviets
The Sandinistas? So did the Soviets

Do you think it's a freaking coincidence that the USSR was usually on the progressive side in these battles? Does it mean that "State Capitialism" is somehow more progressive than good old regular capitalism. Of course, there were many problems with the way the Soviets supported these struggles. You know comrades, it is my belief that Desert Storm and the more recent Iraq war doesn't happen if the USSR still exists.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

So, Jimmie, why don't you guys say, in a straightforward manner, that you are not not Leninists in any meaningful way? Certainly on the party question you absolutely are not. What you advocate is much more like Kautsky's "party of the whole class."

You are impatient and somehow think that pandering will win the masses to socialism in stages. You will wind up building larger coalitions, based on minimum program, from which your group will then be thrown out because you are reds.

[Lucretia]

Yes, that is why we see these tasks as linked - as you said a dialectical relationship. People need to be struggling for our politics to even be relevant and our politics are important for advancing these struggles. So this is why struggles with the potential to radicalize, workplace struggles, struggles against oppression, etc are things that revolutionaries should engage in these struggles.

Of course ideas need to be placed into practice in order to be of any relevance. That was precisely my point. We're not on disagreement there. Where we seem to disagree is in thinking that showing up to the demonstration, echoing basically the same demands as all the non-socialists, while saying a few nice things about class and Marx constitutes an effective way of building a revolutionary party. My opinion is that it's not. Clearly revolutionaries want to participate in the movements of the day, but not just echo the existing demands, especially when those demands are framed in a way of thinking that obscures the importance of socialist revolution.


It's not watering down your politics if you recognize that you are a tiny minority of opinion and want to try and change that - it means having to work with other forces, it doesn't mean that being in an anti-war coalition with a mix of ideas and not pulling out every time you loose a vote or whatnot "waters down your politics".You seem to be responding to a point I did not make, perhaps because I did not make my point clearly or artfully enough. I am not suggesting that revolutionaries not "work with other forces." Nor am I suggesting that revolutionaries take their ball and go home when non-socialist don't immediately and excitedly embrace Marxism with open arms. To repeat: I am saying you don't just echo the demands, which tend to be minimal, which have already been put forward by non-revolutionary, often bourgeois elements in these movements.

The reason this is important is that, without presenting new demands or reframing the existing demands, you are sending mixed messages to your target audience: a demand that is couched in a bourgeois framework ("Tax the rich!"), with flowery, preachy rhetoric that implies, if not outright states, that the rich need to have their wealth confiscated rather than taxed.


The "right ideas" don't mean anything unless people are engaged in struggle. We can tell people Obama and the Democrats are bourgeois and have for 30 years and it did less to expose Obama than a couple of months protests from his left. Better yet, if Marxists are there, working side by side with people in the movement arguing our perspective. If we're ignored, we've not gained or lost anything, if we win people's confidence then we can win a part of the movement to revolutionary politics, if we loose votes we can still be shown to be correct if our arguments play out. So in the occupy movement the arguments made by marxists about the cops with a bunch of liberals with bad politics around the police helped give radical politics a lot of credibility when the police or (here in Oakland) when politicians supposedly "on our side" (Quan) attacked.You are again responding to statements I have not made. To repeat another time, I am not saying that revolutionaries should not get involved with movements that have bourgeois, non-socialist elements. I am not saying that you simply present ideas to people, and if the ideas are good enough, you'll win them over, no matter how or if those ideas are put into practice. These are all strawmen you have latched onto for one reason or another. Again, I am not sure if it's my lack of clarity, your lack of care in reading what I've written, or (and I hate to think that this could be the case) a deliberate attempt to derail serious discussion about important issues.


It's in no way a reformist party, it's a bourgeois party not the German SWP or even the old UK Labour party.It is a reformist party. It is not a reformist socialist party, but it is a reformist party. Its members and leadership at least ostensibly want to improve the well being of workers by instituting reforms in how capitalism functions. But that's beside the point. My argument did not hinge in any significant way on sweeping claims about what the democratic party is or is not. My point was about how to win over democrats, liberals, etc to socialist revolution.


Frankly that's the most idiotic thing I've ever seen you write. The Democratic party organizes confrontations of the Minutemen, get's arrested at actions at the DNC!? Protests Obama? Kicks military recruiters off campuses?No, not the democratic party. Members of the democratic party, or at least liberals/progressive who are generally sympathetic with what the democratic party supposedly represents. Many of them are active participants in the Occupy movement. I am sorry you have such a hard time believing this that you think my point out is "the most idiotic thing" you've ever seen me write.


You keep repeating this notion that participating in the broad left means that we join an anti-war movement and shut-up about imperialism or whatnot. No, we try and bring our politics into the movement in hopes of both spreading the movement and arguing for politics that will actually help advance the movement.Liberals talk a lot about imperialism also. Talking about imperialism does not necessarily advance the revolutionary cause. I am not saying that the ISO is not trying to bring their politics into the various movements. I am saying that they are not really aware of how to do so effectively. That's just my speaking from my own experiences in movements in various cities I've lived in.


Maybe some induviduals, but that's what I mean by a Left, a left that's independent of the Democrats, I'm talking about something that looks like the 1930s or the new left, I think you take left to mean "Liberalism". There is no "left" to speak of in the US - at least not until the OWS movement which is beginning to create networks and alliances. It's mixed politically but there is a radical core open to revolutionary politics and learning quite quickly through struggle. This also happened in the 1960s where basically liberal movements of students sitting-in against segregation radicalized and paved the way for things like the black power movement.So because there's not a large left in the US, the goal should be (step 1) create a larger generic left, then (step 2) convert that large left to revolutionary socialism? It makes no sense, comrade. You either do one or the other, and you're not going to be very effective at the second one if you keep soft-pedaling your criticisms of Obama with talk of the "historical nature" of his election, or by publishing articles like the one by Nichols on Abraham Lincoln, which is the worst kind of liberal history.


These kinds of analogies exposes the delusions that some on the left have (not you personally, because I think you are picking up an analogy from others). Working class self-activity already? Strikes are at a low, unionization is a fraction of what it once was, social movements have been in retreat or in the arms of Democrat lobbying machines for DECADES now.I didn't say that "self-activity" of the US working class compares favorably with the working classes of other countries throughout the world. I am saying that it is there. It might be small. But that's neither here nor there. If self-activity automatically led to Leninist cadre, where are they? Apparently there are so few that the ones who exist are convinced they need to create a "broad left" before engaging in the more demanding, specific task of creating a large revolutionary cadre.


Bullshit. You make it sound like we are promoting "green jobs" and charter schools and bullshit. We participate in struggles we think can potentially advance the struggle or lead to working class movements and so on. So we get involved in fighting oppression, fighting the justice system, anti-war coalitions, immigrant rights, anti-racist struggles etc.You can curse and making sweeping claims all you want. But name a single concrete claim or proposal that the ISO has put forward in any struggle that isn't something you'd find in the Green Party platform. (And sorry, but "overthrow capitalism" is not a concrete proposal.)


A minimum program is what is the next thing that will help advance the struggles. Apparently our difference, then, is in our perspectives of what politics look like. I think political consciousness is low, class-consciousness is rare, and revolutionary consciousness the least of all. So to a general audience the arguments are pretty basic right now: the democrats are not your allies, without struggle there can be no change, this is a class society and workers have the power to shut down production, etc. For an audience like occupy it means that the arguments are more advanced: police, class Independence, the nature of the state etc. We are engaged in constant arguments and debates and fights in occupy, so that's why the SW occupy articles are about tactics of insurrectionist, why moral boycotts are a dead-end, the necessity to make OWS a class and anti-racism struggle.Great, but how do you present the argument that democrats aren't the allies of the working class? Do you say that it's because the democrats are controlled by capital? How did you explain that to the people who you tied to convince to vote for Nader when he was heading a party that is similarly under the control of bourgeois forces? It's simply incoherent.

As for your second argument, without a struggle for what can change not happen? And are you really telling this to people who are already at demonstrations? Surely their presence there attests to the fact that they are already aware that change cannot happen except through struggle. This is what I meant when I said just echoing what the participants of these movements already believe regarding concrete proposals and the like.


Strawman, we are not trying to build the ISO AS the broad left or a mass reformist organization. We hope to play a part in laying the groundwork for a vanguard party at some point, but what we do now is about how to get there. Without struggle there are no working class fighters who could become a revolutionary vanguard to be organized into a party.Then I am confused here. Is the ISO not trying to build itself by appealing to people on the need for socialist revolution breaking the framework of bourgeois demands? Because you make it seem like the goal is to build a "broad left" -- whatever that means. Does this broad left mean that the ISO is trying to just get more people to come out to demonstrations, no matter what political message they bring to, and take away from, those demonstrations? I am not deliberately being dense here. What you've said on this issue just strikes me as muddled and maybe even contradictory.


And I think your conception is dangerous because it seems to suggest that a revolutionary cadre is created through smarties telling them how to be revolutionary, a party of followers rather than a revolutionary vanguard being developed through the intersection of real experiences in struggle and political theory.No, I explicitly said that "self-activity" on its own, or abstract ideas on their own, will never lead to the building of a revolutionary party. It's only through an interplay of the two, done effectively. Your condescending remark about "smarties telling them what to do" is something I would expect to hear from a postmodernist anarchist who looks down on the idea that there are right programs or wrong programs (because all attempts to explain to other workers what an effective strategy would be is authoritarian politicking).

[Lucretia]

Right, there is no pressure on you from the state department, I get it. But one issue I was getting at, indirectly was this: The "state capitalists" don't exist before they take power. That's pretty unusual -- to have a revolution to create property relations that will benefit a class that is yet to exist. And again, doesn't it puzzle you that the USSR was consistently taking the progressive side in world struggles (I know, only to generally fuck them up)? These are perhaps not a fatal problems, but not a small ones. I'm afraid I will have to go back to the books to more centrally refute more of your core arguments.

And of course, you cannot build socialism in one country, especially an economically backward one. Perhaps the biggest deviation from Leninism that the Stalinists make is their consistent nationalism, or, if you will, anti-internationalism.

I would recommend you read David McNally's book Against the Market, particulary pp. 175-184, a section titled "Wage Labour, Accumulation and Market Regulation." The book is a refutation of market socialism. This section talks of "capitalism without capitalists" and similar such things.

[Jimmie Higgins]

So, Jimmie, why don't you guys say, in a straightforward manner, that you are not not Leninists in any meaningful way? Certainly on the party question you absolutely are not. What you advocate is much more like Kautsky's "party of the whole class."

You are impatient and somehow think that pandering will win the masses to socialism in stages. You will wind up building larger coalitions, based on minimum program, from which your group will then be thrown out because you are reds.

No we would like to help lay the foundation for a real vanguard party to emerge. We just think groups posing as toy Leninist vanguard group in the absence of real movements and a vanguard of revolutionaries who have actual connections and are organic leaders in working class struggles is wrong and leads to groups going off the rails or engaging in a lot of bullshit like poaching other groups and sectarianism and so on.

We are not trying to build a party of the whole class, you are conflating our goal of trying to be a part of building a broader left with trying to build our organization. If someone is a revolutionary and wants to join our group we don't say, hey, you have to be a Counter-Punch leftist first, then an anarchist and then you can become a Marxist revolutionary. Rather we'd like to win people to revolutionary politics and we do but in non-revolutionary times, the revolutionaries are always the minority position and so the real question and the real difference between ISO and some other groups is what do you do in that situation? Just reading groups? Just propaganda and criticizing movements from the sidelines? This works in very small numbers, but it's idealist to think that large numbers of people will be won to revolutionary activity through reading the perfectly worded article or hearing a cutting slogan. We have to prove our politics in action and if Marxist revolutionaries don't attempt to do this - especially at a time like now - where are people going to go? Probably towards insurrectionist on the one hand or they will get discouraged and think that there's no hope for revolution and go to the Democratic party.

If you are a Leninist, why aren't you in a party or organization? How are you individually building a vanguard party? Or do you hide your affiliation? Or do you actually think you are Trotsky and are waiting for the vanguard party to emerge and win you over :D


Of course ideas need to be placed into practice in order to be of any relevance. That was precisely my point. We're not on disagreement there. Where we seem to disagree is in thinking that showing up to the demonstration, echoing basically the same demands as all the non-socialists, while saying a few nice things about class and Marx constitutes an effective way of building a revolutionary party. My opinion is that it's not. Clearly revolutionaries want to participate in the movements of the day, but not just echo the existing demands, especially when those demands are framed in a way of thinking that obscures the importance of socialist revolution.
And I keep saying that this is a straw-man. In the anti-war movement we worked in coalitions with non-radicals: we fought against red-baiting in the movement, fought against sections wanting to support the democrats, argued why an understanding of imperialism was essential for building an effective anti-war movement, the same with standing up to anti-Arab racism, we also tried to win people to an understanding of the class issues involved and had campaigns around military recruitment and worked with anti-war vets. These are modest things, but the anti-war movement was very weak politically for the most part.

In the OWS movement we are also not saying, "hey great, an a occupied space, let's make a utopia here" we are arguing against lifestylist politics and the co-option attempts by pacifists and Democrats on the one hand, and arguing against the adventurist and substitutionist actions on the other. Our propaganda and reading groups on things like "State and Revolution" and "Left-wing communism" can only go so far and only appeal to the radical core in the movement, but helping to build things like the port-shut down in Oakland can make the case for why rank and file militants are not the same as the bureaucracy or why mass militant action at the point of production is much more effective than braking a window at Whole Foods or things like "buy nothing day" actions.

The effect is still winning revolutionaries in the - well lets' say two and fours rather than the ones and twos, but as things continue to develop, people learning these lessons in practice and being exposed to revolutionary ideas at the same time could lead to much more widespread radicalization in a volatile time like now.

[workersadvocate]

Aw shizzle, this actually has become an interesting thread.
Keep it going. By all means, get specific about right now and the near term.

Here's a question: what is to be done when the poliical advanced revolutionary working class minority has spent these last decades fucking around with middle class politicos and junior partners of the ruling class, instead of educating, organizing and agitating within the working class itself (because they usually write them off as inactive/apathetic, too afraid, too backwards, "lumpen"...code word meaning worse off and oppressed minority working people)?
Hasn't that been the story of the US Left for decades now....the subjective proletarian class vanguard has been misidentifying/fraternalizing with and wasting its time with the politically active middle class (including the union bureaucracies)? And even the critical orthodox toy vanguard groups have also left the working class itself high and dry while their whole focus is upon seeking out recruits poached from the middle class oriented left groups, meaning they have abandoned the proletariat in actuality, to build toy vanguard parties off of the middle class too!

Maybe instead of expecting the working class to show up at middle class dominated activist events, revolutionary leftists need to actually act like a fucking vanguard where it counts inside the working class itself where it works, schools and lives. I think Jimmie has a great point, but I don't think it can be done in the middle class politically activist and college student dominated crowds or playing around with business union bureaucrats and wannabe hacks, just like it win't get done playing critical Spart poaching and posturing from the sidelines of these same middle class politically active crowds. In both cases, the working class 67% get left behind abandoned and ignored because you can't quickly snatch recruit to build a party out if them like you can with middle class professional hyperactivists, college students and petty bourgeois intellectuals. The left in this country leaves the vast majority of working people out of politics because that's not a quick and dirty way to build a vanguard party in a timely manner such that it can have the dues base to support the lifestyles of its top leadership. Fact is, much of the organized left is eerily similar to the business unions themselves.

[Lucretia]

We are not trying to build a party of the whole class, you are conflating our goal of trying to be a part of building a broader left with trying to build our organization.

Jimmie, I am not trying to be annoying, but I've yet to hear this explained to me clearly by anybody in the ISO. Since you are a relatively articulate defender of the group's policies, I am taking this opportunity to press you on this issue in hopes of getting that explanation: what do you mean by building a broader left, how is that different than building a revolutionary Marxian left, and (if they are different in your view), how in practical terms does the ISO reconcile these two goals?

I think I've explained at sufficient length in my earlier posts to this thread why I think those two goals are at cross purposes as far as the ISO's politics are concerned, so I would ask that you to point out any errors in my logic, any false assumptions or misunderstandings I might have.

Thank you.

[Jimmie Higgins]

what do you mean by building a broader left, how is that different than building a revolutionary Marxian left, and (if they are different in your view), how in practical terms does the ISO reconcile these two goals?

I think I've explained at sufficient length in my earlier posts to this thread why I think those two goals are at cross purposes as far as the ISO's politics are concerned, so I would ask that you to point out any errors in my logic, any false assumptions or misunderstandings I might have.

Thank you.

The ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class and so revolutionaries are always a minority, yet in order for revolutionary ideas to apply to the struggles of working people, working people need to be struggling.

So hoping to help rebuild a broad left means helping to build struggles which will give people confidence to fight and in doing so will clarify class demands or potentially lead to radicalization. Even struggles that fail to create an independent movement (like immigrant rights so far) can produce a radical core of people who might be won to radical politics even while most people involved retain or fall back into the default ideas of capitalism.

So, practically, what does this mean? It means in the occupy movement, we get involved in committees and argue from our perspective what we think will be the best next step. So some people argue for moralistic "buy-nothing" Adbusters-type politics and we argue against that because this doesn't make the movement stronger, doesn't connect it to the broader working class community, doesn't even actually harm or threaten the system. We also argue against individualist tactics or pacifist tactics while arguing for things like foreclosure defense or anti-racist actions which will help the movement to connect with black and Latino and working poor people; we argue for mass militant actions at points of production because it sets a precedent for point of production struggles and shows how working class people can fight alongside union struggles on a class basis (class solidarity). So we fight for these things because we think this will help bring the movement forward and we also argue that our perspective comes not just from the logic of movements but from marxism and so that's what informs us that shutting down the port or encouraging organizing with rank and file union members are effective.

In addition to making these practical arguments we do propaganda work, try to identify what are the political questions in the movement "Can the police be won-over?" "Is Mayor Quan really on our side?" to have study groups or teach-ins or ISO meetings that makes a Marxist case. We hope that we can win some of the radical core to our organization, or if not that at least win them on certain central questions that push them closer to revolutionary politics.

The main thing is if people aren't struggling then our ideas don't mean much. This is why the revolutionary left has remained small, why some groups have become overly dogmatic or groups not being able to expand beyond their base in a few unions or industries or on college campuses.

What are the first hurdles faced by the working class right now, we don't have a Tsar and that kind of autocratically repressive barrier to class organization, instead we have the two party system where two parties representing the bourgeois share long-term goals and keep official politics constrained in a narrow band of what is "realistic" and acceptable politics. The union bureaucrats are tied to business unionism and specifically around hitching their wagon to the Democratic party - the same with the corpses of the social movements from the last wave of radicalism in the US.

Rebuilding an independent left in the US just means encouraging these independent struggles and movements. These fights against oppression, fights for economic gains etc are the first steps towards the possibility of rebuilding a revolutionary tradition in the US with roots in workplaces and working class communities. I think maybe the misunderstanding here is that I think you may be conflating Left with just official ideological liberalism. These are not the same but there is some surface overlap but with different effects in practice. In the anti-war movement Liberal politics won out over Left-wing politics in that most of the movement saw "moral witness" as the best tactic, argued that "peace is patriotic", and that voting for Democrats was the realistic option. The anti-Vietnam protests however were an independent Left movement that was not revolutionary in a Marxist sense but did adopt anti-imperialist politics, challenged liberalism in power and that kind of movement developed a radical core of revolutionaries.

I think your other misunderstanding (or my lack of clear explanation) is that we think that people should become Leftists first and then become revolutionaries. Obviously we'd prefer people to join our group or, short of that, become working class revolutionaries of some sort, but in non-revolutionary times that's a slow and patient and mostly each-one-teach-one sort of process and in revolutionary times it's possible to win huge numbers of people to revolutionary ideas, but it will probably be too late to actually organize effectively. But it is more likely that large numbers of people will move to the left, break with the Democrats, and engage in movements and we think that revolutionaries should participate in movements that have the potential to radicalize and teach workers lessons that will create an audience for revolutionary politics and the possibility for much wider radicalization in the working class.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Aw shizzle, this actually has become an interesting thread.
Keep it going. By all means, get specific about right now and the near term.

Here's a question: what is to be done when the poliical advanced revolutionary working class minority has spent these last decades fucking around with middle class politicos and junior partners of the ruling class, instead of educating, organizing and agitating within the working class itself (because they usually write them off as inactive/apathetic, too afraid, too backwards, "lumpen"...code word meaning worse off and oppressed minority working people)?
Hasn't that been the story of the US Left for decades now....the subjective proletarian class vanguard has been misidentifying/fraternalizing with and wasting its time with the politically active middle class (including the union bureaucracies)? And even the critical orthodox toy vanguard groups have also left the working class itself high and dry while their whole focus is upon seeking out recruits poached from the middle class oriented left groups, meaning they have abandoned the proletariat in actuality, to build toy vanguard parties off of the middle class too!

Maybe instead of expecting the working class to show up at middle class dominated activist events, revolutionary leftists need to actually act like a fucking vanguard where it counts inside the working class itself where it works, schools and lives. I think Jimmie has a great point, but I don't think it can be done in the middle class politically activist and college student dominated crowds or playing around with business union bureaucrats and wannabe hacks, just like it win't get done playing critical Spart poaching and posturing from the sidelines of these same middle class politically active crowds. In both cases, the working class 67% get left behind abandoned and ignored because you can't quickly snatch recruit to build a party out if them like you can with middle class professional hyperactivists, college students and petty bourgeois intellectuals. The left in this country leaves the vast majority of working people out of politics because that's not a quick and dirty way to build a vanguard party in a timely manner such that it can have the dues base to support the lifestyles of its top leadership. Fact is, much of the organized left is eerily similar to the business unions themselves.

Hmm, well I think historically part of the problem is that the last wave of radicalism in the US came out of social struggles that did not appear to many at the time to be connected to working class struggles. So it wasn't until the early 70s that some radicals even began seriously trying to connect to worker's struggles. Some of this is due to ideology and the national liberation/Maoist/nationalist struggles that people looked to at the time for revolutionary examples and so radicalizing people looked to students or various other groups in society to lead the struggle in a sort of romantic revolutionary Che sort of way. The Black Panthers, who are fantastic revolutionary examples in many ways, organized on a community basis but at a time when there still was a sizable black industrial workforce in Oakland at key points of production, they didn't (to my knowledge) make serious attempts to organize radicals in unions.

But for the past few decades, there has been little struggle and the ruling class has been on the offense and so that has led to stagnation on the radical left in my opinion. Groups like mine made a conscious decision in the face of a downturn to focus on campuses because there were still struggles there and as a tiny group at the time, this is where we could openly propagandize without Regan-era conservatives harassing us on picket-lines or larger and hostile radical groups icing us out of the unions they dominated or movements they had key positions in. Still we always tried to be involved in any labor struggle happening locally on principle but were more or less stuck on campuses for a while. Groups like the SWP and Solidarity had some bases in unions and stayed there but have likewise been sort of ghettoized in those sites or industries or unions. Some groups in my opinion have in the absence of struggle from below and maybe being concentrated in certain places oriented towards controlling that base, making ins with the union bureaucracy etc.

While I think that students by and large are working class in the US (and most go on to working class jobs, professional jobs as the second highest, and then a minority become capitalists or agents of the ruling class) and schools are a major location of class struggle (particularly now with privatization, attacks on affirmative action, tuition hikes, cuts etc), my group at least never intended to mainly organize on campuses but that's been 60% of our work by default. That's changed over the last decade and now we have tons of community branches rooted in local struggles, working with local rank and file militants or are these militants themselves. But that has only been because of a concerted effort as well as the growth of our organization and experience.

Now, however, there is struggle beginning to really emerge and it's much more organically and obviously related to working class issues. I think we'll see a generation of radicalization and struggles which will shake up the revolutionary left as we know it. IMO those who are too inflexible or too insular or too propaganda-oriented will miss the boat. Revolutionaries always should be out there fighting with workers in motion, arguing revolutionary poltics, and organizing - but now more than ever because thousands of people are looking for an alternative and they will move our direction spontaneously only for so long and if there isn't an alternative they will fall back into the arms of the Democrats or worse.

[blake 3:17]

Sorta thread drift but we'll cope

@JH
The first time I ran into the Sparts, by the way, was a protest against David Horowitz shortly after 9/11. They had a banner that said "All Power to the Soviets". If the point was to piss off Horowitz, it was an inspired sign, if it was to try and win people to marxist politics... what Soviets are there now that should take power? It's a silly annecdote, but I think it shows the difference in approach.

My favourite Spart story (there's a few) was at a forum I and a few other comrades had organized to support Quebec's right to national self determination and against the undemocratic Clarity Act.

On the panel, we had Jean-Claude Parrot, probably Canada's most radical union leader since the 40s. The dude did jail time for refusing to end a strike when the contract was shit. So this Spart, a real goofball, stands up in the middle of the meeting and denounces him as a labour bureaucrat. And again. And again. Nothing else. Scientifically true, but so what?

More seriously and @JH, do you know what splits happened in the IS that led to the ISO & there being an IS current in Solidarity? Was there an earlier schism about the turn to industry v campus recruiting? I only know American IS folks via Solidarity & that crowd.

[Jimmie Higgins]

No. You base it on class. Not impressions. The national question did not stand above the issue of what is best for the working class. But if you are an impressionistic type -- a country invading another country must be bad.No, that's a strawman. A country invading another country is not the issue. The issue is that imperialism makes the local rulers clients and makes any real popular struggle more difficult because the local elite has a much larger force to back it up.


Well, the PDPA in Afghanistan, a country with almost no proletariat, was the kind of regime you should like. They had a program of land reform, equal rights for women (including the reduction and ending of women being sold as chattal).So you only support reforms when the population is a passive recipient, rather than fighting and organizing for it, and when they come from above?


The opposition? Cutthroat reactionaries, supported by the CIA. The regime, which was supported by the USSR (no doubt because they were making a killing on the sale of pistachio nuts) was losing the civil war -- so the Soviets, came into the country. Now, I don't think they were particularly concerned with the democratic rights of Afghan women -- probably more with not having NATO rockets on another border. However, if the net result was making Afghanistan an SSR, and bringing it's population into the modern world, it would have been a major progressive thing (compare tadzikistan, say to Afghanistan in 1980). Under the PDPA, women did not have to wear the veil, they could have jobs, go to school, serve in the military, serve in the government. Sadly, the Soviets abandoned the country and all kinds of good things happened at the hands of the "freedom loving Afghan rebels." Your organization called that a victory. A victory for whom, comrade?A victory for self-determination.


And, the idea that the USSR was going to "underdevelop" Afghanistan is a riot. You can't develop a modern proletariat based in a society ruled by the likes of the Taliban. You are happy to let Afghan women be chattel -- as we wait a couple of centuries for there to be an organic growth of an Afghan proletariat, sufficiently powerful to throw out the mullahs. You are blinded by your state capitalist view here. No capitalist country would have intervened on behalf of the PDPA. Afghanistan is impoverished. It's only truly valuable resource is poppy production. No capitalist country would waste it's time supporting a progressive internal regime there -- much easier to deal with the war lords and mullahs if there is any reason to be involved. So you wind up in bed with the CIA on this one. Congrats.The bullshit "socialism" of the USSR is one of the main reasons that people fighting oppression in many parts of the world DIDN'T look to marxism for answers and turned instead towards various nationalist or Islamic movements.


And, obviously, to the extent that the entry of Soviet tanks in various places meant the overthrow of capitalism, I would be for it. Where it meant the crushing of a pro-socialist, incipient political revolution in Hungary, strongly against. The class line is what matters -- and we do not agree on where to draw it.Overthrow capitalism and replace it with what? How would that be the self-emancipation of the working class?


Do you think it's a freaking coincidence that the USSR was usually on the progressive side in these battles? Does it mean that "State Capitialism" is somehow more progressive than good old regular capitalism. Of course, there were many problems with the way the Soviets supported these struggles. You know comrades, it is my belief that Desert Storm and the more recent Iraq war doesn't happen if the USSR still exists.And the Red Sox also wouldn't have won the world series if the USSR still existed.

Ok, the USSR was not on the progressive side of many struggles, in fact it often tried to put the breaks on struggles in order to maintain the cold-war status-quo. In fact it didn't support Cuba until Castro was forced to break with the US and was eligible to be a trading partner with the USSR. The best someone can say about the USSR was that they were less aggressive than the US, but they were still not on the side of working class movements. In fact you defend them in Afghanistan and also recognize that there is no working class - so who was the USSR relating to? Mostly the officer corps of the military from everything I've read.

Afganistan is not a "nation" in the modern sense and the only infrastructure the USSR added was things to aid resource extraction and military hardware transportation. Just like the US now, they held power over a weak national government while provincial rulers actually ran most of the country.

You're out on a limb on this one, only the Sparticists still uphold the USSR in Afghanistan as a progressive thing. Just think if they had "not given up" (or forced out as the case may be) then when the USSR system collapsed, the still could have been taken over by local warlords - or if they had somehow actually been modernized from above through nationalist schemes, they could have become capitalist like the rest of the USSR sphere! What a bold alternative that could have been if only the USSR had sent in tens of thousands of more troops stayed indefinitely and killed a larger percentage of the hostile population!

[Lucretia]

So hoping to help rebuild a broad left means helping to build struggles which will give people confidence to fight and in doing so will clarify class demands or potentially lead to radicalization.

Here is where I begin to get confused. You talk about building "struggles to give people confidence to fight" as a process that (spontaneously?) "clarifies class demands." Should not your intervention in the struggle, your way of moving forward, be to press people to take a class analysis? Shouldn't it be to point out the nature of the system that gives rise to issues of oppression and exploitation? Again, I fail to see how you can draw this clean distinction between building a "broader left" as a precondition, a discrete stage, in building a Marxist left. They are done in tandem as part of the same process, not as discrete stages -- which is what the model you presented above implies.


Even struggles that fail to create an independent movement (like immigrant rights so far) can produce a radical core of people who might be won to radical politics even while most people involved retain or fall back into the default ideas of capitalism.Right, but they won't be won over simply by being involved in the movement. Being involved in the movement is a precondition, an essential component of becoming radicalized. The other is being introduced to a class analysis of the situations they confront in the process of fighting for their demands. What I am still not understanding is your attempt to bridge the one (self-activity, "building struggles," "building a broad left") with the second ("producing a radical [Marxian?] core"). It seems you think of these as discrete activities, where you can put the second on hold while you do the first.


So, practically, what does this mean? It means in the occupy movement, we get involved in committees and argue from our perspective what we think will be the best next step. So some people argue for moralistic "buy-nothing" Adbusters-type politics and we argue against that because this doesn't make the movement stronger, doesn't connect it to the broader working class community, doesn't even actually harm or threaten the system.
...
So we fight for these things because we think this will help bring the movement forward and we also argue that our perspective comes not just from the logic of movements but from marxism and so that's what informs us that shutting down the port or encouraging organizing with rank and file union members are effective.This sounds good, but I wonder. Are you naming the system "capitalism"? Is your intervention in the movement explaining why consumer-based politics won't work because the nature of class society makes the point of production the key site of struggle, where the system can be brought to its knees most effectively? Or are you couching this in more generic, ambiguous terminology so as not to scare people away? (The real Marxist terminology will have to wait until stage two to be revealed?) If you are doing the latter, I don't think that's an effective way at all of building a radical core or of advancing struggles. I will reiterate: the two goals are mutually implied and dialectically interconnected. You, at least in theory, seem to acknowledge this, but I wonder how this acknowledgment is put into practice.

In other words, the key question here is one of style. And I don't mean style in a flippant way. I mean it as an important subjective factor in how you introduce people to a Marxian analysis of politics and the world.You claim that your organization's members do argue from an explicitly Marxist perspective, but I really wonder about this in light of some of the articles, for example, I've seen in the ISR (like the Nichols one), where the group is publishing views that are not even Marxist, much less explicitly so.


In addition to making these practical arguments we do propaganda work, try to identify what are the political questions in the movement "Can the police be won-over?" "Is Mayor Quan really on our side?" to have study groups or teach-ins or ISO meetings that makes a Marxist case. We hope that we can win some of the radical core to our organization, or if not that at least win them on certain central questions that push them closer to revolutionary politics.But the key question, again, is are you answering these questions from an explicitly Marxist position, openly and proudly using the toolbox that the Marxian tradition has left us? Or are you taking a mormon-like "Milk Before Meat" approach, where you try to introduce them to certain key ideas, but then hide the fact that these ideas are in fact the product of a much broader and far-reaching (Marxian) analysis of society? If it's the latter, it is not an effective way of building a radical/revolutionary cadre that is wanting to learn more about revolutionary socialist theory.


The main thing is if people aren't struggling then our ideas don't mean much. This is why the revolutionary left has remained small, why some groups have become overly dogmatic or groups not being able to expand beyond their base in a few unions or industries or on college campuses.True, but if your ideas don't affect how you struggle, the ideas don't mean much either. It's a delicate balance that needs to be struck. I just suspect from my own observations that the ISO is striking the balance too much in terms of trying to fit in with, adapt to, activist liberals rather than lead them to a revolutionary politics.


Rebuilding an independent left in the US just means encouraging these independent struggles and movements. These fights against oppression, fights for economic gains etc are the first steps towards the possibility of rebuilding a revolutionary tradition in the US with roots in workplaces and working class communities.This might sound like unfair quibbling, but here you go again with talk of "steps." They aren't steps comrade. They are the beginnings of a unified process in which action and theory interact dialectically not separated out from one another in a process of carefully choreographed stages. The process of trying to win people over to a revolutionary Marxian politics should be present from the beginning as the way in which the movement is built.


I think maybe the misunderstanding here is that I think you may be conflating Left with just official ideological liberalism. These are not the same but there is some surface overlap but with different effects in practice. In the anti-war movement Liberal politics won out over Left-wing politics in that most of the movement saw "moral witness" as the best tactic, argued that "peace is patriotic", and that voting for Democrats was the realistic option. The anti-Vietnam protests however were an independent Left movement that was not revolutionary in a Marxist sense but did adopt anti-imperialist politics, challenged liberalism in power and that kind of movement developed a radical core of revolutionaries.

I think your other misunderstanding (or my lack of clear explanation) is that we think that people should become Leftists first and then become revolutionaries. Obviously we'd prefer people to join our group or, short of that, become working class revolutionaries of some sort, but in non-revolutionary times that's a slow and patient and mostly each-one-teach-one sort of process and in revolutionary times it's possible to win huge numbers of people to revolutionary ideas, but it will probably be too late to actually organize effectively. But it is more likely that large numbers of people will move to the left, break with the Democrats, and engage in movements and we think that revolutionaries should participate in movements that have the potential to radicalize and teach workers lessons that will create an audience for revolutionary politics and the possibility for much wider radicalization in the working class.The highlighted part here is the root of the disagreement. It, I think, illustrates beyond a reasonable doubt that your view of winning people over to revolutionary politics is thoroughly stageist ala Kautsky, with a first stage of winning people over to a minimally "leftist" program of reforms before getting them committed to a "maximum" revolutionary Marxian approach. It is only by winning people over to revolutionary Marxism, by introducing them explicitly to the concepts and approaches of Marxian politics, that these movements will secure the most victories, inspire of the most confidence of workers, and grow to their maximum potential. As I have repeated countless times, I think your view (and the view of the ISO, if your view is in any way representative) is completely backwards in that it seems to think that the building of a massive left is the precondition for forging an effective revolutionary cadre. It is through revolutionaries agitating in struggles from the beginning of those struggles, that a massive left is build, and that an effective revolutionary cadre is built.

In any case, I am still not clear on how you envision the process of "building a broad left" as in any way distinct from trying to introduce people to your revolutionary perspective on politics. Please clarify for me: how does the process of winning somebody over to left politics, differ, at a practical level, from winning somebody over to a revolutionary politics? If you are winning them over through your arguments, and your arguments are explicitly Marxist (as you claim they are up above), I fail to see how the one can happen and not the other. Unless, of course, you have a distinct set of arguments that you make which are not explicitly Marxist or revolutionary. But according to you, the ISO does not do this. So I am thoroughly confused on this issue. Does this "broader left" construction consist of shutting up about Marxism, and publishing articles that cater to liberal assumptions (like the Nichols article did)? That's probably where I'm the most unclear on your views.

[Jimmie Higgins]

We are not trying to win people to the broad left first while hiding our revolutionary politics until someone is ready. We are trying to help movements that we think will advance things to succeed, in that process we make both practical movement arguments which naturally come from our class politics as well as try and reach people who might be receptive to revolutionary politics.

I don't know where you get this "phase 2" strawman. This is your conception and you keep trying to fit what I am saying into that preconcieved notion. We can not create an anti-war movement if we wanted to - we instead go to where people are engaging in struggle and participate as open Marxists while also arguing for the politics and strategy that we think will advance that struggle. I'm talking "steps" not as an word for "stages" as you suggest but in terms of footsteps... you know moving forward. You say that Marxist politics should be the core of movements from the beginning... well that's nice, and they should, but how can a few thousand revolutionary marxists in the US do this when radical poltics have been divorced from the working class for a couple of generations? Marxist politics will only have influence if we win people to these arguments while engaging with people in struggle.

Lecturing people and arguments can win over a few people already open to things, but most people will not question some of the common assumptions in our society until they are actually confronted by how the police actually treat "peaceful protesters" for example or how NGOs or Liberal politicians will go only so far at best and betray you the rest of that time.

Like you said, struggle is a precondition for radicalization on a larger scale... since consciousness is low while class anger is high, that is what I think needs to happen to see the revolutionary left's arguments and politics begin to attract people. But again, there are no phases it's a connected process and we do the same propaganda that a lot of the rest of the left does, but I think our propaganda efforts are more successful because we work with other activists and show in practice how these ideas are necessary.

[Lucretia]

We are not trying to win people to the broad left first while hiding our revolutionary politics until someone is ready. We are trying to help movements that we think will advance things to succeed, in that process we make both practical movement arguments which naturally come from our class politics as well as try and reach people who might be receptive to revolutionary politics.

I don't know where you get this "phase 2" strawman. This is your conception and you keep trying to fit what I am saying into that preconcieved notion. We can not create an anti-war movement if we wanted to - we instead go to where people are engaging in struggle and participate as open Marxists while also arguing for the politics and strategy that we think will advance that struggle. I'm talking "steps" not as an word for "stages" as you suggest but in terms of footsteps... you know moving forward. You say that Marxist politics should be the core of movements from the beginning... well that's nice, and they should, but how can a few thousand revolutionary marxists in the US do this when radical poltics have been divorced from the working class for a couple of generations? Marxist politics will only have influence if we win people to these arguments while engaging with people in struggle.

Lecturing people and arguments can win over a few people already open to things, but most people will not question some of the common assumptions in our society until they are actually confronted by how the police actually treat "peaceful protesters" for example or how NGOs or Liberal politicians will go only so far at best and betray you the rest of that time.

Like you said, struggle is a precondition for radicalization on a larger scale... since consciousness is low while class anger is high, that is what I think needs to happen to see the revolutionary left's arguments and politics begin to attract people. But again, there are no phases it's a connected process and we do the same propaganda that a lot of the rest of the left does, but I think our propaganda efforts are more successful because we work with other activists and show in practice how these ideas are necessary.

I appreciate your taking the time to respond to these questions. I think your patience in explaining your views, and the views of your organization, are admirable and reflect well on the ISO. But I am a little perplexed about why you should think that steps is somehow different than stages. Both imply a series of discrete measures, one taken after another, rather than a single process with multiple aspects continuously occurring and bound up together inextricably. (E.g., trying to win people over to left politics through making Marxian socialist arguments as a part of the movement -- the two aspects cannot be separated out. What does it look like to try to build a broad left as a "first step," of making people "Leftist first" then revolutionaries later, as you said?)

I am also confused about where you get the idea that I think "Marxist ideas should be at the core of a movement from the beginning." Marxists do not control when struggles against oppression begin or, for the most part, who begins them, so it is obviously impossible to make Marxist ideas at the core of struggles from the beginning. That claim would be pure idiocy, and I encourage you to look through my posts in this thread to find where I said any such thing. In contrast, what I emphasized was for revolutionary Marxists to fight at the very start of their involvement in movements to place a Marxian approach to social struggle at the core of that movement. The fact that you keep speaking of this idea in a belittling fashion as "Lecturing people" by "smarties" indicates to me that you don't really understand what I am saying or, at least, don't agree with it. I am talking about getting involved and being in the thick of movements as activists who are unashamedly putting forth a class analysis of the situation and encouraging others to see their struggle as part of a wider system of oppression and exploitation. By the way, this does not mean repeating "All Power to the Soviets! Revolution now!" It can be putting forth demands that are not nearly as sweeping, but which are articulated within a very clear Marxian framework with class struggle and class power at the center.

Of course, all of this is secondary to what I consider to be the most important question of all. And you never really addressed it in your follow up post. The question is, how exactly do you win people over to left politics but not revolutionary Marxian politics if, according to you, your group intervenes in movements to put forward a revolutionary socialist approach to the issues at hand? Please explain to me how this happens, because as far as I am aware, there are two logical outcomes: people hear your revolutionary socialist approach and reject it, or they hear it and accept it. Where does rejecting Marxian leftism, but embracing generic leftism come into the equation? Do ISO members make "broad left" arguments to win people over to the "broad left" while muting anything that might sound overly Marxist once they realize that their earlier more Marxist arguments are rejected? As I asked above, how do you fight to make people "Leftist first" then revolutionaries second? I would honestly like to know how you see this happening, perhaps by being shown a concrete example, because according to you, this is what your group tries to do in "non-revolutionary times."

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

This works in very small numbers, but it's idealist to think that large numbers of people will be won to revolutionary activity through reading the perfectly worded article or hearing a cutting slogan. We have to prove our politics in action and if Marxist revolutionaries don't attempt to do this - especially at a time like now - where are people going to go? Probably towards insurrectionist on the one hand or they will get discouraged and think that there's no hope for revolution and go to the Democratic party.

If you are a Leninist, why aren't you in a party or organization? How are you individually building a vanguard party? Or do you hide your affiliation? Or do you actually think you are Trotsky and are waiting for the vanguard party to emerge and win you over :DSpent some serious time in groups when you were probably just a wee lad. I am not active at the moment. I doubt that I am actually Trotsky as I cannot speak Russian and I feel significantly younger than 132 years old.

See, I think that you think you are really more down to earth than us Vanguard Party Smarties, but have it backwards. Somehow, if you play your cards right, and are super respectful of liberal prejudices, you somehow will move the masses toward revolutionary consciousness. That is, of course, a pipe dream. The masses will start to move leftward when they do. What a revolutionary group wants to do now, is find the outlier, the unusual person that is drawn to communism and train them. Not to be mindless followers, but to be revolutionary leaders when the time comes -- you cannot as a tiny group make that time come significantly sooner (maybe not as a large group either). That is a Leninist view of party building. And historically the ISO is so enamored of "movements" that it supports reactionary ones like Solidarity or the Afghan Mullahs. Those were broad movements, you know.

[workersadvocate]

Still one of my favorite current treads here on Revleft.
Keep going, please.

[A Marxist Historian]

Just some fact-checking here. The ISO REVOKED support for the Nader campaign in 2004 when he sought political support from right-wing anti-war groups. Our organization was on the fence about supporting him that year already and we voted to support getting him on the ballot but not investing our time and organizational energy to helping the campaign as we did in 2000. His courting of libertarians and so on and his softness (or defensiveness) in taking on the Democrats and Kerry proved the side of the debate that said he was too isolated now (and the Green-party was already in full retreat) and would not be a rallying figure for people who were against the war and the Democrats. The anti-war movement was in decline but we thought that anti-war forces might rally behind Nader as a protest vote. Our whole perspective around these 3rd party efforts was in the hopes that a left-of Democrats (anti-Democrats) base could organize out of disgust with neoliberalism around some 3rd party "progressive" campaign. It was never about supporting Nader or the Greens as the vehicle to socialism but as a vehicle to trying to help drive a wedge in the hold of the Democratic party over people, to help nurture a left independent of the Democrats.

Ah, Jimmy. You're the best of the ISO defenders here, so I'm a bit disappointed with your argument, which is shall we say naive.

The ISO dropped support for Nader in 2004 because Nader had pissed a whole lot of left-liberals off in 2000, by helping, or at least so was the mythology, Bush Jr. getting elected by splitting of a few percent in Florida.

Now of course that's not what the ISO said, and that may not even have been what your more naive ISO supporters, such as yourself, were thinking.

But that's what was happening.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Dude, tell the Marxists you meet with politics similar to ours to join us then:D

But in general, yeah there are far too few of us for the tasks at hand - and I don't mean just ISOers. RCP is better about being flashy, but from my perspective we do a lot of movement work and have been heavily involved in coalitions and one of our members led one of the marches to shut down the port - of course at that same march, someone forgot to bring the banner we made, but we're all human and luckily it looks like struggle will be with us for a while so we'll have more opportunities to learn and participate and build more.

We did initially support him and I helped collect signatures for him in Berkeley which in the rightward shift of "Anybody But Bush/There wouldn't have been a war if Nader hadn't run and Gore won" was an experience along the lines of what trying to get an openly gay candidate on a ballot in the 1980s may have been like. I had people take the petitions from me and try and destroy them and I was spit on byKerry supporters . Hmm, yes, somehow I think if we wanted to "pander to liberals" I don't think supporting Nader who liberals hated with passion usually reserved for Bush would have been the way to go. Instead, as I explained and as we explained in publications at the time, we were hoping that a prominent challenge to the Democrats could be the beginnings of an independent left. Occupy is doing that instead and is much superior, but in 2004, how could we know that the unorganized class anger that we believed was building up due to the hold of the 2 parties and their agreement on war and neoliberalism would only find expression now? I think we were right in 2000, wrong in 2004, but we quickly made a switch when we saw what we had hoped to come from such a campaign was not attracting or galvanizing the anti-war movement. Of course some others on the left said we ditched Nader in order to provide cover for Kerry (as if any group on the radical left is that influential anyway), so also sometimes no matter what, there are criticisms.

Um, I think you just made my point here. Did you guys ditch Nader in order to provide cover for Kerry? Of course not, the ISO is not big and influential enough to play in the big leagues in that fashion, like the CPUSA still tries to out of old habit.

You guys ditched Nader in 2004 'cuz supporting Nader made you so unpopular. That Nader did some particularly disgusting things at the time gave a good excuse.

Of course, if you guys had wanted to ditch Nader in 2000, his union-busting and various other unpleasant things about him would have been an equally good excuse.

-M.H.-

[Jimmie Higgins]

Ah, Jimmy. You're the best of the ISO defenders here, so I'm a bit disappointed with your argument, which is shall we say naive.

The ISO dropped support for Nader in 2004 because Nader had pissed a whole lot of left-liberals off in 2000, by helping, or at least so was the mythology, Bush Jr. getting elected by splitting of a few percent in Florida.

Now of course that's not what the ISO said, and that may not even have been what your more naive ISO supporters, such as yourself, were thinking.

But that's what was happening.

-M.H.-
That couldn't be more false. I know the internal votes we had on this one, I know the SW articles as well as what we were arguing to our members and allies at the time. We dropped our support for the exact reasons I stated and then quoted from in the SW.

The whole argument for our support of those efforts was to drive a wedge in the hold the Democratic party has on union and movement activism and we dropped support for the Greens because the conservative side of the party won over the Camejo side and pursued a "safe-state strategy" that wouldn't confront the Democrats in states where they might loose. Then we dropped support for Nader in 2004 AFTER helping to get him on the ballot because in the course of that campaign he met with John Kerry, softened his criticism and sought right-wing populist allies.

We were wrong that Nader's campaign would be a rallying point for people in the anti-war movement angered by the Democrat's and Kerry's pro-war stance and so we dropped our already luke-warm support.

After the 2000 election we argued publicly that Nader and the Greens SHOULDN'T be defensive about liberal attacks about "costing Gore the election" - we argued that the Green party has no political function if it doesn't see challenging the Dems from the left as it's purpose.

Internet sectarians like to make a big deal out of bad political break ups, when someone quits or is kicked out of the ISO they make a big deal of it as if this wasn't a voluntary organization or that this doesn't happen in any group formal or informal. But in 10 years of organizing, only two people have been kicked out of branches I've been in. One was a macktivist who was making female comrades uncomfortable and the other was in 2004 when a new member who'd been around for a few months insisted that we do vote for Kerry even after we made ever attempt to win him away from support of the Democrats and electoralism with study groups and readings and one on one debates. He was never won to our politics and wanted to make pro-Kerry arguments at our meeting so we told him this was a irreconcilable difference in views and he should look for a group that is a better fit. So the ideas that we hide our poltics, don't try and win people to revolutionary politics, or even more bizzarely that we are secretly pro-Democrats despite everything we say and attempt to do is just plain wrong.

[A Marxist Historian]

For there to have been a 'counterrevolution' between 1989-1992 it would have to be one class throwing out another and supplanting itself as the ruling class. What's amazing about the fall of the USSR and the Eastern European states is the continuity. In Russia Boris Yeltsin was president, followed by KGB officer Vladimir Putin-and current and former KGB/SVR officers are well known to be influential in government (in fact the difference between the SVR and KGB is so slight they still call themselves "Chekists"). The former factory mangers simply bought the factories and became capitalists. In several of the central Asian states the former general secretaries of the Communist party became president (in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan they're still in office). One ruling class wasn't thrown out and replaced with another with the fall of the USSR, the same one simply took a different name. Whatever you want to call the collapse of the USSR, it wasn't a 'counterrevolution'.

Olentzero, lets not resort to name-calling if possible.
(http://www.revleft.com/vb/member.php?u=37186)

No counterrevolution? The USSR ceased to exist, it no longer is even on the map. The Communist Party, which was the axis of the old ruling elite, became illegal and all its property was seized. Blood flowed in the streets in all sorts of places, Tadzhikistan, Azerbaijan/Armenia, and even after it was all over, Yeltsin shelled the Russian parliament to get rid of the last symbolic vestiges.

Social relations were transformed to such an extreme degree that the economy came to a crashing halt, and the standard of living of the working class dropped to such an extreme degree that average life expectancy for men dropped by ten years! The official estimates of number of people who died due to the economic transformations even from right wing sources are verging on six million at this point, the number of people who died in the Holocaust.

The economic blows against the Russian working class, by any objective measure, exceeded those suffered by German workers when Hitler seized power and instituted fascism.

If that's not what a counterrevolution is, what would be?

The fact that lots of apparatchiks jumped ship and managed to make out in the new setup means absolutely nothing. The new oligarchs include quite a few former bureaucrats, mostly low or at most middle level, but most of them were crooks, bandits and clever operators who seized opportunities and were nothing and nobody under Gorbachev. Claiming that the new capitalist ruling class has any real relationship to the old nomenklatura is absurd.

And by the way, "Chekist" is what they called the original Sword of the Revolution, Dzherzhinsky's guys whom the ISO, at least in theory, still considers as heroes, as do the most conscious Russian workers. Putin's thugs call themselves by the honorable name of Chekists to delude the workers.

-M.H.-

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

This is laughable. The idea that state capitalist theory inexorably leads to Walesa is as absurd as the idea that Marx's value theory invariably leads to Stalin's gulags. For some one who seems relatively knowledgeable about the history of Trotskyist groups in the US, you should be aware that other groups besides the ISO and the LRP have had a state cap line in describing what you would call stalinist "workers states" (there's a contradiction in terms), and their record indicates that whatever serious mistakes the ISO makes in its approach to politics is most certainly not some kind of logical extension of a state cap line.

Does the state cap theory inevitably lead to Walesa? Well, since both the ISO and LRP supported Walesa vs. Jaruzelski, side by side with Ronald Reagan etc., I suppose so.

Were there any of the myriad "state caps" out there that didn't? Not to my knowledge.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Because socialism, unlike capitalism or any other class society, is not a system that functions independently of, in spite of, workers' control. The very essence of socialism is workers' control, a set of political relations. They are not some secondary issue that can be done away with, like whether a capitalist is able to exert direct control over a government dominated by private capital accumulation. This, by the way, is why bourgeois revolutions are possible even where capitalists do not exercise leadership functions. It's the point Marx made about capitalism being out of the control of even capitalists. You cannot have a socialist revolution in which the working class is not at the helm (under the leadership of the most class-conscious of those workers, of course).

Well, I'm working through this thread one post at a time, and no doubt your failure to answer the question you were asked about when or whether China and Cuba were ever capitalist gets challenged later in the thread. Apparently you think Cuba under Castro has always been a capitalist country? That fails the howling absurdity test. Sort of like saying the earth is flat, so it is not surprising you try to avoid saying so in so many words.

But beyond that, this posting raises a very serious question that needs to be dealt with seriously.

Can you have socialism without the working class in command, run by a bunch of privileged bureaucrats? No, you can't.

Why? Because Marx said so, and everything Marx wrote was holy writ? Well no. Especially since to the best of my knowledge Marx never actually got around to saying anything like that.

For a better reason. Because it's been tried, on half the planet, and guess what, it didn't work.

And that's not even getting into the important but ultimately less fundamental question of whether you can have socialism in one country.

And when you assert that socialism is "a set of political relations," that shows you are not a Marxist. Marxists see economics as fundamental, and politics as superstructure.

And, by the way, when you say you can't have a socialist revolution without the working class at the helm, that is true but irrelevant. Workers were at the helm of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, but Russia was not a socialist society the day afterwards, as the Stalinists (er, pardon me, "Marxist-Leninists") here maintain.

The Cuban, Chinese, Yugoslav and Vietnamese Revolutions were peasant revolutions in which workers played little or no role. That is why their leaderships were, or in the case of Cuba became, Stalinist not revolutionary Marxist. But they overthrew capitalism, and created bureaucratically-deformed states that defended the social interests of the working class and the people in general vs. capitalism and imperialism, to one degree or another.

Were they "socialist states"? Well no, as first of all "socialist state" is a contradiction in terms, and second of all the bureaucratic misleaders of these revolutions played and in some cases still play an intermediary mediating role between the oppressed peoples of their countries and world capitalist imperialism, in exactly the same way as reformist trade union bureaucrats do between the rank and file and the employers and the capitalist state.

-M.H.-

[Jimmie Higgins]

I doubt that I am actually Trotsky as I cannot speak Russian and I feel significantly younger than 132 years old.:lol:


See, I think that you think you are really more down to earth than us Vanguard Party Smarties, but have it backwards. Somehow, if you play your cards right, and are super respectful of liberal prejudices, you somehow will move the masses toward revolutionary consciousness. That is, of course, a pipe dream. The masses will start to move leftward when they do. What a revolutionary group wants to do now, is find the outlier, the unusual person that is drawn to communism and train them. Not to be mindless followers, but to be revolutionary leaders when the time comes -- you cannot as a tiny group make that time come significantly sooner (maybe not as a large group either). That is a Leninist view of party building. And historically the ISO is so enamored of "movements" that it supports reactionary ones like Solidarity or the Afghan Mullahs. Those were broad movements, you know.Yes, as I have said, we recruit people to our group in the ways you talk about here and we get people joining our group in the ones and twos.

We are enamored by movements because that is what teaches people in a much bigger scale important lessons and holds the potential for either a core radicalizing or radicalization on a larger scale as in the civil rights movement becoming the black power movement. Movements also make revolutionary ideas and arguments actually relevant to workers because marxism isn't just a bunch of insights but a guide to action.

Of course we don't think our group or any group can really initiate a real movement of consequence at this point, but there are subjective things that revolutionaries can do now that can have an effect greater than our small numbers at present. The involvement of radicals in movements can mean maybe not wining the whole to revolutionary ideas but it might mean winning some arguments and gaining respect for revolutionary politics as having a better understanding of how the system works and how to fight it.

[Lucretia]

Does the state cap theory inevitably lead to Walesa? Well, since both the ISO and LRP supported Walesa vs. Jaruzelski, side by side with Ronald Reagan etc., I suppose so.

Were there any of the myriad "state caps" out there that didn't? Not to my knowledge.

-M.H.-

You have no evidence for this, which is not surprising since it is not true, at least as far the LRP goes. I advise you read the LRP's comments on Walesa (http://lrp-cofi.org/archive/DBreply1.html) to a criticism that seems as baseless as yours.


Well, I'm working through this thread one post at a time, and no doubt your failure to answer the question you were asked about when or whether China and Cuba were ever capitalist gets challenged later in the thread. Apparently you think Cuba under Castro has always been a capitalist country? That fails the howling absurdity test. Sort of like saying the earth is flat, so it is not surprising you try to avoid saying so in so many words.

I answered it quite clearly -- I said that I had not done the requisite historical research (you know, the thing that is necessary to make a class analysis of a society, whereas you seem to think class analysis involves categorizing abstract property forms). So I don't know where you get the idea that I 'apparently think Cuba under Castro has always been state capitalist.' It's certainly a possibility, but I have not made that claim anywhere. I also said that, whatever the economy was, it was not socialist, nor was it transitioning to socialism as a "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." How could it? The "proletariat" was never in power in Cuba. You, on the other hand, want to suggest that the dictatorship of the proletariat and the transition to socialism is not a process of political emancipation brought about by workers themselves, but a process of leaders nationalizing property under their own authority.


But beyond that, this posting raises a very serious question that needs to be dealt with seriously.

Can you have socialism without the working class in command, run by a bunch of privileged bureaucrats? No, you can't.

Why? Because Marx said so, and everything Marx wrote was holy writ? Well no. Especially since to the best of my knowledge Marx never actually got around to saying anything like that.

For a better reason. Because it's been tried, on half the planet, and guess what, it didn't work.

And that's not even getting into the important but ultimately less fundamental question of whether you can have socialism in one country.Ok. We're in agreement here.


And when you assert that socialism is "a set of political relations," that shows you are not a Marxist. Marxists see economics as fundamental, and politics as superstructure.This has got to be the dumbest thing I have ever any supposed "Marxist" say. Although his base-superstructure passage in the Preface is often misinterpreted as foregrounding the division between state and mode of production, Marx's point in that passage was actually to do the opposite: to stress their interconnetedness as part of a totality. His point was that economics is fundamentally political -- that it very much involves relationships of power, which was his entire reason for connecting state forms to the mode of production. His argument (which was actually just a recapitulation of what he wrote in the German Ideology) was that you don't analyze states as isolate little entities, like people who do "great man" history might be inclined to do, but you view them as subordinate part to a larger process of struggle over who controls the fundamental resources in society. It is news to me that, by distinguishing between the base and the superstructure, Marx was saying that politics and power struggles (namely, the class struggle) don't take place in civil society over the means of production.

Socialism is a set of political relations, a set of political relationships in which productive property is held in common, and in which decisions regarding its use are made in common. The transition to socialism is a process whereby the working class empowers itself, even if that empowerment occurs through a willingness to listen to and learn from leaders who have inspired their confidence through results.

That you don't even really understand Marx's point about base and superstructure might be the most fundamental flaw of all, because once you try to sever the two, with one being "political" and the other "economic," you're well on your way to claiming that once the economic sphere is "nationalized," you have a society on its way to socialism, regardless of the political content of those relations. If Marx were around today and heard what you just wrote, he'd only have to change a few words around to make his Preface relevant to this debate: "My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms [including state control over the economy] could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life [who exercises control over what key productive resources, which are relationships of power -- political relationships that are reflected imperfectly in the institutions of the state], the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and French thinkers of the eighteenth century, embraces within the term “civil society”; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in political economy."


And, by the way, when you say you can't have a socialist revolution without the working class at the helm, that is true but irrelevant. Workers were at the helm of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, but Russia was not a socialist society the day afterwards, as the Stalinists (er, pardon me, "Marxist-Leninists") here maintain.Correct. What you had for years after the 1917 revolution was a society transitioning to socialism. A society in which, whatever "substitution" was being made by bureaucrats, the party bureaucrats did not yet have the power to subordinate workers to their command on the shop floor, and had not yet derived their political power ultimately from control over the means of production. Instead workers still identified and placed confidence in the regime, which in turn had no choice but to allow workers considerable power on the shop floor up until the late NEP. Kevin Murphy's book Revolution and Counterrevolution deals with this quite well.


The Cuban, Chinese, Yugoslav and Vietnamese Revolutions were peasant revolutions in which workers played little or no role. That is why their leaderships were, or in the case of Cuba became, Stalinist not revolutionary Marxist. But they overthrew capitalism, and created bureaucratically-deformed states that defended the social interests of the working class and the people in general vs. capitalism and imperialism, to one degree or another.

Were they "socialist states"? Well no, as first of all "socialist state" is a contradiction in terms, and second of all the bureaucratic misleaders of these revolutions played and in some cases still play an intermediary mediating role between the oppressed peoples of their countries and world capitalist imperialism, in exactly the same way as reformist trade union bureaucrats do between the rank and file and the employers and the capitalist state.

-M.H.-We've already had a prolonged and rather unproductive discussion about your definition of capitalism. You make the same error the Bronsteinovich made earlier, which is picking out a few empirical characteristics of capitalist societies in the West, and saying that because state capitalist countries lacked these empirical markers (inheritance, planlessness), that therefore the fundamental processes of capitalist exploitation were absent. I've addressed these claims to you, and I've addressed them when Lev made them. I shan't do it again.

[Lucretia]

:lol:

Yes, as I have said, we recruit people to our group in the ways you talk about here and we get people joining our group in the ones and twos.

We are enamored by movements because that is what teaches people in a much bigger scale important lessons and holds the potential for either a core radicalizing or radicalization on a larger scale as in the civil rights movement becoming the black power movement. Movements also make revolutionary ideas and arguments actually relevant to workers because marxism isn't just a bunch of insights but a guide to action.

Of course we don't think our group or any group can really initiate a real movement of consequence at this point, but there are subjective things that revolutionaries can do now that can have an effect greater than our small numbers at present. The involvement of radicals in movements can mean maybe not wining the whole to revolutionary ideas but it might mean winning some arguments and gaining respect for revolutionary politics as having a better understanding of how the system works and how to fight it.

Jimmie, are you going to answer my last post to you?

[A Marxist Historian]

[QUOTE=Jimmie Higgins;2342692]That couldn't be more false. I know the internal votes we had on this one, I know the SW articles as well as what we were arguing to our members and allies at the time. We dropped our support for the exact reasons I stated and then quoted from in the SW.

The whole argument for our support of those efforts was to drive a wedge in the hold the Democratic party has on union and movement activism and we dropped support for the Greens because the conservative side of the party won over the Camejo side and pursued a "safe-state strategy" that wouldn't confront the Democrats in states where they might loose. Then we dropped support for Nader in 2004 AFTER helping to get him on the ballot because in the course of that campaign he met with John Kerry, softened his criticism and sought right-wing populist allies.

We were wrong that Nader's campaign would be a rallying point for people in the anti-war movement angered by the Democrat's and Kerry's pro-war stance and so we dropped our already luke-warm support.

After the 2000 election we argued publicly that Nader and the Greens SHOULDN'T be defensive about liberal attacks about "costing Gore the election" - we argued that the Green party has no political function if it doesn't see challenging the Dems from the left as it's purpose...
QUOTE]

I do not doubt that that's how your documents read, I do not doubt that is what you, and indeed, most of the cadre of the ISO tell themselves.

Denial is not a river in Egypt.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

You have no evidence for this, which is not surprising since it is not true, at least as far the LRP goes. I advise you read the LRP's comments on Walesa (http://lrp-cofi.org/archive/DBreply1.html) to a criticism that seems as baseless as yours.

Glanced at the LRP piece, and I must say I gave the LRP a bit too much credit for simple intelligence. They claim, in true flat-earth defiance of reality, that there was no difference between Walesa and Jaruzelski.

I guess it was all a secret conspiracy run by the Bavarian Illuminati, just like 9/11, which, of course, was masterminded by Bush Jr., or maybe actually never really happened at all. Or that notorious fraud, the alleged American moon landing.

Their line is that Solidarity was a heroic working class movement, sold out to the evil Stalinists by that counterrevolutionary secret Stalinist collaborator Walesa.

Oy!




I answered it quite clearly -- I said that I had not done the requisite historical research (you know, the thing that is necessary to make a class analysis of a society, whereas you seem to think class analysis involves categorizing abstract property forms). So I don't know where you get the idea that I 'apparently think Cuba under Castro has always been state capitalist.' It's certainly a possibility, but I have not made that claim anywhere. I also said that, whatever the economy was, it was not socialist, nor was it transitioning to socialism as a "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." How could it? The "proletariat" was never in power in Cuba. You, on the other hand, want to suggest that the dictatorship of the proletariat and the transition to socialism is not a process of political emancipation brought about by workers themselves, but a process of leaders nationalizing property under their own authority.

Ok. We're in agreement here.

Um, just what are we agreeing to here. Just what is Castro's Cuba anyway? Is it capitalist, or something else? If so, what something else? Not socialist clearly. Bureaucratic collectivist? Or what?

So you don't know 'cuz you haven't done the historical research? Well, it's a big island, not far off the coast of Florida, and the Castro brothers are at this point I think the longest-surviving political regime on earth. By now one would think it would be possible to draw some conclusion about the nature of the political regime and the society it governs without having to do any historical research.

How about some plain ordinary journalism? The Cuban regime is not an historical artifact, it exists here and now, and has changed very little over the course of the last half century. Or talk to a Cuban or two?

Class analysis doesn't involve "categorizing abstract property forms," like lawyers or something. It involves looking at what happens to people who live there on a day to day basis.

How much division is there between rich and poor? Are there banks? Is there a stock market? If so, what role do they play in the economy? Social surplus, where does it go? Into the hands of the Mafia, like in the old days? Or does it maybe go into things like Cubans having better medical care and lower infant mortality than Americans do?

That's the kind of simple extremely concrete stuff to look at to determine the class nature of a society and the regime that rules over it. In whose name and for whose benefit they rule and who those armed bodies of men, for that's what a state is, hold down in subjection, and to whom.

But what really reveals your confusion is your comment that "nor is it transitioning to socialism as a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."

Of course not! The Castro brothers are Stalinists after all. If the society completed a transition to socialism, they would be out on their asses.

If a society is in transition towards socialism, the state running it, pushing it in that direction, is not Stalinist but revolutionary, in the Lenin/Trotsky mould.

A Stalinist *bureaucratically deformed* workers state, governing a society in between capitalism and socialism, where social relations are in transition, is pushing it back in the direction of capitalism, as events in the USSR and Eastern Europe at the end of the '80s and beginning of the '90s demonstrated once and for all.




This has got to be the dumbest thing I have ever any supposed "Marxist" say. Although his base-superstructure passage in the Preface is often misinterpreted as foregrounding the division between state and mode of production, Marx's point in that passage was actually to do the opposite: to stress their interconnetedness as part of a totality. His point was that economics is fundamentally political -- that it very much involves relationships of power, which was his entire reason for connecting state forms to the mode of production. His argument (which was actually just a recapitulation of what he wrote in the German Ideology) was that you don't analyze states as isolate little entities, like people who do "great man" history might be inclined to do, but you view them as subordinate part to a larger process of struggle over who controls the fundamental resources in society. It is news to me that, by distinguishing between the base and the superstructure, Marx was saying that politics and power struggles (namely, the class struggle) don't take place in civil society over the means of production.

Socialism is a set of political relations, a set of political relationships in which productive property is held in common, and in which decisions regarding its use are made in common. The transition to socialism is a process whereby the working class empowers itself, even if that empowerment occurs through a willingness to listen to and learn from leaders who have inspired their confidence through results.

The abstruseness of the verbiage in the above section demonstrates your failure to understand what Marx was saying. If you did understand him, you would be able to state what you mean simply and clearly, which obviously you can't.

Politics is about power, and in particular about power struggles between classes. In a socialist society there will be no classes, and therefore no power struggles between them. Putting it in another way, there will be no politics. Asserting that socialism is "a set of political relations" borders on Stalinism.

I hate to engage in Bible-quoting Marxology, but hell, you started it. When and where did Marx ever describe socialism as "a set of political relations"? Never.



That you don't even really understand Marx's point about base and superstructure might be the most fundamental flaw of all, because once you try to sever the two, with one being "political" and the other "economic," you're well on your way to claiming that once the economic sphere is "nationalized," you have a society on its way to socialism, regardless of the political content of those relations. If Marx were around today and heard what you just wrote, he'd only have to change a few words around to make his Preface relevant to this debate: "My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms [including state control over the economy] could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life [who exercises control over what key productive resources, which are relationships of power -- political relationships that are reflected imperfectly in the institutions of the state], the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and French thinkers of the eighteenth century, embraces within the term “civil society”; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in political economy."

A bit of a mistranslation. The phrase you translate as "civil society" in the original German is "burgerliche gesellschaft." Marx translators, at least those translating Das Kapital, prefer to translate that phrase with the much more literal, scientific and precise phrase "bourgeois society."

But in any case, even without that, your quote makes my point. It's the "material conditions of human life" that determine the nature of a society. Not who runs it or how it is run! Not who exercises political power! Your parenthetical insertion in brackets has absolutely nothing to do with what Marx is saying.

A workers state is a state that defends the social interests of the working class, that defends its "material conditions of human life." Like the USSR, with no unemployment, job security, free medical care and education, ultra-cheap rent and transportation costs.

And does not even allow a capitalist class to exist, much less to salt away its ill-gotten gains in Swiss bank accounts in the Yeltsin fashion, or foster some of the richest plutocrats on earth in the Putin fashion.

Does nationalization mean a society is on its way to socialism? Certainly not. That depends on what class in society benefits from the stateization of property. If the purpose of nationalization is to prevent bankrupt capitalists from going broke, like when British Labour nationalized steel, or to lay the basis for future capitalist development, like in so much of the Third World after the colonial power were kicked out (in some cases such as Burma going to nearly 100% nationalization of the economy) then it means nothing of the sort.

If you can't tell that there is a basic class difference between Cuba or China or Vietnam vs. Burma or Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Egypt under Nasser, or for that matter the American post office, then you are, well, unperceptive.




Correct. What you had for years after the 1917 revolution was a society transitioning to socialism. A society in which, whatever "substitution" was being made by bureaucrats, the party bureaucrats did not yet have the power to subordinate workers to their command on the shop floor, and had not yet derived their political power ultimately from control over the means of production. Instead workers still identified and placed confidence in the regime, which in turn had no choice but to allow workers considerable power on the shop floor up until the late NEP. Kevin Murphy's book Revolution and Counterrevolution deals with this quite well.

It's a very interesting, very well researched and highly informative book, and I highly recommend it. In fact, one of these days I may write a review of it in a proper venue. It is however deeply flawed.

It is marred for the unsurprising reason that the author is, well, a Cliffite. So everything in the book is excellent up to the year 1928, the year point at which point Cliffism diverges from Trotskyism. Excellent research and brilliant analysis is suddenly transformed into dubious special pleading where he attempts to impose his Cliffite schemas on highly resistant Russian reality, resulting in some truly tortured arguments.

But I digress.



We've already had a prolonged and rather unproductive discussion about your definition of capitalism. You make the same error the Bronsteinovich made earlier, which is picking out a few empirical characteristics of capitalist societies in the West, and saying that because state capitalist countries lacked these empirical markers (inheritance, planlessness), that therefore the fundamental processes of capitalist exploitation were absent. I've addressed these claims to you, and I've addressed them when Lev made them. I shan't do it again.

I agree, that discussion was unproductive, and no need to recycle the same arguments all over again. A point we haven't quite gotten to yet here, though we likely are about to.

-M.H.-

[workersadvocate]

Alright comrades, now this discussion is focusing upon the past and.
tendency orthodoxies.

Did any of the left tendencies that have existed in the USA over the last 30 years or so get it right, or did they all get lost along the way? I suspect the truth is the latter. Change surprised all. No one's 20th century leftist orthodoxies prepared them for these changes.
I think Jimmie is right that Left retreat ensued in the confusion and demoralization. Different tendency sects groped through the smoke to figure out what the fuck was happening, and wildly different perspectives and analyses and practical focuses came out of it. We were still debating Russia's past....but who could say what was happening to its immediate present (the Left had a thousand different confusing answers about it). Same thing now happening with Cuba. But one thing you'd hear from almost everyone on the Left was that revolution was such a long way off, blah blah blah. Reeking of Pabloite pessimist perspectives. Ah the working class is soooo weak and unorganized and politically backwards, the tendencies sung in chorus. Well, who was the Left waiting to do their work for them? Year after year, same shitty pessimistic perspectives, all we can do is hope to recruit ones and twos from the protests and events organized by other fucking parties with ultimately hostile interests (to recruit the middle class politicized "outliers", as somebody here honestly described this practice).Next year, working class is still soooo weak and so on, but our sect has some new members, we're at all the activist events and selling our sect's published materials...and that became all that mattered. The more intellectual leadership of the sects started to make their perspectives fit the needs of their party building efforts du jour, like marketing and branding a small business and carving out it's little specialized nich in the political marketplace among the middle class consumers.
All communists have lost as a result of this unforgivable tendency sect bullshit of the last decades.

In a way, Jimmie is right about the need for mass social movements. The old movements are coopted to death, or just plain dead memories. Especially regarding those where the working class played a role. Hard to believe now, but eorking people in this country used to be far more organized. Whoever on the left figured that slacking on the organizing of the proletariat was okay so long as we build our little sects among the middle class should burn in hell.
It is a crime, and this is compounded every year that left groups pat themselves on the back for recruiting a few more college kids but ain't organizing the masses of working people and keep justifying it with the excuse that revolution is far far away. Hmmm....maybe there is a corrolation there?!

What do we have to do to get some honest objective analysis and perspectives and an real program of organizing and action for the working class and not just one or another petty left sect's expectations for the next quarter? I just don't see ehy working class people should bother with these sects that proclaim themselves vanguards but ain't really done anything in the real world of working people to earn that distinction. Well okay, some leftist do dabble in established business unions which ostensibly "represent" a pathetically puny number of working people in America and that have hardly any internationalist practice or classwide solidarity whatsoever. You know, all thesr fuckimg unions that promote themselves as "middle class America" (the narriw narcissism of labor bureaucrats on full display). But what about the rest of us working people....does the organized left even care? If you really want to know why you can't reach and move more than one or two outliers, it could be because your sects' activism doesn't seem to have any immediate benefit to our lives and our daily struggles, and you ain't helping the working class itself to increase its own strength. Comrades, if you were actually organizing the working class beyond the limits of the business unions, you'd get some respect from our class, then you wouldn't have to go chasing middle class liberal tails or poaching other left sects to have an audience with the people that need you most and whom you really really need in revolutionary organizations at all levels. Yes we can have a subjective effect that alters the objective circumstances, so that revolution won't be far far away forever!

As some comrades figure out the crucial need to actually break from the bourgeoisie by actually turning their attentiin and efforts and energy toward the working class itself (not just the few in the business unions,either), then I hope they will discover a whole new way of conceiving "vanguard". It's not a separate clique of middle class smarty pants benevolent condescending saviors coming to play commissar over the working class. We don't need any more bureaucrats and specialist overlords, thank y'all very much. Bring your ideas and suggestions as our fellow working class comrades. Be prepared to be our student as well as our teacher. Remember those things which Marx and Engels said the communists must consistently distinctly do among the working class, but also remember not to artificially separate yourselves from us...we don't care for your political marketplace sect small entrepreneurialship games, and this marks you as being based upon alien class interests. Communists standing apart from the working class is as crazy as a human being trying to separate away from oxygen that we need to breathe. Stay away too long and it will change you fundamentally. That's what happened to the Left. But we settle for these oxygen-starved lost little scts because we think that's the best we can do, the working class itself is too hard to deal with ( yeah, if you just want to build your little sects and only talk Marxism with regards to the distant past), we have to wait wait until other more influential leaderships start movements and then we have to play within their constraints...why would working people want to waste their time with this nutty left-loser stuff? We're depressed enough already. Hyping your sect like an otherworldly secret fraternity doesn't help...if anything, it takes the worker-communists away from our class and into escapist schemes among the wrong crowds, and teaches us that is real leftist activism. Then, they get jaded after dealing with middle class leftist bullshit and sect building activites that hasn't built the strength of our class, and yet has bred an elitist contempt for the working class "sheep" who are "too stupid" or "don't care".
Working people who sympathize and share communist ideas aren't pawns to be played for middle class activist brownie points. The relationship is upside down. Help these working people develop to be effective Marxist educators, organizers and agitators in our own class...help us win our class to greater consciousness, organization and our own independent class-for-itself action. Then your sect would be worth something to us.
Then we working people might wonder how Marxist theory and the Left's love for history lesson might actually help us in our struggles today and tomorrow.

[Olentzero]

I do not doubt that that's how your documents read, I do not doubt that is what you, and indeed, most of the cadre of the ISO tell themselves. Denial is not a river in Egypt.Proof is not just the strength of whatever it was you were drinking when you wrote this, either. What have you got that conclusively shows the ISO tailed liberal arguments in dropping support for Nader in 2004? I mean, besides "Everybody knows the ISO panders to liberal bourgeois sentiments."

[Jimmie Higgins]

But I am a little perplexed about why you should think that steps is somehow different than stages. Both imply a series of discrete measures, one taken after another, rather than a single process with multiple aspects continuously occurring and bound up together inextricably.Stages, to me, implies a specific and defined path where in order to reach the next stage you must pass through particular previous stages. It's like the idea that an underdeveloped country must first complete it's bourgeois revolution and then workers can organize for a socialist revolution.


The question is, how exactly do you win people over to left politics but not revolutionary Marxian politics if, according to you, your group intervenes in movements to put forward a revolutionary socialist approach to the issues at hand? Please explain to me how this happens, because as far as I am aware, there are two logical outcomes: people hear your revolutionary socialist approach and reject it, or they hear it and accept it.Or they reject it in the movement or coalition but as things play out, the argument makes sense and now they are either convinced or at least see the value in what you are trying to argue.

What a "left" means in this case is that in the recent past movements have been sort of one-off single-issue things that rise, hit an impasse or the limits of the leading politics involved (or hit an impasse and the politics of the movement prevent it from moving forward) and then collapse. Some of the radicals who do propaganda from the sidelines do this because of this situation and it makes some sense when prospects for radicalization and not likely because you can get in, recruit a few people who are more class conscious and militant, and then get them out of there before the movement's collapse demoralizes them. The ISO does this in a de-facto way too because movements have been kind of isolated.

What a revival of the left would mean is that these are not single-issue flare ups, but that there is actually a little coherence and momentum in which the defeat of a certain kind of tactic or part of the movement and even a decline don't cause total demoralization, but instead cause reassessment and regroupment. So in the occupy movement, we see "building the left" to be linking occupy with anti-racist struggle and rank and file struggles. On the one hand developing in this way will advance the class struggle because it brings class issues to the center of what right now is a left-populist movement and at the same time it will strengthen the movement because the workers and oppressed people who sympathies with the anti-1% rhetoric will see that a movement from the bottom up can fight and actually make gains and so other people not in the movement will either join or try and build their own struggles.

So a left creates an audience for radical politics, it creates and internal dynamic in which class politics can become more distinct in the course of a struggle, it creates organic leaders and militants as well as networks of those militants and the seeds of a real vanguard.


As I asked above, how do you fight to make people "Leftist first" then revolutionaries second? I thought I covered this one. Maybe I don't know what you are arguing here, but it sounds like you are basically saying that we hide our politics. If that's the argument, then we don't, like I said we often get red-baited for having newspapers or trying to promote our own events while also working in movements.

"Building the left" doesn't mean arguing to people, "hey, Keynesianism will solve the problems of capitalism" - it means if people are fighting for minimum wage reform or against privatization then depending on the specifics of the struggle, it might make sense for radicals to engage in that struggle with people: propagandize and try and win some of the more militant people to revolutionary politics, expose a larger layer of people to Marxist arguments, but also try and make arguments in the movement about what practical next steps we think will help advance things.

In the occupy movement for example, we argue against adventurism on the one hand and against lifestyle and other liberal notions in the movement on the other. We helped build the port shut-down along with people of all sorts of politics but we didn't argue that we supported that action for their reasons: we didn't say, "Oh because it's a peaceful tactic" like liberals who supported this action and we didn't say it's because "the occupy movement or small groups doing direct actions can replace the existing labor movement" like some anarchist tendencies have argued. We argued that we should do this, do outreach and work with militant and rank and file unionists at the port, we should build it as a mass action because all these things will help the action suceede and in a larger sense will help put militant action (from below) at the point of production back on the map for millions of people as well as show how unorganized and union workers can build solidarity.

[Lucretia]

Glanced at the LRP piece, and I must say I gave the LRP a bit too much credit for simple intelligence. They claim, in true flat-earth defiance of reality, that there was no difference between Walesa and Jaruzelski.

I am quickly losing confidence in you as a good-faith interlocutor. Your claim was that the LRP supported Walesa. In the piece I referenced, the LRP very clearly states "In contrast to every other tendency that we know of, from the beginning we not only supported the Polish working-class upheaval, we fought against its betraying leadership, Walesa & Co. We pointed out that his treasonous transformation of the Gdansk MKS dual power institution into Solidarity was a disaster. We pointed out that his subservience to the West and to the Catholic Church was only matched by the fact that he was a reformist toward the Stalinist state! We pointed out that Walesa and Jaruselski had far more in common than they did with the working class they pretended to favor."

So we can gather from this piece (and from earlier published material: http://lrp-cofi.org/PR/poland12.html), that the LRP, contrary to your earlier claim, emphatically did not support Walesa. Instead of doing the comradely thing, and just admit you fucked up (but then, horror of horrors, you'd have to drop your fantasies about state capitalism being the original sin of all sorts of other political errors), you fallback onto a second false claim, the claim that the LRP sees "no difference between Walesa and Jaruzelski." Yet again, all we have to do is check the source itself and see that the LRP did not say that there was "no difference." They said that "had far more in common than they did with the working class they pretended to favor." Is that a true statement? Well, we can debate that, but let's actually debate what the LRP's position was, not make one up then try to attribute the made-up position to the idea that Poland was state capitalist. (I suppose your constant misrepresentations on this issue aren't as obnoxious as claiming to have secret psychic knowledge relating to the ISO's decision not to back Nader in 2004. Who would have thought that a Spart sitting in his basement knew more than a member who had access to internal bulletins?)


Their line is that Solidarity was a heroic working class movement, sold out to the evil Stalinists by that counterrevolutionary secret Stalinist collaborator Walesa.But wait -- I thought you said they supported Walesa! Now that you recognize what their position was, perhaps you can get around to having an informed debate about it, but judging by your attempt to have an informed debate about other issues, I am skeptical.


Um, just what are we agreeing to here. Just what is Castro's Cuba anyway? Is it capitalist, or something else? If so, what something else? Not socialist clearly. Bureaucratic collectivist? Or what?The same question can be asked of you: what is Cuba? Is it capitalist, state capitalist, or socialist? Is it somewhere between? And if it is somewhere between, doesn't that put it in the same position as Western European countries where the state controls some of the large industries? If not, what's the relevant difference? Just the fact that an undemocratic state has a monopoly over the productive forces in one case, where as a minimally accountable government has a monopoly over some resources on the other?


So you don't know 'cuz you haven't done the historical research?Well, it's a big island, not far off the coast of Florida, and the Castro brothers are at this point I think the longest-surviving political regime on earth. By now one would think it would be possible to draw some conclusion about the nature of the political regime and the society it governs without having to do any historical research.The regime is currently state capitalist, but that's not the question that I was originally asked by Bronsteinovich, and which you excitedly insisted I answer. That question was, "When did Cuba become state capitalist? Was it from the time Castro took power" The answer is I have not done enough research to answer the question. I don't make sweeping historical proclamations without having done the empirical research. It is certainly not a question I can answer by having it pointed out to me that Cuba is an island off the course of Florida. If that's the kind of information you use to make a historical class analysis, I have to wonder what kind of "Marxist historian" you are.


How about some plain ordinary journalism? The Cuban regime is not an historical artifact, it exists here and now, and has changed very little over the course of the last half century. Or talk to a Cuban or two?How dense can you be? You asked me a historical question about when I think Cuba became state capitalist. This is not going to be answered by "talking to a Cuban or two." Anymore than we could, if this were 1950, answer when the Soviet Union became "bureaucratically degenerated" by asking a peasant or two who was around in the 1920 and 1930s.


Class analysis doesn't involve "categorizing abstract property forms," like lawyers or something. It involves looking at what happens to people who live there on a day to day basis.It involves "what happens to people who live there on a day to day basis"? You mean like watch baseball? Eat dinner? Actually class analysis involves who has the authority and control over the means of production.


How much division is there between rich and poor? Are there banks? Is there a stock market? If so, what role do they play in the economy? Social surplus, where does it go? Into the hands of the Mafia, like in the old days? Or does it maybe go into things like Cubans having better medical care and lower infant mortality than Americans do?Is there universal healthcare? Is there free higher education? Is there subsidized child care? Is that gap between rich and poor lower there than in the United States. You just keep naming things that capitalist countries like France achieved long ago. They are certainly good things, and it's undeniably more impressive that Cuba achieved them in its current predicament than the fact that France managed to achieve them. But let's be serious as Marxists -- it has no bearing on whether the economy in question is capitalist or not. You can have a capitalist country where the effects of capitalism are offset by regulations and incursions into private ownership -- a nationalized coal industry, health care system, etc, a highly progressive tax rate that redistributes income from the wealthy to the poor.

In other words, even if I were to answer your questions about Cuba, the answers do absolutely nothing to determine whether the country in question is a class society, or what kind of class society it is (feudal, capitalist, etc.)


That's the kind of simple extremely concrete stuff to look at to determine the class nature of a society and the regime that rules over it. In whose name and for whose benefit they rule and who those armed bodies of men, for that's what a state is, hold down in subjection, and to whom.The Marxian concept of class is not defined by the gap between rich and poor. That sounds more like a bourgeois sociologist's definition of class as "income status." Your confusion here reflects a totally inadequate understanding of Marxian analysis.


The abstruseness of the verbiage in the above section demonstrates your failure to understand what Marx was saying. If you did understand him, you would be able to state what you mean simply and clearly, which obviously you can't.I don't know how much more plainly I can make clear that "base" and "superstructure" was Marx saying: "Hey, dumbass Hegelians. You think the state exists because it is the logical outcome of good ideas. I am telling you it exists as an institution of power that reflects and is reinforced by the power created by people privately owning shit and forcing others to work for them." Is that blunt and simple enough for your probing mind to understand, MH?

What it means is exactly what I said earlier, and which you now seem to acknowledge: that "Politics is about power, and in particular about power struggles between classes." This struggle occurs just as much at the point of production, on strike pickets, outside of the state, as it does in the ballot box. Socialism is a society where that kind of political struggle no longer takes place because there are no classes, because the power over the means of production does not rest in the hands of just one sector of society, but in the hands of everyone. As I said, "workers' control" is not some secondary issue in defining socialism or a socialist economy. It's the essential issue.

You chose to respond to this argument with some idiotic statement about Marxists needing to analyze the economy, which is the base, not the superstructure, which is "politics." I've already explained clearly how Marx would have had no truck for your artificial attempt to isolate one from the other, just as he would reject your attempt to isolate abstract property forms as inherently socialist (inherently imposing working class control over the means of production).


I hate to engage in Bible-quoting Marxology, but hell, you started it. When and where did Marx ever describe socialism as "a set of political relations"? Never.Are you serious? You're literally asking me, "where does Marx state that socialism is about the power relationships [political relationships -- as you said, "power struggles" are "political relationships"] relating to who controls the means of production?"

If you don't know where Marx has said this, you have never cracked open Marx -- a conclusion to which I am quickly arriving after each ignorant statement you make.


A bit of a mistranslation. The phrase you translate as "civil society" in the original German is "burgerliche gesellschaft." Marx translators, at least those translating Das Kapital, prefer to translate that phrase with the much more literal, scientific and precise phrase "bourgeois societyEven without that "correction" in translation--Huh? The point is just as clear before as it is after your pendantry. To understand the state, which is a concentrated form of class power, you have to understand class society, which is civil society, bourgeois society, or what have you. The point, to repeat, is that "political relations" are not confined to some superstructural level. Politics take place in "bourgeois society" every day, in class struggles that do not necessarily involve the government directly.


But in any case, even without that, your quote makes my point. It's the "material conditions of human life" that determine the nature of a society. Not who runs it or how it is run! Not who exercises political power! Your parenthetical insertion in brackets has absolutely nothing to do with what Marx is saying.What do you think Marx is referring to when he talks about "the material conditions of human life"? Do you think he means who owns a refrigerator? Again, since this is a recapitulation of his argument in the German Ideology, we don't have to guess. For Marx the key determinant in understanding the material conditions of human life -- who, ultimately, controls the shape of human life -- is who controls productive property. Property forms inscribed in state law are important only insofar as they relate to who controls that property. For instance, we can have state laws that are purely symbolic and not enforced in any way, such a law which states that the workers are to control all the economic decisions in a country where workers in reality have no such say. I guess you would just take this law at face value and say, "well, I guess we have workers control and the abolition of all classes then!"


A workers state is a state that defends the social interests of the working class, that defends its "material conditions of human life." Like the USSR, with no unemployment, job security, free medical care and education, ultra-cheap rent and transportation costs.By this definition European social democracies, especially in the 1960s, were also workers' states. See the problem when you try to define "workers' state" based on things other than, well, whether the state is under the control of the workers? It leads to all sorts of embarrassing statements.


Does nationalization mean a society is on its way to socialism? Certainly not. That depends on what class in society benefits from the stateization of property. If the purpose of nationalization is to prevent bankrupt capitalists from going broke, like when British Labour nationalized steel, or to lay the basis for future capitalist development, like in so much of the Third World after the colonial power were kicked out (in some cases such as Burma going to nearly 100% nationalization of the economy) then it means nothing of the sort.Finally we've broken through, the state control over the economy is not incompatible with class society. What needs to be examined to determined whether the state control is socialist or capitalist is a class analysis of the political relations in that society, who has power in that society (inside and outside the state) and whence they get their power. In other words, a class analysis of what type of economy (base) we have is contingent upon something like politics (the "superstructure" as you called it). In Soviet society post-1920s, the bureaucrats had power because they controlled productive resources. It was certainly not because they had the support of the workers or even their tacit consent. This, in case you were wondering, is a class society.


If you can't tell that there is a basic class difference between Cuba or China or Vietnam vs. Burma or Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Egypt under Nasser, or for that matter the American post office, then you are, well, unperceptive.There are similarities and differences between all of them. Stop being daft, we're discussing a very specific difference/similarity.

[A Marxist Historian]

Proof is not just the strength of whatever it was you were drinking when you wrote this, either. What have you got that conclusively shows the ISO tailed liberal arguments in dropping support for Nader in 2004? I mean, besides "Everybody knows the ISO panders to liberal bourgeois sentiments."

Proof? Jimmy Higgins' dead honest posting about how ISO'ers pushing Nader in 2004 practically got themselves tarred and feathered till they dropped Nader like a hot potato is proof enough for me.

That he didn't quite realize what he was saying is something I have every sympathy for. Happens to the best of us.

-M.H.-

[Olentzero]

Oh please, Democratic supporters tarred and feathered us starting the day after the 2000 election. We were used to it by 2004. Not that I expect this will disabuse you of your delusion that you know the ISO better than its members from your position of complete isolation from its debates and discussions.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Lucretia -- we are really having trouble with basic definitions. I am saying it is the property relations that determine the class nature of the state. Not just whether there are nationalized property forms, or even a planned economy. In what form does capital exist? That's a good question. How free is the exchange.

The biggest problems with Stalinists as a ruling class is that they would be absolutely unique in not owning the means of production. Further, at least in my understanding of Marx, classes come into being out of some kind historical/social/economic necessity. The Staninists have existed on pure contingencies, and with a few small twists of fate, would never have existed. Simply put, they don't have the historical stuff it takes. Their characteristic relationship to the means of production is managing, not owning it. And in most cases not being particularly interested in the profitability of any given factory or even sector of industry. And I think the relative ease with which they have been swept away (while I agree it took a counterrevoluton in the USSR, it sure as hell wasn't the civil war after the Revolution). That they are analogous to the trade union bureaucracy in capitalist countries is apt. They are a parasitic caste that uses the unions/workers state, to enrich themselves and make nice with capitalists.

[A Marxist Historian]

I am quickly losing confidence in you as a good-faith interlocutor. Your claim was that the LRP supported Walesa. In the piece I referenced, the LRP very clearly states "In contrast to every other tendency that we know of, from the beginning we not only supported the Polish working-class upheaval, we fought against its betraying leadership, Walesa & Co. We pointed out that his treasonous transformation of the Gdansk MKS dual power institution into Solidarity was a disaster. We pointed out that his subservience to the West and to the Catholic Church was only matched by the fact that he was a reformist toward the Stalinist state! We pointed out that Walesa and Jaruselski had far more in common than they did with the working class they pretended to favor."

So we can gather from this piece (and from earlier published material: http://lrp-cofi.org/PR/poland12.html), that the LRP, contrary to your earlier claim, emphatically did not support Walesa. Instead of doing the comradely thing, and just admit you fucked up (but then, horror of horrors, you'd have to drop your fantasies about state capitalism being the original sin of all sorts of other political errors), you fallback onto a second false claim, the claim that the LRP sees "no difference between Walesa and Jaruzelski." Yet again, all we have to do is check the source itself and see that the LRP did not say that there was "no difference." They said that "had far more in common than they did with the working class they pretended to favor." Is that a true statement? Well, we can debate that, but let's actually debate what the LRP's position was, not make one up then try to attribute the made-up position to the idea that Poland was state capitalist. (I suppose your constant misrepresentations on this issue aren't as obnoxious as claiming to have secret psychic knowledge relating to the ISO's decision not to back Nader in 2004. Who would have thought that a Spart sitting in his basement knew more than a member who had access to internal bulletins?)

But wait -- I thought you said they supported Walesa! Now that you recognize what their position was, perhaps you can get around to having an informed debate about it, but judging by your attempt to have an informed debate about other issues, I am skeptical.

Picky picky! This is casual postings on the Internet, here today, gone tomorrow. I do not consider 100% precision that important here, especially since if you get something a little off there will always be a partisan around to correct you, such as your good self. I believe, unlike some folk, that it is actually possible to learn something here through dialogue.

Rarely bothering to actually read the LRP's lengthy lucubrations, I falsely assumed they had a consistent position that made sense. It turns out they didn't. I welcome your minor correction of my minor error, and I utterly fail to see how it makes any difference to the central points here.

So fine, they supported that glorious wonderful movement Solidarity, but considered its central leader, who embodied everything about it, everything bad as well as what few things one might find good about it (elementary trade union militancy and working class social composition is all I can come up with offhand), as somehow a traitor and sellout to it.

There were people within Solidarity who considered him a traitor too, that he was for example insufficiently Polish nationalist, anti-communist or anti-Semitic. That the LRP puts themselves into that camp is hardly to its credit.

Even in their own terms, Walesa's Polish critics were wrong. He brought Solidarity to power, and the country was transformed according to the Solidarity program. What more could a movement expect from a leader?


The same question can be asked of you: what is Cuba? Is it capitalist, state capitalist, or socialist? Is it somewhere between? And if it is somewhere between, doesn't that put it in the same position as Western European countries where the state controls some of the large industries? If not, what's the relevant difference? Just the fact that an undemocratic state has a monopoly over the productive forces in one case, where as a minimally accountable government has a monopoly over some resources on the other?

The regime is currently state capitalist, but that's not the question that I was originally asked by Bronsteinovich, and which you excitedly insisted I answer. That question was, "When did Cuba become state capitalist? Was it from the time Castro took power" The answer is I have not done enough research to answer the question. I don't make sweeping historical proclamations without having done the empirical research. It is certainly not a question I can answer by having it pointed out to me that Cuba is an island off the course of Florida. If that's the kind of information you use to make a historical class analysis, I have to wonder what kind of "Marxist historian" you are.

Oh. So then you maintain that the Castro regime is state capitalist right now? That is the first time in this thread that you have clearly stated that. That's clarifying. Whether or not you think there was some brief interlude in which it wasn't is a minor and secondary question.

I'll help you with your historical research in fact. There was exactly one basic change in the Castro regime in its history, that was the split in 1959 between those Castroists who did not want to lick Eisenhower's boots, the majority, and those that did, who shortly thereafter ended up on the Bay of Pigs, a few months after Castro nationalized everything in Cuba down to hot dog stands.

So by your criteria, you should think the Castro regime was always state capitalist. A truly insane flat earth position, famously advanced by Gerry Healy, whose "dialectical" defenses of such positions were highly reminiscent of the way you defend your positions as well.

So back to your very valid question. Just what is Cuba anyway, and how does it differ from say England under the Labour Party nationalizing steel?

Capitalism was abolished in Cuba in 1960. That's an objective empirical fact, ask any Cuban capitalist in Miami, he will tell you so. Anyone who doubts this is disconnected from reality. The Castro brothers, given the collapse of the Cuban economy after Soviet support ended, have been introducing measured doses of capitalism to try to save the economy. As Cuba is an isolated island, literally, in a capitalist sea, again literally, they are not having much luck with that, and it is questionable if the current setup in Cuba will last much longer.

Is Cuba socialist? Of course not.

It's a society in transition between capitalism and socialism, overseen by a bureaucratic regime that attempts to maintain this unstable state in a bureaucratic freeze. A highly unviable state of affairs. Ultimately, given the choice, the Castro regime would probably prefer to go capitalist rather than see themselves displaced by democratic workers rule. But in the long run we are all dead, as the Castro brothers doubtless say to themselves every night when they go to bed.

And they know very deeply that neither the US capitalist class nor the bloodthirsty Cuban capitalists in Florida will ever forgive them, so for survival if nothing else they are compelled to continue to maintain the deformed Cuban workers state, which in a deformed way defends the social interests of the Cuban people vs. world imperialism and the exiled Cuban capitalist class, which wants everything back.

Clear enough for you?

So how is this different from the British Labour Party? Simple. When they nationalized steel, that was not for the benefit of British steelworkers, but for the benefit of British steel magnates, who laughed all the way to the bank.

As SL leader Robertson put it when polemicizing vs. the Healyites long ago, if Cuba is ruled by the Cuban capitalist class, it is ruled by a capitalist class very tired by its long swim to Miami.

In every capitalist country that has carried out extensive nationalizations, the workers were often if anything worse off, whereas the capitalists benefitted.

The extreme case is Burma, where everything was nationalized. There was little or no capitalist class in Burma at the time, but now there is. Once the generals had got some industry going, they took it, and simply became the Burmese capitalist class. They even renamed the country while they were doing it. So now Myanmar is one of the ugliest and most brutal capitalist dictatorships around, a true capitalist paradise, which Hillary Clinton is now welcoming into the "free world," as it seems they've had a falling out with China.


How dense can you be? You asked me a historical question about when I think Cuba became state capitalist. This is not going to be answered by "talking to a Cuban or two." Anymore than we could, if this were 1950, answer when the Soviet Union became "bureaucratically degenerated" by asking a peasant or two who was around in the 1920 and 1930s.

It involves "what happens to people who live there on a day to day basis"? You mean like watch baseball? Eat dinner? Actually class analysis involves who has the authority and control over the means of production.

No it doesn't, and that's your basic mistake.

Who has authority and control is merely politics. Why is it merely politics? Because it evades the question, just what it is that the power holders *do* with all that authority and control! Power does not exist in a social vacuum. Your conception is fundamentally anti-Marxist and non-class.

In judging the nature of a state, you have to look to economics and sociology. What class in society does the state defend the economic and social interests of? How does it use its authority?

So a state like the USSR under Brezhnev, with little or no capitalist class, and in which auto workers are paid better than doctors and lawyers, is a workers state, regardless of how bureaucratically deformed it is, and even regardless of how crooked the bureaucrats are and how much they skim off the top.

Which is why the children of Brezhnev's bureaucrats, members of the intelligentsia who deeply resented not getting paid as well as auto workers, and bureaucrats who wanted to actually *own* the factories which they were temporarily in charge of and could be fired from at any moment, wanted to become real capitalists, part of a real capitalist class, ruling the USSR for real. So they wanted a counterrevolution, and they got what they wanted.


Is there universal healthcare? Is there free higher education? Is there subsidized child care? Is that gap between rich and poor lower there than in the United States. You just keep naming things that capitalist countries like France achieved long ago. They are certainly good things, and it's undeniably more impressive that Cuba achieved them in its current predicament than the fact that France managed to achieve them. But let's be serious as Marxists -- it has no bearing on whether the economy in question is capitalist or not. You can have a capitalist country where the effects of capitalism are offset by regulations and incursions into private ownership -- a nationalized coal industry, health care system, etc, a highly progressive tax rate that redistributes income from the wealthy to the poor.

"Incursions on private ownership" by a capitalist state mean nothing, as they are for the benefits of the capitalists themselves. With some rare exceptions when they result from working class pressure. And of course the Soviet example after WWII, which ultimately is a form of working class pressure too, expressed in tank armies driving tanks built by Soviet workers

Now, lately there is a fair amount of private ownership in Cuba, which confuses the issue. But that's irrelevant, as they are something the Castro brothers only desperately allow due to Cuban economic collapse, and are only semi-legal.

The fact is that until recently, there were no "incursions on private ownership" in Cuba, as there was no private ownership of the means of production!

Whether an economy is capitalist or not, as you put it, is determined by -- whether an economy is capitalist or not! Not by the nature of the political regime. Though a political regime seriously out of variance with its social nature is not long for this world.

Which is why you can only have a Stalinist regime in a society such as Cuba socially in between capitalism and socialism, and not otherwise. And why a bureaucratic regime in such a country will automatically *become* Stalinist, adopt the Stalinist version of pseudo-Marxism, and even put up statues to Stalin, even if its origins are utterly non-Stalinist, as in the case of the Castros and Castroism.


In other words, even if I were to answer your questions about Cuba, the answers do absolutely nothing to determine whether the country in question is a class society, or what kind of class society it is (feudal, capitalist, etc.)

The Marxian concept of class is not defined by the gap between rich and poor. That sounds more like a bourgeois sociologist's definition of class as "income status." Your confusion here reflects a totally inadequate understanding of Marxian analysis.

I don't know how much more plainly I can make clear that "base" and "superstructure" was Marx saying: "Hey, dumbass Hegelians. You think the state exists because it is the logical outcome of good ideas. I am telling you it exists as an institution of power that reflects and is reinforced by the power created by people privately owning shit and forcing others to work for them." Is that blunt and simple enough for your probing mind to understand, MH?

Yes it is, thank you. I regret to point out, however, that that is not what Marx said the state was.

Instead, he said it was a vehicle for one class in society to rule over all the others by force and violence. Lenin further clarified this with his formula that the essence of the state was "armed bodies of men" (and some women nowadays) committed to the defense of certain property relations.

The power of the state is *not* "created by people privately owning shit and forcing others to work for them." Rather, it is a military body utilized by those owners to suppress the people working for them when they get unruly. Its power rests not on "capitalist power," but on rifles, bayonets, tear gas, pepper spray, tanks, nuclear bombs, etc. etc.


What it means is exactly what I said earlier, and which you now seem to acknowledge: that "Politics is about power, and in particular about power struggles between classes." This struggle occurs just as much at the point of production, on strike pickets, outside of the state, as it does in the ballot box. Socialism is a society where that kind of political struggle no longer takes place because there are no classes, because the power over the means of production does not rest in the hands of just one sector of society, but in the hands of everyone. As I said, "workers' control" is not some secondary issue in defining socialism or a socialist economy. It's the essential issue.

You chose to respond to this argument with some idiotic statement about Marxists needing to analyze the economy, which is the base, not the superstructure, which is "politics." I've already explained clearly how Marx would have had no truck for your artificial attempt to isolate one from the other, just as he would reject your attempt to isolate abstract property forms as inherently socialist (inherently imposing working class control over the means of production).

Are you serious? You're literally asking me, "where does Marx state that socialism is about the power relationships [political relationships -- as you said, "power struggles" are "political relationships"] relating to who controls the means of production?"

If you don't know where Marx has said this, you have never cracked open Marx -- a conclusion to which I am quickly arriving after each ignorant statement you make.

Well, no sense arguing such things, but I assure you you are very wrong about that. I've read huge quantities of Marx. If you wish to think I have misunderstood them, you are free to do so of course.

By all means find me a quote--if you can. Especially since you clearly think there is one, indeed zillions.

Some time spent by you futilely trying to find one would further your education.

Marx clearly distinguished between ownership and control, unlike you. Perhaps you might find some early stuff where he fuzzed over the distinction, but not in his later and more mature works.

Marx by the way never wanted to publish the German Ideology, which he said in one of his letters he wanted to leave to "the gnawing criticism of the rats." I've never been clear what he meant by that, I was highly impressed when I read it many moons ago. Perhaps fuzziness on such questions was one reason.


Even without that "correction" in translation--Huh? The point is just as clear before as it is after your pendantry. To understand the state, which is a concentrated form of class power, you have to understand class society, which is civil society, bourgeois society, or what have you. The point, to repeat, is that "political relations" are not confined to some superstructural level. Politics take place in "bourgeois society" every day, in class struggles that do not necessarily involve the government directly.

What do you think Marx is referring to when he talks about "the material conditions of human life"? Do you think he means who owns a refrigerator? Again, since this is a recapitulation of his argument in the German Ideology, we don't have to guess. For Marx the key determinant in understanding the material conditions of human life -- who, ultimately, controls the shape of human life -- is who controls productive property. Property forms inscribed in state law are important only insofar as they relate to who controls that property. For instance, we can have state laws that are purely symbolic and not enforced in any way, such a law which states that the workers are to control all the economic decisions in a country where workers in reality have no such say. I guess you would just take this law at face value and say, "well, I guess we have workers control and the abolition of all classes then!"

Nope, not who controls, but who owns. But I am beginning to repeat myself here.

Workers control means control by workers over capitalist industry. So if you have workers control, you still have capitalism, if for no other reason than that you still have a working class.

What's the basic point here?

That the banks are made of marble, with a guard at every door.

And we need to tear down the walls, and the workers need to take those vaults of silver, that the workers sweated for.

Like it says in the song.

And yes, the workers have the right to decent refrigerators and consumer goods, and that is very important. That the capitalists are currently taking these things away from the workers is why the workers will overthrow them--not because your average worker either does care or even should care about who is the guy running the factory he works in.



By this definition European social democracies, especially in the 1960s, were also workers' states. See the problem when you try to define "workers' state" based on things other than, well, whether the state is under the control of the workers? It leads to all sorts of embarrassing statements.

Finally we've broken through, the state control over the economy is not incompatible with class society. What needs to be examined to determined whether the state control is socialist or capitalist is a class analysis of the political relations in that society, who has power in that society (inside and outside the state) and whence they get their power. In other words, a class analysis of what type of economy (base) we have is contingent upon something like politics (the "superstructure" as you called it). In Soviet society post-1920s, the bureaucrats had power because they controlled productive resources. It was certainly not because they had the support of the workers or even their tacit consent. This, in case you were wondering, is a class society.

There are similarities and differences between all of them. Stop being daft, we're discussing a very specific difference/similarity.

European social democracies in the 1960s were in no sense workers states, which is why the workers rose in rebellion against them in 1968 and 1969.

Not because they didn't get to decide which widgets to use in a factory, but because the European capitalists were getting fatter and fatter, whereas the standard of living of the workers was being ground down every day by the capitalists, and strikes were being regularly broken by the state--whether in state-owned factories or private-owned.

And especially in France, with its Gaullist high level of state ownership!

And the social measures of the 1960s, adopted partly in imitation of the Soviet bloc and partly stemming from concessions made necesssary by the Europe-wide revolutionary situation in the aftermath of the collapse of Nazism, were very poor imitations of those in the Soviet bloc. Unemployment was abolished in the East and rampant in the west, for just one example.

Which is why the French and Italian Communist Parties were so popular with workers back then!

*After* the '60s things changed of course, again another story I would be pleased to go into if you are interested.

-M.H.-

[Lucretia]

Stages, to me, implies a specific and defined path where in order to reach the next stage you must pass through particular previous stages. It's like the idea that an underdeveloped country must first complete it's bourgeois revolution and then workers can organize for a socialist revolution.

Yes, and fighting in "non-revolutionary times" to build a generic left before embarking on the further step of building a revolutionary left seems to be a stageist model.


What a "left" means in this case is that in the recent past movements have been sort of one-off single-issue things that rise, hit an impasse or the limits of the leading politics involved (or hit an impasse and the politics of the movement prevent it from moving forward) and then collapse. Some of the radicals who do propaganda from the sidelines do this because of this situation and it makes some sense when prospects for radicalization and not likely because you can get in, recruit a few people who are more class conscious and militant, and then get them out of there before the movement's collapse demoralizes them. The ISO does this in a de-facto way too because movements have been kind of isolated.

What a revival of the left would mean is that these are not single-issue flare ups, but that there is actually a little coherence and momentum in which the defeat of a certain kind of tactic or part of the movement and even a decline don't cause total demoralization, but instead cause reassessment and regroupment. So in the occupy movement, we see "building the left" to be linking occupy with anti-racist struggle and rank and file struggles. On the one hand developing in this way will advance the class struggle because it brings class issues to the center of what right now is a left-populist movement and at the same time it will strengthen the movement because the workers and oppressed people who sympathies with the anti-1% rhetoric will see that a movement from the bottom up can fight and actually make gains and so other people not in the movement will either join or try and build their own struggles.This is all very circuitous and hard to decipher. What I gather from it is that your conception of building a generic left is just trying to link social struggles, but not necessarily from a revolutionary socialist perspective. Is that not correct?


I thought I covered this one. Maybe I don't know what you are arguing here, but it sounds like you are basically saying that we hide our politics. If that's the argument, then we don't, like I said we often get red-baited for having newspapers or trying to promote our own events while also working in movements.No, I'm not saying anything. I am asking that, since you claim that members of the ISO do not hide their politics, how it is possible for them to build a generic left as a "first step" - a distinctly separate activity - to building a revolutionary socialist left. Your answer seems to be that you just focus on coalition building. But then my question is, how are you coalition building? Are you attempting to link struggles by noting that they all share grievances with capitalist exploitation? If you are, then once again I fail to see how you can view building a left - coalition building or whatever you want to call it - as different in any way to trying to win people over to revolutionary socialism. If you aren't, then you are, in a manner of speaking, hiding your politics by deliberately omitting it from the arguments you put forward.


"Building the left" doesn't mean arguing to people, "hey, Keynesianism will solve the problems of capitalism" - it means if people are fighting for minimum wage reform or against privatization then depending on the specifics of the struggle, it might make sense for radicals to engage in that struggle with people: propagandize and try and win some of the more militant people to revolutionary politics, expose a larger layer of people to Marxist arguments, but also try and make arguments in the movement about what practical next steps we think will help advance things.Actually, building a left does mean arguing to people. Fighting a social struggle means arguing to people. Those arguments don't necessarily always have to be articulated in a newsletter published by some well-paid operative. It can be at a proposal advanced at an Occupy GA meeting regarding what to do next. It can be about how to interpret the actions of the police when formulating the next step. You seem to have this overly intellectualized understanding of what an argument is. It's a call for action. And unless you think people involved in movements or struggles are robots, they are crucial to how a movement develops.


In the occupy movement for example, we argue against adventurism on the one hand and against lifestyle and other liberal notions in the movement on the other. We helped build the port shut-down along with people of all sorts of politics but we didn't argue that we supported that action for their reasons: we didn't say, "Oh because it's a peaceful tactic" like liberals who supported this action and we didn't say it's because "the occupy movement or small groups doing direct actions can replace the existing labor movement" like some anarchist tendencies have argued. We argued that we should do this, do outreach and work with militant and rank and file unionists at the port, we should build it as a mass action because all these things will help the action suceede and in a larger sense will help put militant action (from below) at the point of production back on the map for millions of people as well as show how unorganized and union workers can build solidarity.So you argued for the port strike not within the framework of demonstrating to people the power that people have as workers (versus the power they have as consumers), not by pointing out how the demonstration would succeed because of that power, and how it's not fair for a small minority to exploit that power to enrich themselves. (See - the success of the action is proof of what can happen when working people band together and use what they have in common - their status as workers - to empower themselves rather than capital-serving politicians!) Rather, you argued for the port strike by saying it was a way of "building coalitions" with labor? Yes, that sounds to me like deliberately hiding your politics. Because we all know why labor is a crucial site of struggle from a Marxian perspective. If you are trying to incorporate that site of struggle without mentioning why, you're very conveniently leaving something out. And, to be honest, I have no idea why. Is it a fear of scaring people away? It seems to be that in arguing for a strike, you'd have the best opportunity possible to put forward a Marxian socialist perspective on its value and strategic importance. If the ISO did indeed do what you claim, and argue for the action under the guise of coalition building, then I am both shocked and disappointed.

[A Marxist Historian]

Oh please, Democratic supporters tarred and feathered us starting the day after the 2000 election. We were used to it by 2004. Not that I expect this will disabuse you of your delusion that you know the ISO better than its members from your position of complete isolation from its debates and discussions.

Except that between 2000 and 2004 folk had other things on their mind, like 9/11 for example. Yes, liberals were already annoyed at you for helping Bush get elected by their lights, but the obsessive hatred of Bush Jr. as the be all and end all of the political understanding of the kind of folk the ISO recruits from took several years to develop, and 9/11 seriously interrupted the process.

In 2004 your position of support for Nader was no longer a closet embarrassment, but something that was actually your central activity, it being an election year and all. So maintaining that position would have been seriously damaging to your prospects, so you guys dropped it.

That you guys were in denial to yourselves about what you were doing is hardly surprising.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Yes, and fighting in "non-revolutionary times" to build a generic left before embarking on the further step of building a revolutionary left seems to be a stageist model.

This is all very circuitous and hard to decipher. What I gather from it is that your conception of building a generic left is just trying to link social struggles, but not necessarily from a revolutionary socialist perspective. Is that not correct?

No, I'm not saying anything. I am asking that, since you claim that members of the ISO do not hide their politics, how it is possible for them to build a generic left as a "first step" - a distinctly separate activity - to building a revolutionary socialist left. Your answer seems to be that you just focus on coalition building. But then my question is, how are you coalition building? Are you attempting to link struggles by noting that they all share grievances with capitalist exploitation? If you are, then once again I fail to see how you can view building a left - coalition building or whatever you want to call it - as different in any way to trying to win people over to revolutionary socialism. If you aren't, then you are, in a manner of speaking, hiding your politics by deliberately omitting it from the arguments you put forward.

Actually, building a left does mean arguing to people. Fighting a social struggle means arguing to people. Those arguments don't necessarily always have to be articulated in a newsletter published by some well-paid operative. It can be at a proposal advanced at an Occupy GA meeting regarding what to do next. It can be about how to interpret the actions of the police when formulating the next step. You seem to have this overly intellectualized understanding of what an argument is. It's a call for action. And unless you think people involved in movements or struggles are robots, they are crucial to how a movement develops.

So you argued for the port strike not within the framework of demonstrating to people the power that people have as workers (versus the power they have as consumers), not by pointing out how the demonstration would succeed because of that power, and how it's not fair for a small minority to exploit that power to enrich themselves. (See - the success of the action is proof of what can happen when working people band together and use what they have in common - their status as workers - to empower themselves rather than capital-serving politicians!) Rather, you argued for the port strike by saying it was a way of "building coalitions" with labor? Yes, that sounds to me like deliberately hiding your politics. Because we all know why labor is a crucial site of struggle from a Marxian perspective. If you are trying to incorporate that site of struggle without mentioning why, you're very conveniently leaving something out. And, to be honest, I have no idea why. Is it a fear of scaring people away? It seems to be that in arguing for a strike, you'd have the best opportunity possible to put forward a Marxian socialist perspective on its value and strategic importance. If the ISO did indeed do what you claim, and argue for the action under the guise of coalition building, then I am both shocked and disappointed.

The original purpose of the Oakland port "strike" (not a strike really, as it was an action by OWS merely passively supported by the longshoremen) was to help the workers of Longview win their critical struggle.

And it does seem to have had some impact in that direction, though the main reason the capitalists flinched, drawing back from Obama's threat to run in a scab ship guarded by the US Navy and Coast Guard, was due to the raw working class power displayed by the rank and file longshoremen in September, physically defeating the scabs and the company guards, in fact walking all over them 1930s style, not a one day rally by the citizenry of Oakland a month later.

The capitalists finally decided that they just weren't quite up for raw 1930s style class warfare this week, too dangerous it could get out of hand.

Good enough for me!

-M.H.-

[Lucretia]

Picky picky! This is casual postings on the Internet, here today, gone tomorrow. I do not consider 100% precision that important here, especially since if you get something a little off there will always be a partisan around to correct you, such as your good self. I believe, unlike some folk, that it is actually possible to learn something here through dialogue.

Rarely bothering to actually read the LRP's lengthy lucubrations, I falsely assumed they had a consistent position that made sense. It turns out they didn't. I welcome your minor correction of my minor error, and I utterly fail to see how it makes any difference to the central points here.

So fine, they supported that glorious wonderful movement Solidarity, but considered its central leader, who embodied everything about it, everything bad as well as what few things one might find good about it (elementary trade union militancy and working class social composition is all I can come up with offhand), as somehow a traitor and sellout to it.

There were people within Solidarity who considered him a traitor too, that he was for example insufficiently Polish nationalist, anti-communist or anti-Semitic. That the LRP puts themselves into that camp is hardly to its credit.

Even in their own terms, Walesa's Polish critics were wrong. He brought Solidarity to power, and the country was transformed according to the Solidarity program. What more could a movement expect from a leader?

It's not picky to point out patently false statements you make about somebody who, to be honest, enjoys a deservedly notorious reputation among revolutionary socialists. And, no, the LRP did not put themselves into the same camp as people who criticized Walesa for being insufficiently anti-communist. If you think so, you're just demonstrating once again that you clearly do not understand the LRP's position.


I'll help you with your historical research in fact. There was exactly one basic change in the Castro regime in its history, that was the split in 1959 between those Castroists who did not want to lick Eisenhower's boots, the majority, and those that did, who shortly thereafter ended up on the Bay of Pigs, a few months after Castro nationalized everything in Cuba down to hot dog stands.

So by your criteria, you should think the Castro regime was always state capitalist. A truly insane flat earth position, famously advanced by Gerry Healy, whose "dialectical" defenses of such positions were highly reminiscent of the way you defend your positions as well.You can't seriously be this stupid, MH. You honestly think that performing a class analysis involves talking about Castro's regime, internal divisions within it, and how it related to Eisenhower. What you fail to understand--and this is shocking that it is coming from a self-professed Marxist--is that we are investigating class relationships, with relationships being the key word. So we cannot determine what class relationships prevailed in Cuba by simply mentioning that Castro basically remained in power since the overthrow of the Batista regime. Why not, you might ask. Well, because it tell us nothing about who controlled the means of production (was it just the Castro regime, or was it a class of people who chose Castro and approved of the decisions he was making about production?). It explains literally nothing about how workers' relationship to the means of production might have changed or not. Nor does it shed light on how workers confronted the means of production -- whether they confronted them as alien forces, or whether they controlled them through political means, such as by democratically deciding how they are used or who gets to plan the economy, or directly through self-management -- which is the issue that determines whether or not any society is a class society.

This is Marxism 101, and I am stunned I am actually having to waste my time explaining it to you.


Capitalism was abolished in Cuba in 1960. That's an objective empirical fact, ask any Cuban capitalist in Miami, he will tell you so.Actually, the only empirical fact is that private industry was commandeered by the state. Whether that means "capitalism" is abolished is another issue entirely. You, like Lev, are defining capitalism as an economic system with private firm owners, without realizing that private firm owners are just one group through which the underlying and fundamental functions of capital can be exercised. It is those processes which define capitalism, which are its essence, not who carries those functions out.

That you would ask for me to derive my class analysis of the country based on what a Cuban capitalist expatriate would tell me is similarly risible.


Is Cuba socialist? Of course not. It's a society in transition between capitalism and socialism, overseen by a bureaucratic regime that attempts to maintain this unstable state in a bureaucratic freeze. A highly unviable state of affairs. Ultimately, given the choice, the Castro regime would probably prefer to go capitalist rather than see themselves displaced by democratic workers rule. But in the long run we are all dead, as the Castro brothers doubtless say to themselves every night when they go to bed.Here's where your argument collapses. You claim it's a society in transition, but how do we know this? Because it combines aspects of socialism with aspects of capitalism, right? (I won't bother asking you which aspects of capitalism remain, since according to you capitalism tout court has been completely and totally wiped from the face of the Cuban Earth.) But then, using that criterion, France is a society in transition. As is the United States. Right? They also combine aspects of socialism with aspects of capitalism. Why aren't they also "in transition" as "workers' states"? In many of those "non-workers' states", the workers actually have more control over the state than the workers in Cuba do.


Clear enough for you?It has been clear to me from some time that you construct your arguments by building your conclusions into your beginning definitions. "We know that capitalism can't exist in Cuba, right? How? Because capitalism's defining essence is what we know doesn't exist in Cuba -- private firm owners. So case closed." Your issue is that your definition of capitalism is theoretically useless -- if workers are just as oppressed, have just as little control over their work conditions, in a classless "non-capitalist transitional society" as they do in a class society, what's the big deal about overthrowing class? A secondary issue is that it has nothing to with how Marx or Engels defined capitalism.


So how is this different from the British Labour Party? Simple. When they nationalized steel, that was not for the benefit of British steelworkers, but for the benefit of British steel magnates, who laughed all the way to the bank.So your argument is that Cuban bureaucrats are different than a Labour government because one nationalizes industry for the benefit of private firm owners, whereas the other one presides over a nationalized industry through which it benefits. Yep profound difference. I'm sure the people of DPRK, Cuba, Vietnam, will be very pleased to hear that their exploiters work for the state rather than Nike.


Who has authority and control is merely politics. Why is it merely politics? Because it evades the question, just what it is that the power holders *do* with all that authority and control! Power does not exist in a social vacuum. Your conception is fundamentally anti-Marxist and non-class.Of course the issue is also of what power-holders do with that power. This is part of what distinguishes one class society from another. One ruling class obtains its surplus through tying the peasants to the land, the other through allowing workers to choose the right job for them in order to work for longer than it takes to produce what they live off of. These are all, of course, political questions just as much as they are economic ones in that they involve what sorts of political mechanisms and institutions are necessary to reproduce these exploitative relationships.

Earlier you seemed to acknowledge that by saying that class struggle, economic struggle, is class politics. Now you've backflipped into saying that control over the means of production is "merely politics" and therefore not related to class as at all. It's breathtaking in its stupidity, MH. And my one regret here is that you're too ignorant to realize how hilarious your bizarre attempts to provide a Marxist analysis sound.

It's almost as if you want to say that politics is about identifying who owns/controls what, and not what they do with that control, so that you can uphold countries like the Cuba and the Stalinist USSR and say that politically the states were under the control of bureaucrats, but that economically they were under the control of workers because of nationalized property. But that's obviously absurd. When the production decisions are being made directly by those with political control, the bureaucrats, the question of economics and of class is inseparable from the question of politics, just as it was under feudalism -- before early capitalism opened an attenuated rift between political leadership and economic control. And in situations where that economic control is exercised (politically) by a minority that is not accountable to the majority, in a way that benefits themselves through controlling the surplus created by the majority, what you clearly have is a class society.


In judging the nature of a state, you have to look to economics and sociology. What class in society does the state defend the economic and social interests of? How does it use its authority?Well, this is an obvious truism. Where we come to a disagreement is in defining what we mean by "in the interests of." The Marcyists think that the ruling regime in the DPRK is socialist because, apparently, sending workers to camps, starving them, and giving them no control over their place of work all while living a life of luxury is "in the interests of the workers" by maintaining state control over the economy in the face of imperialist threats.

You seem to think that, even if a ruling elite controls the productive resources of a country, it is still socialist as long as it controls those resources in the "interests" of the workers. Of course, what the workers have to say about this is irrelelvant in your view, since for you communism is evidently not a process, but a fixed way of distributing the goodies in the right way.


Whether an economy is capitalist or not, as you put it, is determined by -- whether an economy is capitalist or not! Not by the nature of the political regime. Though a political regime seriously out of variance with its social nature is not long for this world.And what determines whether or not an economy is capitalist is not whether there exist inheritance laws, whether or to what degree there exists planning, or any other empirical obscurity you might wish to mention. Capitalism is a series of processes by which workers, once removed from the means of production, exchange their labor power for wages that permit a ruling class that does control the means of production to extract and control a surplus for the purposes of competing with other surplus-extractors.


Yes it is, thank you. I regret to point out, however, that that is not what Marx said the state was.


The power of the state is *not* "created by people privately owning shit and forcing others to work for them." Rather, it is a military body utilized by those owners to suppress the people working for them when they get unruly. Its power rests not on "capitalist power," but on rifles, bayonets, tear gas, pepper spray, tanks, nuclear bombs, etc. etc.Yes, the power of the state is derived from class. Clearly you need to go out a buy a copy of Engels' Origins. And while you're at the bookstore, you might want to pick up a copy of Lenin's State and Revolution, and flip to the section titled "The State: A Product of the Irreconcilability of Class Antagonisms." :laugh:


By all means find me a quote--if you can. Especially since you clearly think there is one, indeed zillions.A quote that shows Marx's understanding of communism/socialism as collective control over the means of production?

Here's Engels defining socialism/communism:

"The universal association of all members of society for the common and planned exploitation of the forces of production, the increase of production at a rate that will enable it to satisfy the needs of all, the end of a state of affairs in which the needs of one are satisfied at the expense of others, the total destruction of classes and their contradictions, the development of the capacities of all members of society in all directions through the abolition of the division of labour as known hitherto, through industrial education, through the rotation of jobs, through the participation of all in the satisfactions created by all, through the fusion of town and country — these are the main results of the abolition of private property."

In the same document Engels, also described the social order of communism as follows:

"Above all it will have to take the running of industry and all branches of production in general out of the hands of separate individuals competing with each other and instead will have to ensure that all these branches of production are run by society as a whole."

Marx, in the third volume of Capital, defines communism as a state in which "the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature."

The key words there, MH, are common control. This is vision far removed from enlightened bureaucrats making productive decisions on behalf of workers. The producers themselves are collectively choosing how to divide work, what to make, etc.


Marx clearly distinguished between ownership and control, unlike you. Perhaps you might find some early stuff where he fuzzed over the distinction, but not in his later and more mature works.You mean like in the above quote, where he talks about control, not legal ownership?

Anyhow, we've had this debate before. Marx does distinguish between the two, but not for the purpose of saying that classes are defined by the latter and not the former, and certainly not for the purpose of saying that communism is not about workers' "ownership" rather than workers' "control."


Workers control means control by workers over capitalist industry. So if you have workers control, you still have capitalism, if for no other reason than that you still have a working class.Now amazingly enough, you're making the same mistake you wrongly accused me of making earlier -- of confusing who controls the means of production with what they do with it. Workers' control does not necessarily mean that workers will manage industry like a bunch of greedy little capitalists. You're so ill-informed about Marxist theory that you're confusing Trotsky's and Lenin's points about workers' control needing to have a democratic content as well as a democratic form (their point being that workers must choose what to do with the means of production, but that if their choices are to be truly democratic in the socialist sense, they must be made in the context of workers looking out for all of society -- thinking and acting like social producers rather than private producers.) Their point was certainly not to say that workers' control is secondary and irrelevant to establishing socialism -- or as you seem to think, its opposite.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Lucretia, you are accusing MH of saying that Cuba is in some way socialist, when he explicitly and correctly says it is not. You further get in a wad because he calls Cuba a society in transition -- and that it is. Stalinist regimes are by their very nature highly unstable. Sooner or later, the contradiction between proletarian property forms and an anti democratic, parasitic regime will be resolved by political revolution that brings about workers democracy and a real fight for world revolution, or counterrevolution and a return to capitalism will occur. Pablo made a similar mistake insofar as he saw the Stalinst regimes as being a long-term historical phenomenon ("centuries of deformed workers states").

Marx not having a crystal ball did not foresee Stalinist bureaucratic regimes ruling over countries where capitalism had been overthrown by largely peasant armies.

Capitalism was overthrown in Cuba, not only was industry nationalized, but private property was virtually abolished. Try to wrap Marx around the concept of capitalism without private property. Do I really have to say that we are NOT calling Cuba communist?

[Lucretia]

Lucretia, you are accusing MH of saying that Cuba is in some way socialist, when he explicitly and correctly says it is not. You further get in a wad because he calls Cuba a society in transition -- and that it is.

He is articulating an incoherent position, and if this post represents your endorsement of what he's saying, then you have the unenviable task of defending incoherence.

We are to believe that Cuba is a society in transition between capitalism and socialism, but is neither socialist nor capitalist. One would think that, since it falls midway between capitalism and socialism, that is has aspects of both. But neither of you has stated what aspects of capitalism remain, the aspects that supposedly prevent Cuba from being fully socialist. As a result, it's not really clear how you could characterize the mode of production that is presently prevailing in Cuba. We know it's not socialism, and we know it's not capitalism, but then what is it? Certainly you wouldn't say bureaucratic collectivism. I guess your answer might be a "workers' state," but I'm sure you are already seeing the writing on the wall here. If all property is controlled by the state, and the state is not accountable to the people, what characterizes the economic relationship between the people and the state that controls all production decisions, but over which they have virtually no control? Is it one of an alien force confronting them ala a class society? Again, the problem is trying to characterize a set of dynamic relationships with reference to a property form that tells us nothing about the actual relationships -- the relations of production -- it presides over.

To make matters even more coherent, MH claims that the bureaucrats constitute a caste but not a class and that therefore Cuba is a classless society. But that just raises the question, if Cuba is a classless society -- a society in which the means of production are held in common by everybody, and not a select minority that uses its control to extract surplus -- then isn't Cuba socialist? I have never heard of a society that has no classes but isn't socialist or communist. It's an innovation of people who are confused enough to try to equate socialism with state control of the means of production, but are level-headed enough not to want to identify socialism with what exists under the despicable regimes of countries like DPRK, Vietnam, and Cuba.



Stalinist regimes are by their very nature highly unstable. Sooner or later, the contradiction between proletarian property forms and an anti democratic, parasitic regime will be resolved by political revolution that brings about workers democracy and a real fight for world revolution, or counterrevolution and a return to capitalism will occur. Pablo made a similar mistake insofar as he saw the Stalinst regimes as being a long-term historical phenomenon ("centuries of deformed workers states").Yes, you're doing an excellent job of reciting verbatim the Ortho-Trot talking points. It's just that you're not able to defend them effectively.


Capitalism was overthrown in Cuba, not only was industry nationalized, but private property was virtually abolished. Try to wrap Marx around the concept of capitalism without private property. Do I really have to say that we are NOT calling Cuba communist?Yes, capitalism was "overthrown" but the society is still in transition between capitalism and socialism -- which means there must be some aspects of capitalism that remain, which prevent the society from being called fully socialist. What are those again?

And you're right again that there's no private property regarding the means of production (actually, after decades of creeping reforms, there is, but we'll set that aside for the sake of sidestepping what I'm sure would be another excruciatingly painful exhibition). There is only "public" state property under the exclusive control of a dictatorial regime. I'll let you decide whether that has the potential to function as a repository for class-based capital accumulation. (Hint: there's not Ortho-Trot talking point you can consult to help you answer this one.)

[A Marxist Historian]

It's not picky to point out patently false statements you make about somebody who, to be honest, enjoys a deservedly notorious reputation among revolutionary socialists. And, no, the LRP did not put themselves into the same camp as people who criticized Walesa for being insufficiently anti-communist. If you think so, you're just demonstrating once again that you clearly do not understand the LRP's position.

My reading of the LRP statement is, naturally, different from yours. The to me ludicrous assertion that Walesa "sold out" Solidarity can only make sense from the perspective of said Polish camp, which was and is quite large. But let us leave that for another thread and try to concentrate on what is essential here.

I should say that what I found "picky" about your comments is not that you corrected me, indeed I appreciated the clarification. It is that you seem to think that this correction has any relevance to the larger points we are discussing, which it doesn't.


You can't seriously be this stupid, MH. You honestly think that performing a class analysis involves talking about Castro's regime, internal divisions within it, and how it related to Eisenhower. What you fail to understand--and this is shocking that it is coming from a self-professed Marxist--is that we are investigating class relationships, with relationships being the key word. So we cannot determine what class relationships prevailed in Cuba by simply mentioning that Castro basically remained in power since the overthrow of the Batista regime. Why not, you might ask. Well, because it tell us nothing about who controlled the means of production (was it just the Castro regime, or was it a class of people who chose Castro and approved of the decisions he was making about production?). It explains literally nothing about how workers' relationship to the means of production might have changed or not. Nor does it shed light on how workers confronted the means of production -- whether they confronted them as alien forces, or whether they controlled them through political means, such as by democratically deciding how they are used or who gets to plan the economy, or directly through self-management -- which is the issue that determines whether or not any society is a class society.

This is Marxism 101, and I am stunned I am actually having to waste my time explaining it to you.

When the Mafia and the Cuban capitalist class were run out of Cuba, in the 1959-1960 period, this, I should think very obviously, was the point at which class relations changed drastically in Cuba. During this process, it was the Castro brothers in charge, not the Cuban working class, as there were no democratic bodies involved. Castro quite literally gave the orders while sitting in the back of his pickup truck as it cruised through the streets of Havana. It so happened that his orders coincided extremely well with what the Cuban workers wanted, so they followed them.

The actual expropriation of the Cuban capitalists was carried out, very enthusiastically, by the Cuban working class. Not because they had democratically decided to do so, but because Castro told them to, giving them permission.

There probably was a fair amount of workers control over just nationalized capitalist enterprises in the early stages, but only because Castro didn't have enough of an apparatus stabilized for anything else to be practical.


Actually, the only empirical fact is that private industry was commandeered by the state. Whether that means "capitalism" is abolished is another issue entirely. You, like Lev, are defining capitalism as an economic system with private firm owners, without realizing that private firm owners are just one group through which the underlying and fundamental functions of capital can be exercised. It is those processes which define capitalism, which are its essence, not who carries those functions out.

That you would ask for me to derive my class analysis of the country based on what a Cuban capitalist expatriate would tell me is similarly risible.

An interesting and revealing statement. What it shows is that for you, "capitalism" is a Hegelian abstraction. Concretely, capitalism is a system in which a particular class in society, the capitalists, extracts surplus value from the working class, in the fashion described so comprehensively by Marx in the first volume of Das Kapital.

So if said class has been expropriated and has fled to Miami, then you no longer have a capitalist system, you have something else. It is possible a new capitalist system could be cohered at a future date, with a new set of capitalists. And in fact a new set of capitalists are just beginning to be created in Cuba, half a century later.

But you cannot have a capitalist system if you do not have a capitalist class.

Which is exactly why a Cuban capitalist is indeed the best possible authority on whether or not Cuba is a capitalist country. He would know.


Here's where your argument collapses. You claim it's a society in transition, but how do we know this? Because it combines aspects of socialism with aspects of capitalism, right? (I won't bother asking you which aspects of capitalism remain, since according to you capitalism tout court has been completely and totally wiped from the face of the Cuban Earth.) But then, using that criterion, France is a society in transition. As is the United States. Right? They also combine aspects of socialism with aspects of capitalism. Why aren't they also "in transition" as "workers' states"? In many of those "non-workers' states", the workers actually have more control over the state than the workers in Cuba do.

There are no "aspects of socialism" in France or the US. If there were, why would we need a revolution? Bernstein would be right, and we should peacefully await the growth of those elements over time, since socialism is of course a better system than capitalism, and Darwinian evolution ought to persuade the ruling classes themselves to go socialist sooner or later.

In the US and France, you have large, well organized and well rooted capitalist classes, who get the social surplus that they extract from the working class, and may do with it what they please. Some of it goes for crumbs for the working class because that's what they choose to do, but that's not "socialism."

In the old USSR and in Cuba, production is administered (or rather misadministered) by the Stalinist bureaucrats, but bureaucrats don't own any of that surplus, they just administer where it goes, which is primarily for the benefit of society as a whole. Sure, they can leech themselves crumbs off the tops, but they just don't own it, like American and French capitalists do. That is why you had a counterrevolution, as they wanted to.

Their power rested on the acceptance of the Soviet working class back in the day, and of the Cuban working class now, that they know best and are doing what the country needed. When that finally went away, in the late 1980s under Gorbachev, the USSR collapsed with stunning ease and rapidity.

Right now, in the USA, the great majority of the American people, as registered even in Gallup polls, are convinced that the American government has no idea what it is doing and is screwing everything up. But that doesn't matter, as this is a capitalist state in which the capitalist class not the people are in charge. Whenever such a state of events has occurred in deformed workers states, whether in Eastern Europe or in the USSR itself, they collapse immediately, unless held up briefly by foreign bayonets, as in Poland. Because ultimately the power of a deformed workers state rests on the support or at least tolerance of the working class.

Now some of those bureaucrats, and a whole lot of other folk who got in on the action, do own the means of production, and have formed themselves into a capitalist class pretty much exactly like those in France and the USA, though younger, greedier, more brutal and crookeder.


It has been clear to me from some time that you construct your arguments by building your conclusions into your beginning definitions. "We know that capitalism can't exist in Cuba, right? How? Because capitalism's defining essence is what we know doesn't exist in Cuba -- private firm owners. So case closed." Your issue is that your definition of capitalism is theoretically useless -- if workers are just as oppressed, have just as little control over their work conditions, in a classless "non-capitalist transitional society" as they do in a class society, what's the big deal about overthrowing class? A secondary issue is that it has nothing to with how Marx or Engels defined capitalism.

Workers care about what their working conditions *are*, not whether they "have control" over them. And of course when workers do get interested in that sort of thing, Stalinist bureaucrats piece them off with letting them run their own factories a bit, as in Yugoslavia, as that doesn't really matter in the end.

If you really think workers are just as oppressed in a society with no unemployment, free education and medical care, etc. etc. as current day society, or France in 1968 for that matter--well, talk to an actual worker, he or she will tell you different.

So why then were Western workers not enthused about the USSR? Because of the totalitarian dictatorship, the lack of control over their lives and working conditions? Well, that was part of it.

But the real reason was that American standards of living were much higher than in the USSR, for historical reasons not really particularly the fault of the Soviet bureaucrats, and that they hoped that by putting up with capitalism they could attain American living standards. And that after the USSR collapsed, workers around the world became convinced that socialism might be a nice idea in theory, but in practice didn't work.


So your argument is that Cuban bureaucrats are different than a Labour government because one nationalizes industry for the benefit of private firm owners, whereas the other one presides over a nationalized industry through which it benefits. Yep profound difference. I'm sure the people of DPRK, Cuba, Vietnam, will be very pleased to hear that their exploiters work for the state rather than Nike.

In Vietnam, like in China, the private sector is growing by leaps and bounds, something Vietnamese workers I am sure are just as unthrilled about as Chinese. DPRK? Well, there's a good thread about the DPRK over in Learning, which I urge you to look at, where I express my thoughts about this extreme case.

Yes indeed, workers in China see nationalized industry as theirs, and resent what the CCP is doing with it. But they understand the difference between an industry where profit goes to the country, and is largely spent on things like the dramatic Chinese infrastructure improvements of recent years, which the people of China are benefitting from tremendously, and where profit just goes into the pockets of the brand new greedy capitalist class.

I am going to skip over much of what is to below, as what I've already said in this posting answers it I think.


Of course the issue is also of what power-holders do with that power. This is part of what distinguishes one class society from another. One ruling class obtains its surplus through tying the peasants to the land, the other through allowing workers to choose the right job for them in order to work for longer than it takes to produce what they live off of. These are all, of course, political questions just as much as they are economic ones in that they involve what sorts of political mechanisms and institutions are necessary to reproduce these exploitative relationships.

Earlier you seemed to acknowledge that by saying that class struggle, economic struggle, is class politics. Now you've backflipped into saying that control over the means of production is "merely politics" and therefore not related to class as at all. It's breathtaking in its stupidity, MH. And my one regret here is that you're too ignorant to realize how hilarious your bizarre attempts to provide a Marxist analysis sound.

It's almost as if you want to say that politics is about identifying who owns/controls what, and not what they do with that control, so that you can uphold countries like the Cuba and the Stalinist USSR and say that politically the states were under the control of bureaucrats, but that economically they were under the control of workers because of nationalized property. But that's obviously absurd. When the production decisions are being made directly by those with political control, the bureaucrats, the question of economics and of class is inseparable from the question of politics, just as it was under feudalism -- before early capitalism opened an attenuated rift between political leadership and economic control. And in situations where that economic control is exercised (politically) by a minority that is not accountable to the majority, in a way that benefits themselves through controlling the surplus created by the majority, what you clearly have is a class society.

Such a class society would not be a "state capitalist" society, as capitalism is a social system that has no resemblance to what you had in the USSR or now have in Cuba.

It would be what various alleged Marxists have called "bureaucratic collectivism." The theoretical problem with bureaucratic collectivism is that it throws the analysis of societies in economic terms right out the window--as do your postings. You really ought to be a bureaucratic collectivist of some sort. Have you read Hal Draper's in some ways excellent books on the state? His analysis has remarkable similarities to yours--and has the same flaws.

In the USSR, yes, the bureaucracy controlled the allocation of social surplus. But they didn't own it, they didn't have it. That makes all the difference.


Well, this is an obvious truism. Where we come to a disagreement is in defining what we mean by "in the interests of." The Marcyists think that the ruling regime in the DPRK is socialist because, apparently, sending workers to camps, starving them, and giving them no control over their place of work all while living a life of luxury is "in the interests of the workers" by maintaining state control over the economy in the face of imperialist threats.

You seem to think that, even if a ruling elite controls the productive resources of a country, it is still socialist as long as it controls those resources in the "interests" of the workers. Of course, what the workers have to say about this is irrelelvant in your view, since for you communism is evidently not a process, but a fixed way of distributing the goodies in the right way.

What the workers have to say is *extremely* relevant. What keeps the Castro regime going, despite its extreme isolation, is that most Cuban workers feel attached to it, and at least want to defend it against foreign imperialism and the gusanos in Miami. The same applied to the USSR, where, as any intelligent and relatively objective Soviet historian will tell you, Soviet workers defended with and identified with the regime as theirs. When they stopped doing so, beginning under Brezhnev and really coming to crisis under Gorbachev, that was it for the USSR.


And what determines whether or not an economy is capitalist is not whether there exist inheritance laws, whether or to what degree there exists planning, or any other empirical obscurity you might wish to mention. Capitalism is a series of processes by which workers, once removed from the means of production, exchange their labor power for wages that permit a ruling class that does control the means of production to extract and control a surplus for the purposes of competing with other surplus-extractors.

"for the purpose of competing"? Ah, a little dose of Cliffism. An utterly anti-Marxist conception. Yes, competition is one of the fundamental features of capitalism, but it is very far from a "purpose" of capitalism.

Capitalists extract surplus from the workers for their own benefit, not to keep up with the Joneses and impress the neighbors.

The Soviet social surplus simply did not go into the possession of a discrete class in society. State bureaucrats had control over where it went, but they didn't get to keep it. When they lost their jobs, they suddenly found themselves no better off than anybody else. Kaganovich was just another pensioner in Moscow, living no better than your average retired worker from a factory.



Yes it is, thank you. I regret to point out, however, that that is not what Marx said the state was.

Yes, the power of the state is derived from class. Clearly you need to go out a buy a copy of Engels' Origins. And while you're at the bookstore, you might want to pick up a copy of Lenin's State and Revolution, and flip to the section titled "The State: A Product of the Irreconcilability of Class Antagonisms." :laugh:

A quote that shows Marx's understanding of communism/socialism as collective control over the means of production?

Here's Engels defining socialism/communism:

"The universal association of all members of society for the common and planned exploitation of the forces of production, the increase of production at a rate that will enable it to satisfy the needs of all, the end of a state of affairs in which the needs of one are satisfied at the expense of others, the total destruction of classes and their contradictions, the development of the capacities of all members of society in all directions through the abolition of the division of labour as known hitherto, through industrial education, through the rotation of jobs, through the participation of all in the satisfactions created by all, through the fusion of town and country — these are the main results of the abolition of private property."

In the same document Engels, also described the social order of communism as follows:

"Above all it will have to take the running of industry and all branches of production in general out of the hands of separate individuals competing with each other and instead will have to ensure that all these branches of production are run by society as a whole."

Marx, in the third volume of Capital, defines communism as a state in which "the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature."

The key words there, MH, are common control. This is vision far removed from enlightened bureaucrats making productive decisions on behalf of workers. The producers themselves are collectively choosing how to divide work, what to make, etc.

In these quotes, Marx & Engels are describing what a socialist or communist society will look like in the future, how things will be run, how production will be controlled. They are simply not relevant to your point.

And no, a socialist society will not be run by an enlightened, or not so enlightened, bureaucracy. In fact, a socialist society will have no state at all, bureaucratized or otherwise. But we have a long ways to go from here to there, even *after* the workers have taken the power away from the capitalist class.

If your only point is that Cuba and the USSR are not and never were socialist societies, including in the case of the USSR when Lenin & Trotsky were at the helm, I could not agree more. And Lenin & Trotsky could not have agreed more either.

M & E are describing a *classless* society. We are talking about what classes are. So you're obviously looking in the wrong place.



You mean like in the above quote, where he talks about control, not legal ownership?

Anyhow, we've had this debate before. Marx does distinguish between the two, but not for the purpose of saying that classes are defined by the latter and not the former, and certainly not for the purpose of saying that communism is not about workers' "ownership" rather than workers' "control."

Now, if you want to find a *relevant* quote, find one where Marx defines what classes are. If he says ruling classes are defined by control, rather than ownership, of the means of production, well, I'd have to have a look at that. Maybe in one of his earlier writings...

But that would surprise me immensely.



Now amazingly enough, you're making the same mistake you wrongly accused me of making earlier -- of confusing who controls the means of production with what they do with it. Workers' control does not necessarily mean that workers will manage industry like a bunch of greedy little capitalists. You're so ill-informed about Marxist theory that you're confusing Trotsky's and Lenin's points about workers' control needing to have a democratic content as well as a democratic form (their point being that workers must choose what to do with the means of production, but that if their choices are to be truly democratic in the socialist sense, they must be made in the context of workers looking out for all of society -- thinking and acting like social producers rather than private producers.) Their point was certainly not to say that workers' control is secondary and irrelevant to establishing socialism -- or as you seem to think, its opposite.

Workers control had a very particular meaning for the Bolsheviks, and there is much written about this. Mistranslation is a problem here, as "kontrol" in Russian, like in German and French, has its original English meaning, namely checking and oversight, not management as the term has drifted into meaning.

So "workers control" was a key Bolshevik slogan, and a key slogan of the factory committee movement in Russia. What was meant by that was that the capitalists would have to open their books, and factory committees would have the right to veto any decisions of management that they disagreed with.

"Workers control" in the sense you reify it is not a phrase or a slogan ever to be found in Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, anybody you might name. It's a syndicalist conception, not a Marxist conception.

This idea was first pushed by the Bakuninists. Engels was undecided but rather dubious about it, as he expressed in his pamphlet "On Authority," which I certainly hope you are familiar with, if for no other reason than that it has been posted several times to Revleft lately.

It was popular initially in the Russian factory committee movement in 1917, after the workers took the power, but practical experience led the Bolsheviks, and most of the originally non-Bolshevik factory committee leaders as well, to reject it.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

He is articulating an incoherent position, and if this post represents your endorsement of what he's saying, then you have the unenviable task of defending incoherence.

We are to believe that Cuba is a society in transition between capitalism and socialism, but is neither socialist nor capitalist. One would think that, since it falls midway between capitalism and socialism, that is has aspects of both. But neither of you has stated what aspects of capitalism remain, the aspects that supposedly prevent Cuba from being fully socialist. As a result, it's not really clear how you could characterize the mode of production that is presently prevailing in Cuba. We know it's not socialism, and we know it's not capitalism, but then what is it? Certainly you wouldn't say bureaucratic collectivism. I guess your answer might be a "workers' state," but I'm sure you are already seeing the writing on the wall here. If all property is controlled by the state, and the state is not accountable to the people, what characterizes the economic relationship between the people and the state that controls all production decisions, but over which they have virtually no control? Is it one of an alien force confronting them ala a class society? Again, the problem is trying to characterize a set of dynamic relationships with reference to a property form that tells us nothing about the actual relationships -- the relations of production -- it presides over.

Does Cuban society have aspects of both socialism and capitalism? Of course it does. That it has aspects of socialism seems so obvious that they are hardly worth enumerating again yet one more time, no unemployment etc., I am getting tired of repeating myself. Biggest one of course is that there is no capitalist class worth mentioning yet in Cuba.

Aspects of capitalism? Well, there are many, but for convenience, let us mention the one that you have been particularly harping on, namely that production is controlled by a privileged bureaucracy rather than democratically by the workers.

What prevents Cuba from being fully socialist? Many things, the biggest and most important being that, as you may have heard, it is impossible to construct a socialist society in one country, to say nothing of one island.

And your suggestion that I might caracterize Cuba socially as a "workers state" is simply illiterate. State and society are two different categories altogether. The nature of the Cuban state is certainly relevant to the nature of Cuban society, but society is, if you will pardon the expression, the base, and the state is merely the superstructure towering above it.

So it is a transitional society, in between capitalism and socialism, with features of both. And there is nothing else it could possibly be.

If there were a workers revolution in Cuba, if Castro were overthrown, if the workers of Cuba had complete control over Cuban society and the Cuban means of production, what would the nature of Cuban society then be?

It would be a transitional society, in between capitalism and socialism, just like before. The only difference, and that is of course a very big difference, would that then it would be moving in the direction of socialism, rather than back to capitalism, which everybody knows is where Cuba is gravitating nowadays.


To make matters even more coherent, MH claims that the bureaucrats constitute a caste but not a class and that therefore Cuba is a classless society. But that just raises the question, if Cuba is a classless society -- a society in which the means of production are held in common by everybody, and not a select minority that uses its control to extract surplus -- then isn't Cuba socialist? I have never heard of a society that has no classes but isn't socialist or communist. It's an innovation of people who are confused enough to try to equate socialism with state control of the means of production, but are level-headed enough not to want to identify socialism with what exists under the despicable regimes of countries like DPRK, Vietnam, and Cuba.

And therefore Cuba is a classless society?

I am sorely tempted to throw back at you one of your little verbal bouquets, and call you an idiot and a nitwit. I will attempt to refrain.

Instead, I will just urge you to reread the passage you just wrote, and realize how silly it makes you sound. Perhaps you would be better off thinking before you post.

Of course Cuba is not a classless society. You have a working class, you have a quite sizeable petty bourgeoisie, which objectively the bureaucracy is a component of, probably you even have a peasantry. What you don't have, however, is a capitalist class, or at least only a small and incipient one.

-M.H.-



Yes, you're doing an excellent job of reciting verbatim the Ortho-Trot talking points. It's just that you're not able to defend them effectively.

Yes, capitalism was "overthrown" but the society is still in transition between capitalism and socialism -- which means there must be some aspects of capitalism that remain, which prevent the society from being called fully socialist. What are those again?

And you're right again that there's no private property regarding the means of production (actually, after decades of creeping reforms, there is, but we'll set that aside for the sake of sidestepping what I'm sure would be another excruciatingly painful exhibition). There is only "public" state property under the exclusive control of a dictatorial regime. I'll let you decide whether that has the potential to function as a repository for class-based capital accumulation. (Hint: there's not Ortho-Trot talking point you can consult to help you answer this one.)

[Lucretia]

An interesting and revealing statement. What it shows is that for you, "capitalism" is a Hegelian abstraction. Concretely, capitalism is a system in which a particular class in society, the capitalists, extracts surplus value from the working class, in the fashion described so comprehensively by Marx in the first volume of Das Kapital.

It's certainly a theoretical abstraction, but one of a Marxian kind not a "Hegelian" kind, whatever that is. (In fact my guess is you know even less about Hegel than you do about Marx, so I won't even bother asking you what you mean by "Hegelian abstraction.") An abstraction is a process of conceptual formation by identifying essential process and relationships, while filtering out--ignoring--the non-essential processes and relationships. Marx did this all the time in his works, and at no point in any of his works did he stipulate that private firm owners are essential components of capitalism.

Marx was not inclined to give nutshell definitions, but what few we have mentions nothing about these empirically superfluities (e.g., CEOs, stock markets) you proudly point to as evidence that the capitalist mode of production doesn't prevail in Cuba. Marx defines capital as "self-expanding value" and a system of "production for the sake of production." And when we take these definitions, and interrogate them to tease out what phenomena and processes are necessary for value to exist, and for it to constantly expand, we can safely conclude that "factory owners" is not on the list. What is on the list are things such as wage labor, commodities (good which are the embodiment of abstract labor), a market for exchanging commodities (including labor power) using money, the exclusionary control over the means of production by a small section of society that uses such control to predominate politically through the appropriation of surplus value that it then reinvests into the means of production for the purpose competing with other capitals, not just militarily but economically as well.


But you cannot have a capitalist system if you do not have a capitalist class.Correct. Somebody must be performing the functions of capital, and those people are the bureaucrats. That's why we call them state capitalists.



There are no "aspects of socialism" in France or the US. If there were, why would we need a revolution? Bernstein would be right, and we should peacefully await the growth of those elements over time, since socialism is of course a better system than capitalism, and Darwinian evolution ought to persuade the ruling classes themselves to go socialist sooner or later.But wait -- isn't state control ("public" control) one of the markers of socialism? Why else do you keep pointing to the state property form as some sort of progressive economic sign? Now you're evidently saying that state-property has nothing to do with socialism, and that places where it exists in regards to certain industries therefore have nothing to do with socialism. Which is it? Is the property form inherently socialist or is it compatible with capitalism? Make up your mind.


In the US and France, you have large, well organized and well rooted capitalist classes, who get the social surplus that they extract from the working class, and may do with it what they please. Some of it goes for crumbs for the working class because that's what they choose to do, but that's not "socialism."Please try to pay attention, MH. I am not talking about the privately owned firms in France and the U.S. I am talking about the publicly owned industries--those that function under the state-property form. How are those not socialist? How does the existence of those public industries not make these countries part socialist (or "in transition" as you like to say)?


In the old USSR and in Cuba, production is administered (or rather misadministered) by the Stalinist bureaucrats, but bureaucrats don't own any of that surplus, they just administer where it goes, which is primarily for the benefit of society as a whole. Sure, they can leech themselves crumbs off the tops, but they just don't own it, like American and French capitalists do. That is why you had a counterrevolution, as they wanted to. And with the publicly owned industries in the US and France, production is also administered by bureaucrats, and they are not operated for the purpose of making a profit or generating surplus. In fact, many of them operate at a loss (the US Postal Service comes to mind). To repeat: doesn't that make the American economy one in transition between capitalism and socialism?


Workers care about what their working conditions *are*, not whether they "have control" over them. And of course when workers do get interested in that sort of thing, Stalinist bureaucrats piece them off with letting them run their own factories a bit, as in Yugoslavia, as that doesn't really matter in the end.Huh? Workers' don't care about what level of control they have over their workplace environment? They don't care about when they take their breaks, what their work schedule is, who assigns tasks in their workplace? The longer I converse with you, MH, the more I am convinced I am communicating with a teenager who has not really read Marx and has certainly never had a job.


If you really think workers are just as oppressed in a society with no unemployment, free education and medical care, etc. etc. as current day society, or France in 1968 for that matter--well, talk to an actual worker, he or she will tell you different.We've already been over this. Many European social democracies can boast these great signs of socialism you keep mentioning (perhaps with the exception of unemployment, but even that was sharply reduced and palliated with a strong social safety-net). Does that make them socialist workers' paradises?


What the workers have to say is *extremely* relevant. What keeps the Castro regime going, despite its extreme isolation, is that most Cuban workers feel attached to it,Any evidence for this claim?


"for the purpose of competing"? Ah, a little dose of Cliffism. An utterly anti-Marxist conception. Yes, competition is one of the fundamental features of capitalism, but it is very far from a "purpose" of capitalism.

Capitalists extract surplus from the workers for their own benefit, not to keep up with the Joneses and impress the neighbors.I think you're coming close to setting a record for logical fallacies in a single thread. Here you are creating a false dichotomy: "capitalists either extract surplus because they have to compete or they extract it for their own benefit." Did it ever occur to you that capitalism is a system of competition that forces people to identify "their own benefit" with maximizing profit? If you remove competition from the equation, you don't have capitalism. You would have capitalists "benefitting" by appropriating some surplus, but having absolutely no compulsion to maximize profit, to reinvest in the means of production and innovate them. The extract of surplus value by a ruling class for its own benefit is universally common to all class societies, including state capitalist ones.


The Soviet social surplus simply did not go into the possession of a discrete class in society. State bureaucrats had control over where it went, but they didn't get to keep it. When they lost their jobs, they suddenly found themselves no better off than anybody else. Kaganovich was just another pensioner in Moscow, living no better than your average retired worker from a factory.Huh? Bureaucrats in the USSR didn't skim off the surplus (keep it, bank it) to support a standard of living disproportionately higher than the workers they controlled? I don't even know what to say about this it is so incomprehensibly out of touch with reality.


In these quotes, Marx & Engels are describing what a socialist or communist society will look like in the future, how things will be run, how production will be controlled. They are simply not relevant to your point.You're so cornered here you are not even making sense. You asked for me quotes from Marx and Engels where they described socialism as consisting of a specific set of political relationships -- that is, relationships of power (or lack thereof) derived from control over productive resources -- and I then proceed to show you multiple quotes by both men that state unequivocally that in a socialist society everybody would collectively control the means of production, thus entailing a set of egalitarian political relationships where nobody is able to exercise power over others in political decision-making because by virtue of their control over productive property.

And all you can say in response is the equivalent of "Nuh uh!"


And no, a socialist society will not be run by an enlightened, or not so enlightened, bureaucracy. In fact, a socialist society will have no state at all, bureaucratized or otherwise. But we have a long ways to go from here to there, even *after* the workers have taken the power away from the capitalist class.I advise you to read Marx and Engels for yourself, instead of inferring what they have said based on what some Spart has told you via email or in some news article. Or at the very least, pick up Lenin's State and Revolution, where Lenin persuasively argues that there will be a state in socialism: "The state withers away insofar as there are no longer any capitalists, any classes, and, consequently, no class can be suppressed. But the state has not yet completely withered away, since there still remains the safeguarding of "bourgeois law", which sanctifies actual inequality. For the state to wither away completely, complete communism is necessary."

You: "Oops."


M & E are describing a *classless* society. We are talking about what classes are. So you're obviously looking in the wrong place.M&E are talking about a *classless* society, and according to you Cuba is a classless society, or at least one without an exploiting class. Gee. I wonder what's wrong with this picture?


Now, if you want to find a *relevant* quote, find one where Marx defines what classes are. If he says ruling classes are defined by control, rather than ownership, of the means of production, well, I'd have to have a look at that. Maybe in one of his earlier writings...Yeah, I am going to spend more time digging up and pasting quotes that you'll find some non-sensical reason to dismiss. If you understood even the basics of Marxism, you'd understand that it identifies social power, including the state and its laws, as derivative from the social relations of production. And how people relate to each other in the process of production depends on who controls the resources. This control is often encoded into the law, but not always. Why is that so difficult for you to understand?

Anyways, this semantic confusion of yours is irrelevant. We both agree that in Cuba and the Stalinist USSR, the state had legal title ("owned") the productive property. It exercised exclusive rights regarding the disposition of that property. We also both agree that (I hope, at least in terms of the Stalinist USSR) that the people had virtually no control over the state or the bureaucrats running it. So my question is, why do you think that the people who controlled the state did not function as a class? They controlled the state, and the state "owned" the property. Is this not a group of people exercising ownership rights through the institution of the state? How are they not a class? (If you repeat some idiotic shit about inheritance again, I am going to put you on ignore.)


Workers control had a very particular meaning for the Bolsheviks, and there is much written about this. Mistranslation is a problem here, as "kontrol" in Russian, like in German and French, has its original English meaning, namely checking and oversight, not management as the term has drifted into meaning.

So "workers control" was a key Bolshevik slogan, and a key slogan of the factory committee movement in Russia. What was meant by that was that the capitalists would have to open their books, and factory committees would have the right to veto any decisions of management that they disagreed with.

"Workers control" in the sense you reify it is not a phrase or a slogan ever to be found in Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, anybody you might name. It's a syndicalist conception, not a Marxist conception.

This idea was first pushed by the Bakuninists. Engels was undecided but rather dubious about it, as he expressed in his pamphlet "On Authority," which I certainly hope you are familiar with, if for no other reason than that it has been posted several times to Revleft lately.

It was popular initially in the Russian factory committee movement in 1917, after the workers took the power, but practical experience led the Bolsheviks, and most of the originally non-Bolshevik factory committee leaders as well, to reject it.
Another unbelievably sloppy argument. You begin by making an argument about the translation of the Russian word for "control" but then apparently think that this invalidates the quotes I presented, which were originally written in German. You really are one confused individual.

By the way, I have read Neil Harding (this argument about Lenin's meaning of workers' control is found in his Lenin's Political Thought), and you're misrepresenting his argument. He's looking at the meaning Lenin attributed to "workers' control" in specific works of his, written to express his views on what would happen in the transition to socialism, not in socialism. This is why, as Harding writes, one of his pre-October definitions of "workers' control" did not even entail the expropriation of the capitalists. Do you honestly think that Lenin was envision socialist or communist society when he wrote that? You're seriously grasping for straws.

The idea that you are getting at when you mention Bakuninists and the like is that "workers' control" in a socialist society is not about an individual worker getting to do what he wants, and it's not about eliminating all authority on the floor of the shop. It's about ensuring that the authority workers confront on the shop floor is not alien, that it is determined democratically by people who are committed to social production and who exercise their control through political processes that might not necessarily occur at the level of the shop. All of the various ways Lenin and Trotsky modulated the way they used the words before and after October can only be understood in the context of that ultimate goal. But let's be clear: that was the goal, and there was no question that socialism entailed workers' collective control, just as Marx indicated.

[Lucretia]

Of course Cuba is not a classless society. You have a working class, you have a quite sizeable petty bourgeoisie, which objectively the bureaucracy is a component of, probably you even have a peasantry. What you don't have, however, is a capitalist class, or at least only a small and incipient one.

Yes, according to you Cuba has no ruling class, only several classes existing horizontally and competing for control over a floating state controlled by a cadre of floating petty-bourgeois bureaucrats wrestling against a "proletarian property form." The fact that the bureaucrats manage the entire economy, including the surplus, and determine how much of that surplus they can appropriate for themselves, has no bearing on where they stand in the relations of production--what their class position is. (Because Marx's notion of class wasn't really about people's relationship to the means of production; it was about their relationship to a process of particular kind of private property ownership!) All that is relevant in characterizing the bureaucrats is that they do not privately "own" the state as individual proprietors, they simply control its "ownership" functions (including that of accumulation) collectively in way that enables them to pad accounts under their "ownership." Ergo they clearly do not occupy a distinct (class) location in relation to the means of production. They are just a parasitic caste.

A breath-taking Marxist analysis, breath-taking in its folly.

[workersadvocate]

I just finished reading Lenin's "Left Wing" Childness and the Petty Bourgeois Mentality (April 1918), where Lenin spends about half the paper singing the praises of state capitalism (his words) as the necessary precondition for socialism. Lots of other stuff inside that must have made Stalin & Company cream their shorts.

How far down the rabbit hole did counterrevolution in Russia really go?
This piece is written just months after October 1917, and already it eerily reeks of Stalin's conservatism and rule of Russia by bureaucrat managers in the name of the working class. This wasn't the pre-1918 Lenin or Leninism I came to admire as a young revolutionary.
Just exactly were the Bolsheviks doing at that time to actually spread international workers' revolution? Talk is cheap, and I always thought of the Bolsheviks as practical revolutionaries. They had plenty of links to German revolutionaries and sympathetic leftists all over the world at that time, so what happened?

I'm asking you in this thread because you seem capable of considering this seriously and giving a serious answer. I've said what I think of the existing middle class left, and in this piece by Lenin I wonder if I'm discovering the grandfather of this phenomena. Why do they all get to a certain point, become conservative and settle for their place and business enterprises, turning their backs on international revolution and the working class itself?
Are they all just social dems with a more radical public veneer for competitive marketing purposes? Does the non-proletarian class composition of these groups and their leaderships factor into this problem? Has this often hustorically been a key problem of the left, even the Bolsheviks?

[A Marxist Historian]

It's certainly a theoretical abstraction, but one of a Marxian kind not a "Hegelian" kind, whatever that is. (In fact my guess is you know even less about Hegel than you do about Marx, so I won't even bother asking you what you mean by "Hegelian abstraction.") An abstraction is a process of conceptual formation by identifying essential process and relationships, while filtering out--ignoring--the non-essential processes and relationships. Marx did this all the time in his works, and at no point in any of his works did he stipulate that private firm owners are essential components of capitalism.

Having struggled through the Phenomenology probably before you were born, I nearly fell off my chair laughing when I read that. But hey, think what you like.

You abstract out of "capitalism" the very existence of a capitalist class, thereby turning your abstraction into what Hegel liked to call an "empty" or "dead" abstraction. For you, capitalism is an ideological construction, not a material reality, which is why your abstraction is Hegelian, though that is to tell the truth a bit unfair to Hegel.


Marx was not inclined to give nutshell definitions, but what few we have mentions nothing about these empirically superfluities (e.g., CEOs, stock markets) you proudly point to as evidence that the capitalist mode of production doesn't prevail in Cuba. Marx defines capital as "self-expanding value" and a system of "production for the sake of production." And when we take these definitions, and interrogate them to tease out what phenomena and processes are necessary for value to exist, and for it to constantly expand, we can safely conclude that "factory owners" is not on the list. What is on the list are things such as wage labor, commodities (good which are the embodiment of abstract labor), a market for exchanging commodities (including labor power) using money, the exclusionary control over the means of production by a small section of society that uses such control to predominate politically through the appropriation of surplus value that it then reinvests into the means of production for the purpose competing with other capitals, not just militarily but economically as well.

Capitalism is "production for the sake of production"? That's almost funny. I believe Marx actually did say something like that on one occasion somewhere buried in the thousand pages of vol. 1 of Das Kapital, not to define capitalism, but to mention one of its features in certain circumstances.

No, under capitalism you have production for the sake of ... profit. As everybody knows.

And there you are again with your capitalists investing for the purpose of "competing with other capitalists," to keep up with the Joneses. In fact, all considered they prefer monopoly to competition, as, again, everybody knows but you it seems.

Funnier yet is you have them competing "not just militarily." Nobody in any social system ever has ever "competed" militarily. One does not "compete" militarily, one conquers, subjects, subjugates, things like that.




Correct. Somebody must be performing the functions of capital, and those people are the bureaucrats. That's why we call them state capitalists.

Then why don't they?



But wait -- isn't state control ("public" control) one of the markers of socialism? Why else do you keep pointing to the state property form as some sort of progressive economic sign? Now you're evidently saying that state-property has nothing to do with socialism, and that places where it exists in regards to certain industries therefore have nothing to do with socialism. Which is it? Is the property form inherently socialist or is it compatible with capitalism? Make up your mind.

I am compelled to repeat the elementary point that you seem utterly unable to grasp, namely that a socialist society has no state, just as it has no classes! You claim to have studied Marx intensively, but somehow can't seem to grasp such an elementary point.

So, obviously, "state control," far from being a marker of socialism, is proof that a society must have a state and therefore is not socialist.

And then you place a parenthetic equals sign between "state" and "public." That is simply illiterate.

In any case, state property is not really a "property form" at all. The state is simply an apparatus for the ruling class of a society to control that society. So so-called "state property" is simply a masked form of whatever form of property the ruling class of a society uses. It indicates that said ruling class owns what is "owned by the state" collectively rather than as individuals.



Please try to pay attention, MH. I am not talking about the privately owned firms in France and the U.S. I am talking about the publicly owned industries--those that function under the state-property form. How are those not socialist?

See above. If you truly think the US Post Office is "socialist," what are you smoking? I want some!



How does the existence of those public industries not make these countries part socialist (or "in transition" as you like to say)?

And with the publicly owned industries in the US and France, production is also administered by bureaucrats, and they are not operated for the purpose of making a profit or generating surplus. In fact, many of them operate at a loss (the US Postal Service comes to mind). To repeat: doesn't that make the American economy one in transition between capitalism and socialism?

Well, Lenin (following Hegel as it happens) liked to say that "truth is concrete." And I know a fair amount about the post office, as it happens, had an old friend who was a postal union activist for many years.

The US Postal Service tries very hard to operate at a profit, and treats its workers with extreme harshness, which is why they have developed the habit of "going postal" from time to time, since they can't strike. It fails however.

But it plays a vital role for the US capitalist class, in helping *capitalists* to make a profit. Its losses are born by working class taxpayers. So it acts indirectly by way of the income tax system to transfer surplus value from workers to capitalists.

Now, with the Internet, the post office is increasingly less necessary for capitalist profit, and more and more is turning into just a social service for the general population. So the US ruling class is in the middle of trying to rip it up, and all over America the postal unions are right now trying to mobilize popular support to keep it going, holding demonstrations, etc.




Huh? Workers' don't care about what level of control they have over their workplace environment? They don't care about when they take their breaks, what their work schedule is, who assigns tasks in their workplace? The longer I converse with you, MH, the more I am convinced I am communicating with a teenager who has not really read Marx and has certainly never had a job.

Funnier and funnier. Well, being as I have over twenty years experience as a union activist, and have often served as a shop steward, let me explain to you how things work.

Does your average worker care about when he takes his breaks, etc.? Of course he does. He does *not* care however about who makes the decisions about it. If he gets nice long breaks exactly when he wants them, if he gets the assignment he likes and the work schedule he likes, he does not care in the least whether that is arrived at through a democratic system.

If he can get the breaks or the assignment or the vacation days or the shift that he wants through favoritism from the foreman, or for that matter the shop steward, handing that to him on a silver platter, he in general prefers that to some democratic fair process in which he might lose out to somebody else.

Now, do all workers have such a narrow level of consciousness? Of course not. The more conscious workers do indeed care about fairness, democracy and union solidarity. That is elementary union consciousness, not even the full class consciousness that steps outside the boundaries of trade unionism, embodied in a party of the vanguard of the working class.

In a highly union-conscious shop, like most of the shops I spent my career as a union activist in, there is continual tension between the more advanced, more union-conscious workers who dominate the shop culture, and those who are not, who also usually (but not always!) are the ones more prone to racism, male chauvinism, etc. In a low-consciousness or nonunion shop, the relationship of forces tends to be different.

But enough. I have to throw your little provocation back at you, as I don't think anything I just said is much news to anybody with much experience in working for a living in a blue collar job. Which obviously you are not.



We've already been over this. Many European social democracies can boast these great signs of socialism you keep mentioning (perhaps with the exception of unemployment, but even that was sharply reduced and palliated with a strong social safety-net). Does that make them socialist workers' paradises?

Any evidence for this claim?

Here I will take unfair advantage of a kink in our interface, and note that you have answered yourself.

That "strong social safety net" was for the labor aristocracy, the citizens. Paid for, as Lenin explained so long ago, out of imperial superprofits extracted in the neocolonies, the Third World. And the "guest workers," the foreign workers from the Third World right in the heart of "the belly of the beast," got little or none of that.

And now that the Soviet Union no longer exists, it has been dragging all of that "safety net" for the upper layers of the European working class into its grave. Since capitalists no longer find it necessary to throw these sops to the labor aristocracy to prevent them getting an unhealthy interest in the Soviet system. They started being ripped up in the '90s in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, and the process has been accelerating ever since.



I think you're coming close to setting a record for logical fallacies in a single thread. Here you are creating a false dichotomy: "capitalists either extract surplus because they have to compete or they extract it for their own benefit." Did it ever occur to you that capitalism is a system of competition that forces people to identify "their own benefit" with maximizing profit? If you remove competition from the equation, you don't have capitalism. You would have capitalists "benefitting" by appropriating some surplus, but having absolutely no compulsion to maximize profit, to reinvest in the means of production and innovate them. The extract of surplus value by a ruling class for its own benefit is universally common to all class societies, including state capitalist ones.

And here you are arguing against yourself!

Yes, it's absolutely true that when capitalism goes monopoly, it stagnates. Lenin explains that very nicely in his pamphlet on the subject.

But if capitalism is "a system of competition," then -- Cuba is not capitalist!

I mean who are the Cubans competing with? North Korea? Certainly not that large neighbor of theirs, the USA. Not militarily, or in any other way!

Case closed.



Huh? Bureaucrats in the USSR didn't skim off the surplus (keep it, bank it) to support a standard of living disproportionately higher than the workers they controlled? I don't even know what to say about this it is so incomprehensibly out of touch with reality.

I begin to get impatient with you, you are taking refuge in games with parentheses.

The answer to your question, if your sneaky parentheses are ignored, is that yes, of course they did, as I have already said several times. I am finding it hard to believe that you are not being deliberately dishonest here.

But when they skim off the surplus, no, they don't get to keep it or bank it, and their kids can't inherit it. All they can do is spend it before they get caught with their hands in the till and they get fired for corruption.



You're so cornered here you are not even making sense. You asked for me quotes from Marx and Engels where they described socialism as consisting of a specific set of political relationships -- that is, relationships of power (or lack thereof) derived from control over productive resources -- and I then proceed to show you multiple quotes by both men that state unequivocally that in a socialist society everybody would collectively control the means of production, thus entailing a set of egalitarian political relationships where nobody is able to exercise power over others in political decision-making because by virtue of their control over productive property.

And all you can say in response is the equivalent of "Nuh uh!"

And I repeat your terse but not inaccurate summary of my response, "Nuh uh." Not only did you show nothing of the kind, but you did not even try to answer my refutation of your stupidity.

Yes of course, in a socialist society everybody would collectively control the means of production. That is perfectly irrelevant to the issue at hand, and is a desperate attempt by you to dodge the question.[/QUOTE]

I advise you to read Marx and Engels for yourself, instead of inferring what they have said based on what some Spart has told you via email or in some news article. Or at the very least, pick up Lenin's State and Revolution, where Lenin persuasively argues that there will be a state in socialism: "The state withers away insofar as there are no longer any capitalists, any classes, and, consequently, no class can be suppressed. But the state has not yet completely withered away, since there still remains the safeguarding of "bourgeois law", which sanctifies actual inequality. For the state to wither away completely, complete communism is necessary."[/QUOTE]

I am quite certain you have dragged that quote (which I do remember come to think of it) out of context, giving it a significance quite different from that which Lenin intended. But OK, I will look it up and get back to you on that.




You: "Oops."

M&E are talking about a *classless* society, and according to you Cuba is a classless society, or at least one without an exploiting class. Gee. I wonder what's wrong with this picture?

Quite a remarkable *at least.* That's like saying "a dead man, or at least one missing his right arm."



Yeah, I am going to spend more time digging up and pasting quotes that you'll find some non-sensical reason to dismiss. If you understood even the basics of Marxism, you'd understand that it identifies social power, including the state and its laws, as derivative from the social relations of production. And how people relate to each other in the process of production depends on who controls the resources. This control is often encoded into the law, but not always. Why is that so difficult for you to understand?

This is getting repetitive. It depends not on who controls, administers, the resources, but who owns them, on whose behalf they are being administered.

And whether the ownership is legal or simply factual makes no difference whatsoever. If you get mugged, and somebody takes all your money, you no longer own it, regardless of what the law says. Unless the cops can get it back for you.



Anyways, this semantic confusion of yours is irrelevant. We both agree that in Cuba and the Stalinist USSR, the state had legal title ("owned") the productive property. It exercised exclusive rights regarding the disposition of that property. We also both agree that (I hope, at least in terms of the Stalinist USSR) that the people had virtually no control over the state or the bureaucrats running it. So my question is, why do you think that the people who controlled the state did not function as a class? They controlled the state, and the state "owned" the property. Is this not a group of people exercising ownership rights through the institution of the state? How are they not a class? (If you repeat some idiotic shit about inheritance again, I am going to put you on ignore.)

Well, maybe they "owned" the property, in quotes, but in reality, no, they didn't own it. Something you own you can do whatever you want with, just like a capitalist can with his property, and as long as he doesn't violate the rights of others, his rights over his property are absolute. That is in fact the foundation of the entire American legal system.

I am tempted to answer your challenge, raise the inheritance issue, and put an end to this exchange, but there really isn't any need, and if I want to end it, all I need to do is stop answering you.

Just who, may I ask, are these people who controlled the state? What class in society were they? The answer is that they were an arbitrary and infinitely changeable group of people, who, as a collectivity, had no mechanisms whereby to control the state. They were, in short, a bureacracy, whose membership in the social elite lasted for as long as they held their positions, at the whim of those higher up on the bureaucratic ladder than they were.

In social terms, they were a petty-bourgeois extrusion of the Soviet working class, rather like labor bureaucrats in the US, who, when they lose an election or an appointment from a higher up, sink right back into the rank and file or leave the industry altogether for a different line of work.

A true ruling class, like say the American, is something very different. That its members can pass their property down to their children is merely one of your simpler and more obvious markers of this, far from the only one.

Capitalist ruling classes are cohesive social entities which are extremely self-conscious and clearly understand just how differentiated they are from other members of the society. The Soviet nomenklatura, to say nothing of its contemporary Cuban equivalent, was simply nothing of the sort.

It was simply a list of thousands (and later tens of thousands) of names compiled by a subcommittee of the Central Committee of the CPSU(b), originally headed by Yezhov, then Malenkov, then others. People whom the people at the top liked, as opposed to those they disliked. A mammoth social clique.

And, by the way, if you really want to pay attention to the "legal title," and read Soviet lawbooks, you would discover that no, the people not the state were the legal owners of land and industry.

Soviet law on such matters usually stretched right back to 1917 and 1918, and was never changed under Stalin. Whatever for, from his viewpoint?



Another unbelievably sloppy argument. You begin by making an argument about the translation of the Russian word for "control" but then apparently think that this invalidates the quotes I presented, which were originally written in German. You really are one confused individual.

And, if you had read the posting a bit more carefully, you would have noted that German, like French and Russian and originally like English, follows the original meaning of "control," not the drift in usage the syndicalists are responsible for.



By the way, I have read Neil Harding (this argument about Lenin's meaning of workers' control is found in his Lenin's Political Thought), and you're misrepresenting his argument.

Well, since I haven't read Neil Harding, in fact I've never heard of Neil Harding, I can hardly be accused of misrepresenting his argument.

I assume he got the argument from the same sources I did. It certainly was far from original to him. I obtained it from my studies of the history of the Russian Revolution--including some material by the Spartacists, probably written before this NH fellow got out of high school.

In particular, some articles by Joseph Seymour from the early 1970s come to mind, I think collected in one of his pamphlets.




He's looking at the meaning Lenin attributed to "workers' control" in specific works of his, written to express his views on what would happen in the transition to socialism, not in socialism. This is why, as Harding writes, one of his pre-October definitions of "workers' control" did not even entail the expropriation of the capitalists. Do you honestly think that Lenin was envision socialist or communist society when he wrote that? You're seriously grasping for straws.

The idea that you are getting at when you mention Bakuninists and the like is that "workers' control" in a socialist society is not about an individual worker getting to do what he wants, and it's not about eliminating all authority on the floor of the shop. It's about ensuring that the authority workers confront on the shop floor is not alien, that it is determined democratically by people who are committed to social production and who exercise their control through political processes that might not necessarily occur at the level of the shop. All of the various ways Lenin and Trotsky modulated the way they used the words before and after October can only be understood in the context of that ultimate goal. But let's be clear: that was the goal, and there was no question that socialism entailed workers' collective control, just as Marx indicated.

Socialism would entail quite a lot of things. One of them would be collective administration of the means of production by society--but not by "the working class," not "workers control," as classes would be abolished under socialism.

What is the real definition of socialism, according to Marx and Engels?

It is when we leave the kingdom of necessity and enter the kingdom of freedom. When who controls the means of production is *no longer important,* as there is plenty for all.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

Remember that one?

-M.H.-

[Olentzero]

In 2004 your position of support for Nader was no longer a closet embarrassmentIt never was, and therefore your analysis, resting on this unfounded assertion, falls completely apart. You can holler about denial all you like, but you haven't got a shred of credible evidence for it.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Just exactly were the Bolsheviks doing at that time to actually spread international workers' revolution? Talk is cheap, and I always thought of the Bolsheviks as practical revolutionaries. They had plenty of links to German revolutionaries and sympathetic leftists all over the world at that time, so what happened? If you want to learn about the Bolshevik's internationalism, I recommend you read the transcripts from the second congress of the Communist International -- it will be a real eye opener. Also, Cannon's, The First Ten Years of American Communism is not bad, although certainly the CI is not the focus of the book. If you consider that the USSR, in the midst of civil war and famine, was devoting significant resources to building an international movement, that should tell you something.

Yes they had connections to Germany, but they lacked the capacity to intervene militarily in the defeated 1919 revolution. And they poured resources into Germany in the early 20s. The KPD lacked a strong leadership (L&L having been murdered by the SPD) and was getting conflicting and often misguided leadership from Moscow (where the fight between the incipient left opposition and the Triumvirate of Stalin-Kameneand Zinoviev was already causing major problems in the CI and in the CCPs approach to the German revolution).

It is hard to imagine that a government that was not committed to international revolution would have behaved the way the Bolsheviks did.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

MH and Lucretia is it correct to distill the differences down to this: L says that you cannot have proletarian property forms or social relations without worker's democracy and therefore, the Stalinist Bureaucracies represent a new, state capitalist ruling class. MH says that them's that OWNS the means of production are the ruling class and in countries such as Cuba, Vietnam, China and the USSR, they were collectively owned by the proletariat. No new classes were developed and no new form of capitalism was born.

Am I missing something else? I don't think there is anyway to bridge this gap. I agree with MH, here -- but there doesn't seem to be too much to add to this discussion. Oh, and either way, the ISO is still reformist:).

[workersadvocate]

Well what was Lenin talking about when he praised "state capitalism", suggested it was a necessary stage of development for Russia because of its backwardness, encouraged copying German forms of "state capitalism" during that time, and then said the only difference is that it would be done under "Soviet power" (that sounds okay until you realize he ain't talking about actual workers' control but rather is refering to a state-party managerial bureaucracy running everything "for the workers")?
Was there ever really a dictatorship of the proletariat? If do, it must have been very short lived.

[Lucretia]

You abstract out of "capitalism" the very existence of a capitalist class, thereby turning your abstraction into what Hegel liked to call an "empty" or "dead" abstraction. For you, capitalism is an ideological construction, not a material reality, which is why your abstraction is Hegelian, though that is to tell the truth a bit unfair to Hegel.

Capitalism is "production for the sake of production"? That's almost funny. I believe Marx actually did say something like that on one occasion somewhere buried in the thousand pages of vol. 1 of Das Kapital, not to define capitalism, but to mention one of its features in certain circumstances.

You're very good at making claims, but abysmal at backing them up. You claim that my abstraction is dead, but then provide no explanation of how. You clam that Marx's definition of capitalism as "production for the sake of production" was intended by him only to define capitalism in specific contexts, but then fail to back up this statement with any proof. Which contexts supposedly limited the usefulness of this definition?

In light of your track record, I won't be holding my breath for evidence, but I just wanted to let other, more reasonable posters like Lev understand that what exactly is taking place in this discussion.


No, under capitalism you have production for the sake of ... profit. As everybody knows.What you don't seem to understand is that capitalism isn't about individual greedy capitalists wanting to turn a profit. It's about a system of competition in which capitalists are forced, whether they are "greedy" or not, to maximize their profits in order to re-invest that profit into the means of production in order to produce more cheaply and turn even more of a profit. The reason this is important is that, if you fall behind, you will go out of business. You seem to think that the lifeblood of capitalism are the personal character flaws of people called capitalists. It's not -- it's a system of competition that imposes its logic of greed onto people insofar as they operate in the business world. You can have capitalists who are far from greedy, who donate most of their personal income to charity, but insofar as they are leaders of their company, their job is to maximize profit in order to keep the company alive, and their jobs in tact.

I've explained this to you at least once before, and yet you just don't seem capable of comprehending it. This is the point Marx was saying about capital only being able to exist as multiple capitals. Without competition (NOT GREED), there is no capitalism. But wait -- let me guess, I am taking his assertion out of context (but you won't show me how).


And there you are again with your capitalists investing for the purpose of "competing with other capitalists," to keep up with the Joneses. In fact, all considered they prefer monopoly to competition, as, again, everybody knows but you it seems.What capitalists "prefer" is irrelevant to what capitalism is. And in any case, if you read Hilferding or any other text about monopoly capitalism, you'd see that the "monopolies" in question only continue to behave capitalistically to the extent that they are in competition with other "monopolies" internationally -- e.g., through imperialism, which represents competition between monopolies elevated to the level of the nation state.

There is simply no such thing as capitalism operating as a single capital. If all of the world's means of production were suddenly integrated under the control of a single company, you would still have surplus extraction, but it would no longer be capitalism. It would be some kind of bureaucratic collectivism carried out by greedy people whose only goal is to make sure they keep the workers down, and who are not pressured to maximize profit.


Funnier yet is you have them competing "not just militarily." Nobody in any social system ever has ever "competed" militarily. One does not "compete" militarily, one conquers, subjects, subjugates, things like that.More proof you haven't read Lenin. You just keep showing your ignorance more and more with every post.


I am compelled to repeat the elementary point that you seem utterly unable to grasp, namely that a socialist society has no state, just as it has no classes! You claim to have studied Marx intensively, but somehow can't seem to grasp such an elementary point.Engels (and Lenin following Engels) talked of the state withering away under communism because it would still exist to carry out bourgeois distributive functions under socialism, yet here you are declaring in the most doctrinaire way that socialist society has no state. I guess you're right, and Engels and Lenin are wrong. :rolleyes:


So, obviously, "state control," far from being a marker of socialism, is proof that a society must have a state and therefore is not socialist.

And then you place a parenthetic equals sign between "state" and "public." That is simply illiterate.Well, obviously I'm not the one who needs to be lectured that state control should not be confused with socialism. This is the pot calling the kettle black.


In any case, state property is not really a "property form" at all. The state is simply an apparatus for the ruling class of a society to control that society. So so-called "state property" is simply a masked form of whatever form of property the ruling class of a society uses. It indicates that said ruling class owns what is "owned by the state" collectively rather than as individuals.Right, except in the case of the USSR and Cuba, where the states exists but there is no ruling class, only parasitic bureaucrats leeching off a state that presides over classes, none of which has any control over the state.


See above. If you truly think the US Post Office is "socialist," what are you smoking? I want some!You really need to pay closer attention to what people say, MH. Because you're constant misreading makes it appear that you're careless. I didn't say that I think the USPS is socialist. I said that if we define socialism as state control, then we have to define the USPS as socialist. But I'm not the person defining socialism as state control, so it's obvious that I similarly would not define the USPS as socialist.


Well, Lenin (following Hegel as it happens) liked to say that "truth is concrete." And I know a fair amount about the post office, as it happens, had an old friend who was a postal union activist for many years.

The US Postal Service tries very hard to operate at a profit, and treats its workers with extreme harshness, which is why they have developed the habit of "going postal" from time to time, since they can't strike. It fails however.

But it plays a vital role for the US capitalist class, in helping *capitalists* to make a profit. Its losses are born by working class taxpayers. So it acts indirectly by way of the income tax system to transfer surplus value from workers to capitalists.Please explain to me who the greedy capitalists are that profit off the USPS. Who are these private owners of the USPS? The state owns it and controls it. Whatever surpluses it generates goes to the state, which according to you can not possibly operate as a capitalist because it doesn't have "private property" (this is why state capitalism cannot exist, according to you).


Funnier and funnier. Well, being as I have over twenty years experience as a union activist, and have often served as a shop steward, let me explain to you how things work.

Does your average worker care about when he takes his breaks, etc.? Of course he does. He does *not* care however about who makes the decisions about it. If he gets nice long breaks exactly when he wants them, if he gets the assignment he likes and the work schedule he likes, he does not care in the least whether that is arrived at through a democratic system.What's funny is this strange vision you have of the interests of bosses and workers perfectly aligning. The reason workers' control is important is that who makes the decisions is indissolubly bound up with what decisions are made. Decision making, in other words, is bound up with interests, and people on opposite sides of the class struggle do not share the same interests. Perhaps decades of being in union leadership, conciliating between workers and their paymasters, has helped you to forget this.

But let me remind you: Members of the ruling class do not have the same interests as the workers at heart. Their interests lie in maximizing profit and screwing the worker, so when they make decisions, they tend to make decisions that workers (whose interests lie in resisting this exploitation and control) would not make and not want to abide by. That's the whole point of class struggle, MH. If bosses and workers shared the same interests, and bosses could be trusted to do the right thing by workers, and pass down decisions that workers would fully endorse, there'd be no point in class struggle. Everybody would be happy.


If he can get the breaks or the assignment or the vacation days or the shift that he wants through favoritism from the foreman, or for that matter the shop steward, handing that to him on a silver platter, he in general prefers that to some democratic fair process in which he might lose out to somebody else.

Now, do all workers have such a narrow level of consciousness? Of course not. The more conscious workers do indeed care about fairness, democracy and union solidarity. That is elementary union consciousness, not even the full class consciousness that steps outside the boundaries of trade unionism, embodied in a party of the vanguard of the working class.

In a highly union-conscious shop, like most of the shops I spent my career as a union activist in, there is continual tension between the more advanced, more union-conscious workers who dominate the shop culture, and those who are not, who also usually (but not always!) are the ones more prone to racism, male chauvinism, etc. In a low-consciousness or nonunion shop, the relationship of forces tends to be different.This long and rather rambling excursus does not contradict anything I've already said, which is fully in line with what Marx and Engels said. In a socialist society decisions relating to production and distribution would be under the control of all the workers (this is workers' control). Obviously in the period of the revolutionary dict. of the proletariat and perhaps a very early stage of socialism, you wouldn't just concede all workplace authority for all workers to administer directly, because you would end up with decisions not being undertaken for social production. Instead, in these early stages, some degree of substitution is inevitable. So long as this substitution is taking place by virtue of winning the confidence and trust of the majority of workers (this is workers' control being exercised indirectly through representative trustees), what you have is still a workers' state transitioning to socialism. If bureaucrats begin to make decisions about production against the wishes of the majority of workers, and therefore are able to make those decisions only on the basis of controlling those resources (with no mandate whatsoever from the workers), what you have is a class society.

But the point still stands, just because you wouldn't immediately implement full direct workers' control over the whole economy the day after the revolution, does not mean that it's not the end point of communism.


And here you are arguing against yourself!

Yes, it's absolutely true that when capitalism goes monopoly, it stagnates. Lenin explains that very nicely in his pamphlet on the subject.

But if capitalism is "a system of competition," then -- Cuba is not capitalist!

I mean who are the Cubans competing with? North Korea? Certainly not that large neighbor of theirs, the USA. Not militarily, or in any other way!

Case closed.I've already explained this in an extended answer to Lev. Because Cuba depends upon trading on the world market for some of its necessities, it has to ensure that it can produce the commodities it wishes to exchange at a level of efficiency comparable to other potential trading partners. Otherwise, what you have is a sapping of the economy through a massive trade deficit. Competition is imposed on Cuba's industries because of its participation on the world market. You seem to view Cuba as some sort of self-contained economy with no links to the outside world. So, no, case not closed.


But when they skim off the surplus, no, they don't get to keep it or bank it, and their kids can't inherit it. All they can do is spend it before they get caught with their hands in the till and they get fired for corruption.Wait--you mean to tell me that there were no banks in the Soviet Union where people could save their rubles for a rainy day? And why would bureaucrats get fired for saving part of their income? Because it's the extravagant incomes that are the skimming, MH. You seem to think that high-level bureaucrats were getting justly compensated and that skimming from the surplus therefore by definition had to take the form of illegality. We are clearly operating with very different understandings of what was happening.


I am quite certain you have dragged that quote (which I do remember come to think of it) out of context, giving it a significance quite different from that which Lenin intended. But OK, I will look it up and get back to you on that.That's what you say everytime you ask for a quote, certain that Marx or Lenin did not say something, and I provide it. This is why I have given up on providing quotes to you. You ask for a quote where Marx says X. I provide a quote where Marx says X. Then you respond with "Oh, well, that's taken out of context!" But of course you never explain what the context for the quote was, or how that context undermines the meaning I am assigning to it.


This is getting repetitive. It depends not on who controls, administers, the resources, but who owns them, on whose behalf they are being administered.

And whether the ownership is legal or simply factual makes no difference whatsoever. If you get mugged, and somebody takes all your money, you no longer own it, regardless of what the law says. Unless the cops can get it back for you.I think you should re-read that second paragraph of yours. It doesn't matter who under the law "owns" property. What matters is effective control or possession. How property is used (to whose benefit, as you keep saying) is indissolubly bound up with who controls the decision-making regarding how that property is used. You seem to think that a small cadre of people--the bureaucrats, who enjoyed in Stalinist societies a standard of living far outstripping anything the average worker enjoyed--made decisions in the interests of the workers because of the fact that the means of production were administered by the state. It just doesn't don on you to connect the dots here: the fact that the bureaucrats were benefiting tremendously from their jobs is -- duh -- the result of their jobs giving them effective control to administer and make decisions regarding how the means of production, and the products genereated therefrom, where to be used. You seem to think that it was a happy coincidence that the bureaucrats are a privileged elite, and that they control productive resources. No, MH, who controls the resources (whether it's the majority or whether it is a minority clinging to privilege) strongly conditions how those resources are used.


Well, maybe they "owned" the property, in quotes, but in reality, no, they didn't own it. Something you own you can do whatever you want with, just like a capitalist can with his property, and as long as he doesn't violate the rights of others, his rights over his property are absolute. That is in fact the foundation of the entire American legal system.It's funny how you attack me for my Hegelianism, then come out and claim that private property means that its possessor can do whatever the owner wants with it. This has never existed in any society. Private property is a legal construction and exists within a framework of laws that always, in some ways, limits what an owner can and can't do with it. Have you heard of zoning laws? Eminent domain? Bank transaction laws? Inheritance laws? No historical form of property ownership has ever entitled its possessor to total and absolute discretion. So why should it in the case of state bureaucrats? What you've done here is constructed a definition of private property as a bizarre ideal that has never existed in any system of law, then used that definition to try to obscure the ways that the relationship between Stalinist bureaucrats to the means of production is basically one of possessing property.

You are confused about why property law is even relevant to talking about relations of production. Property over the relations of production is relevant because it permits, within certain boundaries, owners of productive property to control how that property is used. So if you have a group, like the bureaucrats, that enjoys the same latitude as private firm owners in deciding how production is to take place and its proceeds distributed, whether or not each individual bureaucrat has a private deed to a certain sector of the means of production is irrelevant for the purposes of analyzing the relations of production. What you have is the exact same kind of effective control over how production takes place. For the purposes of class analysis there is no significant difference. Bureaucrats hiring factory workers to produce more than what they get compensated for results in the same kind of class relationship as an individual proprietor hiring a worker to produce more than he is compensated for. In both cases it is exploitation occurring under the auspices of a party whose control over the means of production allows the party to preside over surplus extraction.

To simplify this for you: the state owns the productive property, has exclusive title to it as an institution in perpetuity, and the bureaucrats run the state. The bureaucrats are exercising ownership powers. Is this too complicated for you to understand?


Just who, may I ask, are these people who controlled the state? What class in society were they? The answer is that they were an arbitrary and infinitely changeable group of people, who, as a collectivity, had no mechanisms whereby to control the state. They were, in short, a bureacracy, whose membership in the social elite lasted for as long as they held their positions, at the whim of those higher up on the bureaucratic ladder than they were.Capitalists are also an infinitely changeable group. One day an athlete gets a contract for ten million dollars and decides to buy a large chunk of stock, the next day a capitalist goes to jail for murder and has all his property taken from him. You're confusing the concrete with the abstract here. What's relevant is not the identity of the individual capitalist or the individual bureaucrat, it's the economic role of the capitalist in abstraction and the bureaucrat in abstraction, and what situational logics are imposed on a person when they become a capitalist or a bureaucrat.


In social terms, they were a petty-bourgeois extrusion of the Soviet working class, rather like labor bureaucrats in the US, who, when they lose an election or an appointment from a higher up, sink right back into the rank and file or leave the industry altogether for a different line of work.You keep saying that the bureaucracy was an extrusion, but the bureaucracy was at the heart of production decisions in the USSR. If the bureaucracy, as a group, "sank into the rank and file" of producers, and gave up its unique (class) location, you would have had a very different society with a very different way of making production decisions and a very different set of decisions being taken.


A true ruling class, like say the American, is something very different. That its members can pass their property down to their children is merely one of your simpler and more obvious markers of this, far from the only one.You keep saying that the passing down of inheritance in the means of production is an essential characteristic of a ruling class, yet you have not provided any evidence for this, either logical or textual (from Marx).


Capitalist ruling classes are cohesive social entities which are extremely self-conscious and clearly understand just how differentiated they are from other members of the society. The Soviet nomenklatura, to say nothing of its contemporary Cuban equivalent, was simply nothing of the sort.Oh, right. So capitalists are fully class conscious and never compete with one another, do not form different factions or blocs? They never infight? This is just another one of your idealist constructions found nowhere throughout history. It's quite odd to see this coming from somebody who fancies himself a historian.


What is the real definition of socialism, according to Marx and Engels?

It is when we leave the kingdom of necessity and enter the kingdom of freedom. When who controls the means of production is *no longer important,* as there is plenty for all.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

Remember that one?:rolleyes: You asked me to provide quotes where Marx and Engels defined communism as workers' control, and I did so. Now you provide another quote, which doesn't contradict the quotes I provided, and are claiming these are the real quotes, and must somehow therefore invalidate the ones I provided. It's just one logical fallacy after another: I provided a quote where Marx said socialism is X, and you provided one where he said it was Y. X and Y do not contradict each other. Socialism, according to Marx is X and Y, yet you want to present it as X or Y.

You can't be serious, MH. You can't be this dishonest or this stupid.

[Lucretia]

Well what was Lenin talking about when he praised "state capitalism", suggested it was a necessary stage of development for Russia because of its backwardness, encouraged copying German forms of "state capitalism" during that time, and then said the only difference is that it would be done under "Soviet power" (that sounds okay until you realize he ain't talking about actual workers' control but rather is refering to a state-party managerial bureaucracy running everything "for the workers")?
Was there ever really a dictatorship of the proletariat? If do, it must have been very short lived.

Do you mean what Lenin wrote in this work? (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/11.htm)

I see nothing really objectionable in it. The gist of it is that the collectivized property form that will exist in socialism develops within monopoly capitalism, and that the process of establishing socialism and overthrowing class society (and here is where MH could probably learn something) is of transforming the content of that property form by bringing it under the control of "a revolutionary-democratic state, i.e., a state which in a revolutionary way abolishes all privileges and does not fear to introduce the fullest democracy in a revolutionary way."

Anarchists love to point out quotes such as: "For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly. There is no middle course here. The objective process of development is such that it is impossible to advance from monopolies (and the war has magnified their number, role and importance tenfold) without advancing towards socialism."

And they use these quotes to try to attribute to Lenin the position that socialism is at its essence about a collectivized means of production used to serve the interests of people, without any regard to the people doing the using, the planning, etc. In other words, socialism is a matter of distribution, not of workers' control. (The quotes above are followed by the statement "Either we have to be revolutionary democrats in fact, in which case we must not fear to take steps towards socialism." -- Again the process of democratization of decision-making and movement toward socialism are viewed as inextricable.)

This of course is belied by Lenin's continual stress on the content of the state that controls the means of production. It must necessarily be democratic. So those quotes need to be read in context.

[Lucretia]

MH and Lucretia is it correct to distill the differences down to this: L says that you cannot have proletarian property forms or social relations without worker's democracy and therefore, the Stalinist Bureaucracies represent a new, state capitalist ruling class. MH says that them's that OWNS the means of production are the ruling class and in countries such as Cuba, Vietnam, China and the USSR, they were collectively owned by the proletariat. No new classes were developed and no new form of capitalism was born.

Am I missing something else? I don't think there is anyway to bridge this gap. I agree with MH, here -- but there doesn't seem to be too much to add to this discussion. Oh, and either way, the ISO is still reformist:).

I would say that's pretty accurate. MH's primary theoretical error is that he seems to think that class, the role people play in the relations of production, must be underpinned by individual property rights of members of that class. How a class relates to the means of production is reduced to a distributional question, a question of whether or the degree to which its individual members can appropriate part of the surplus (E.g., class is defined by individualized ownership of productive property rather than relations of production, relations which could encompass a variety of property forms.) I have never seen any evidence or logical arguments adduced to demonstrate that this is the case. This theoretical error is rooted in the way he views capitalism, as a system driven by the greed of individual capitalists rather than a system that imposes upon firm owners and managers the need to maximize capital accumulation for the sake of producing more efficient methods of capital accumulation (production for the sake of production, as Marx called it). So in his view if you don't have greedy private proprietors, you don't have capitalism. In other words, he fails to see capitalism as a system of competition that imposes on its participants the drive to maximize accumulation, and instead views it as an ad hoc product of a collection of individual greedy desires. MH has entirely lost sight of the fact that both capitalists and workers are alienated under capitalism. Nobody controls the system of production. It guides and imposes its logic on both classes. This is similarly true for state capitalists, except their drive to develop the means of production through exploitation and re-investment is driven by international competition.

[workersadvocate]

Do you mean what Lenin wrote in this work? (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/11.htm)

I see nothing really objectionable in it. The gist of it is that the collectivized property form that will exist in socialism develops within monopoly capitalism, and that the process of establishing socialism and overthrowing class society (and here is where MH could probably learn something) is of transforming the content of that property form by bringing it under the control of "a revolutionary-democratic state, i.e., a state which in a revolutionary way abolishes all privileges and does not fear to introduce the fullest democracy in a revolutionary way."

Anarchists love to point out quotes such as: "For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly. There is no middle course here. The objective process of development is such that it is impossible to advance from monopolies (and the war has magnified their number, role and importance tenfold) without advancing towards socialism."

And they use these quotes to try to attribute to Lenin the position that socialism is at its essence about a collectivized means of production used to serve the interests of people, without any regard to the people doing the using, the planning, etc. In other words, socialism is a matter of distribution, not of workers' control. (The quotes above are followed by the statement "Either we have to be revolutionary democrats in fact, in which case we must not fear to take steps towards socialism." -- Again the process of democratization of decision-making and movement toward socialism are viewed as inextricable.)

This of course is belied by Lenin's continual stress on the content of the state that controls the means of production. It must necessarily be democratic. So those quotes need to be read in context.
That's what he said. But where was this revolutionary democracy of the proletariat actually practiced by the proletariat? I guess what I'm asking is if Trotsky just played along with bureacratic usurption of proletarian power beginning soon after the revolution (except in name) until he found himself in the crosshairs of the more powerful majority faction of the ruling bureacracy in Russia?
Is this the sort of thing we can expect if any middle class left group manages to swept into the top levels of power by riding upon workers' revolution and then harnessing and dispossessing our workers' power from above, using of course excuses of state emergency, backwardness of the masses, need for "experts" and management,etc?
Seriously, would working people have more then a brief memory of the taste of power they had during the revolution but then was taken from their own "soviet power" from below and put in the hands of middle class left bureaucrat types and "experts" from the previous capitalist order.

You comrades are arguing because of the defensist or "neither washington nor moscow" implications of your positions.
If the working class itself doesn't actually govern society and control the economy, what makes any country of this sort more worthy of defense by the international proletariat than any other country? Lots of talk about defeding the gainas of October...wouldn't the ultimate defense if those gains have required a serious all out stugglby the working class to reseize power through its own independent revolutionary democratic organs ( like actual soviets and workplace committees) and its own independent workers' defense organizations? Most defensists leave that stuff out of their defense, and even ejen they do day it in words or in publication, where are they actually doing the practical work to actialize it? That last inquiring criticsm can be put to the "neither washington nor moscow" types as well. It seems during the cold war almost every significant middle class left group in the world objectively in practice played flunkey for one or another set of enemies of the international working class. Where was any of them actually practically attempting to seize or reseize workers power through serious independent workers' mass organization and revolution from below? Ah, we can lawyer about social revolution versus political revolution, but in actually the working class didn't exercise hegemonic exclusive collective ownership rights over the property of the state because it wasn't really their state under the democratic control of the working class at all! The ruling bureaucracy clearly saw state property as really solely their own, and logically reappropriated it to themselves as their own private holdings or took it upon themselves to sell state property to private interest for their own profit during the privatization. The former USSR working class was clearly regarded as powerless propertyless subjects in the privatization of the economy two decades ago. What remained for them to defend, if it wasn't actually practically theirs?

[RedTrackWorker]

More seriously and @JH, do you know what splits happened in the IS that led to the ISO & there being an IS current in Solidarity? Was there an earlier schism about the turn to industry v campus recruiting? I only know American IS folks via Solidarity & that crowd.

From a talk Shawki (ISOer) gave which the ISO for some reason republished last year:

When we parted way with some comrades some years ago in the 1970s--actually at the peak of the movement--there was a decision to make. One choice was to retreat from the project of building a directly working-class organization through emphasis on labor work, because the ground wasn't fertile, and instead build an organization that is committed to working-class power, but in the main looks toward youth and students.

That was one of the debates between ourselves and comrades in the International Socialists some years ago. I have to say that 30 years after the process, it is undoubtedly the case that comrades in the IS and Labor Notes have done extremely good work in the labor movement. But from the point of view of the project of Leninism--of building the seeds of a socialist organization committed to the transformation of society--we have made a contribution which has at least kept together that potential.

http://socialistworker.org/2011/12/02/what-kind-of-party-do-we-need

To me, the very idea that one can even conceive of a separation between focusing on building a workers' organization and working for workers' revolution is disturbing.

[RedTrackWorker]

To start at the beginning with O challenging for a basis for a claim that the ISO caters to liberal politicians the one-word answer is of course:
Nader. I'll respond to Higgins on that in a sec.

In 2004, they refused to protest Kerry as an imperialist at an appearance in New York and instead handed out questions like "“Why do you think the U.S. is occupying Iraq"? and had a banner that said: "Kerry Take A Stand: Troops Out Now." As our statement said, " As if Kerry hadn’t already taken a clear stand, both in favor of the war and for sending more troops to Iraq!" (http://www.lrp-cofi.org/statements/isofibs.html) If that's not part of their orientation to "radical" (ultimately reducing to bourgeois liberal) students rather than recruiting based on class consciousness, why did they do that?

The ISO's work in the unions tells a similar story, not of "liberal politicians" but conciliating with the labor bureaucracy.

Here in NYC, they have nothing but praise for my union leader and they just told building workers to vote for their leadership's contract offer. Contrast their article (http://socialistworker.org/2012/01/16/victory-for-32bj) versus ours on the contract (http://lrp-cofi.org/statements/32bj_bulletin4_011312.html).


Our view [on Nader] was simply that breaking the monopoly of the democrats on social movements would be a step forward in US workers being able to develop independent politics. A campaign that was explicitly a challenge to the Democrats would potentially be a positive step and would attract the seeds of an independent left in the US (people in social movements who were sick of the Democrats, people in the labor movement who were tired of their union's support of Democratic politicians who uphold Taft-hartly and promote neo-liberal policies). So the goal was not party-building (other than the hope that some good people who were convinced of our politics might join) but trying to help develop an independent left in the US.

What does an "independent left" have to do with workers' revolution? It's fine sometimes to use terms like left and right informally--but from a Marxist point of view, one should realize the obvious danger of the terms confusing the fundamental issue of class: there can be very "left" bourgeois forces. Just breaking the two-party monopoly in the U.S. is not a step forward for the working class--one only needs to look at European style elections to see that. (See also what someone else already referred to: the LaFollete campaign in the twenties and Trotsky's warning that through tailing such things a revolutionary organization can dissolve itself.)

I would say that vote for Nader also confused the whole issue of how to intervene in bourgeois elections and that I prefer the position of an ultra-left communist who denounces running in any such election to that of a practical socialist hemming and hawing like above. Revolutionary workers use bourgeois elections as a platform if workers are looking at them--as a platform to denounce elections and explain the need for workers' revolution. Critical support is an exception to the rule and it's based on certain situations relating to a political organization based on the working class, which the Green Party clearly wasn't.

The whole issue is how the working class and oppressed can come to understand their interests and win them. Voting for Nader obscured those issues. Pandering to my union president obscures those issues. Telling John Kerry to "take a stand" obscures those issues. Running the articles you've run on Occupy obscures and avoids those issues.

[RedTrackWorker]

I think the debate on what kind of organization the working class needs and how to build it between Higgens and Lucretia is important.

I think Lucretia has some very important points on this, such as:


The ISO is adopting wholesale as its program, rather than trying to innovate, whatever grassroots struggles liberal democrats happen to be pushing at the moment, and it publishes articles that put forward generic "left" analyses in its theoretical journal. (Take the article on the occupy movement in the latest issue of the ISR, which wasn't published by a member of the ISO, and from what I could tell wasn't published by a Leninist. It was filled with all sorts of banalities, and I cringe to think that ISO would try to use it as an educational tool for its members.) This is an excellent way of merging the ISO with the "broad left," involving ISO members in generically left groups with broadly progressive causes in a way that sort of resembles entryism. But I fail to see how it in any way is helping to create a revolutionary core. What it is successfully doing is taking people who are committed revolutionaries like you and miring them into writing and thinking and working in ways that won't offend (at least not too much) the progressive establishment, lest the "broad left" you're fighting for not be as large and united as it could be.
and


Members of the group might claim that this is not what they do, but if you browse any thread in which ISO members make remarks on the importance of reforms, that is the explanation you will be given -- it's about workers gaining confidence, but there's no real content to what the workers confidence should be directed to, certainly no talk of revolutionary consciousness.

An important document from the LRP attempts to address this question Propaganda and Agitation in Building the Revolutionary Party (http://lrp-cofi.org/PR/propagitPR56.html).

I also like this quote from Trotsky:

The shilly-shalliers, the confused, the centrists, the pacifists, can vegetate years on end, issue papers, hold conferences, yes, even register temporary organizational successes. Great historic turns, however--war, revolution--knock these parties over like a house of cards. On the other hand, organizations that have reached real revolutionary clarity and consciousness really develop their greatest strength in critical historical situations. Then the philistine is astonished, and the left philistine is exultant--without understanding, however, that the "miracle" of the successes was only possible through long and persevering preparatory work, and that Marxist intransigence was the best weapon in this preparatory work.
Splinters and chips fly in every big ideological struggle. .... You must examine things to the very bottom! .... Lose no time; study; reflect; discuss honestly; strive incessantly for revolutionary clarity!
Leon Trotsky, "To young communists and socialists who wish to think," Writings of Leon Trotsky [1935—1936] (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977), pg. 52.

Revolutionary clarity...that is precisely what I think is needed and what is missing in voting for Nader, supporting the 32BJ contract, calling Occupy a working class movement and to give another example:
At the ISO's major conference last year in Chicago, I challenged Shawki in his talk on Egypt (which seems to be the only major talk not put online http://wearemany.org/event/2011/07/socialism-2011) if an analysis based on permanent revolution would not point to the way forward for the struggle there to be workers' socialist revolution, and if so, why had the ISO not claimed such or analyzed such in any of its publications?
His answer was to talk about how when Marx coined the term he talked about being the extreme wing of "democracy."
And no one challenged that from the very, very large audience and he didn't clarify after having time to consider the point.

The question of how the Egyptian struggle can go forward is one of the most immediate and urgent questions facing the international working class. For a supposed Trotskyist to fob off a question about permanent revolution to Marx's formulation from the 1800's is..., well, you can fill in the blank.

Where's the revolutionary clarity in the ISO's writings on Egypt?

[workersadvocate]

From a talk Shawki (ISOer) gave which the ISO for some reason republished last year:

http://socialistworker.org/2011/12/02/what-kind-of-party-do-we-need

To me, the very idea that one can even conceive of a separation between focusing on building a workers' organization and working for workers' revolution is disturbing.
I'm not shocked by what Shawki said in the quoted, because it seems a lot of leftists interpret Leninism to mean a party separate from the working class operating for its own sake (or at least, that of its top leadership). Is that actually Leninism? I used to assume not, but now I'm not so sure, and perhaps some proletarian "Left Communist" criticism was generally correct while some of "Leninism" was also correct. If so, what are the right take-home lessons of the historical experience and what is the significance for working class internationalist revolutionary communists today?
The October 1917 revolution was right, but how soon after that was genuine workers' power over society and genuine workers' control of the economy and their own workplaces actually usurped/substituted for/suppressed? Who did this, and why?
Is that Leninism? Did Trotsky stand for it at least somewhat? Wasn't Stalinism the inevitable result? What could the class conscious working people of Russia done to defend their power and extend their revolution against all enemies foreign and domestic ( including those from the party and state apparatus that supposedly ruled in their interests)?

[A Marxist Historian]

It never was, and therefore your analysis, resting on this unfounded assertion, falls completely apart. You can holler about denial all you like, but you haven't got a shred of credible evidence for it.

In what sense was it not a closet embarassment? It certainly was an embarrassment, right?

As for the closeted part, no I'm not saying you were hiding it, but after 9/11 it was hardly high on anybody's radar--till of course the election season started for 2004, at which point it comes out of the closet and, as Jimmie Higgins so nicely described, it immediately becomes a bigtime problem for your organization.

So the analysis stands up just fine thank you.

As for your "no shred of credible evidence" bit, well, you ain't on trial here, so "innocent till proven guilty" don't apply.

Though if you were, any court in the land would consider it excellent circumstantial evidence. Means, motive, opportunity, all three present in abundance.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

...
I advise you to read Marx and Engels for yourself, instead of inferring what they have said based on what some Spart has told you via email or in some news article. Or at the very least, pick up Lenin's State and Revolution, where Lenin persuasively argues that there will be a state in socialism: "The state withers away insofar as there are no longer any capitalists, any classes, and, consequently, no class can be suppressed. But the state has not yet completely withered away, since there still remains the safeguarding of "bourgeois law", which sanctifies actual inequality. For the state to wither away completely, complete communism is necessary."

You: "Oops."

Quote out of context, just as I thought. Previous paragraph:

"There is no other standard yet than 'bourgeois right." To this extent (all bolding my emphasis), a form of state is still necessary."

In addition, in the International Publishers version I'm quoting from (p. 78), the last two sentences of your quote are translated rather differently:

"But the state has not yet altogether withered away, since there still remains the protection of 'bourgeois right,' which sanctifies actual inequality. For the complete extinction of the state, complete Communism is necessary."

In other words, Lenin is saying that in a socialist society, the first stage of communism, you'll have a faint shadow of a state, some sort of judicial apparatus to adjudicate wage rates and such (or rather labor certificate rates, if you want to be technical), according to the principle "to each according to his work" as opposed to the fully communist principle "to each according to his need."

But no army, no police, no jails!

In short, none of those "armed bodies of men," whom according to Lenin are the essence of the state!

And not much of a government bureaucracy for that matter, no elections, no parliaments, no presidents.

This is dogmatic twisting of Lenin's words on your part in exactly the same fashion as Stalin employed in his attempts to prove that Lenin believed in socialism in one country!



...
By the way, I have read Neil Harding (this argument about Lenin's meaning of workers' control is found in his Lenin's Political Thought), and you're misrepresenting his argument. He's looking at the meaning Lenin attributed to "workers' control" in specific works of his, written to express his views on what would happen in the transition to socialism, not in socialism. This is why, as Harding writes, one of his pre-October definitions of "workers' control" did not even entail the expropriation of the capitalists. Do you honestly think that Lenin was envision socialist or communist society when he wrote that? You're seriously grasping for straws.


Well, firstly, as I already commented, there simply can be no "workers control" in a society where there is no working class, even if you technically have some ultra-faint shadow of a state. So your positiing of "workers control" in a socialist society is just more of your illiteracy. It is simply not a meaningful phrase except in a non-socialist society.

But, as it happens, it turns out my source, not NH, is posted to the web, so here is the the piece, which you may now subject to your critique, if you are serious.

It's on the website of the International Bolshevik Tendency, http://www.bolshevik.org/

However, due to the peculiar way they have organized their website, there's no separate link for it. You have to do a bit of clicking to get to it from the above link, first on "Marxist Archives" then on an "other Spartacist articles" type link, then on "Leninism and Workers Control."

So here it is in full.

******************************************
Leninism and Workers Control
By Joseph Seymour
Workers Vanguard no 162, 17 June 1977

The following article is based on a talk by Joseph Seymour at a West Coast Spartacus Youth League educational in mid-March 1977
There is probably no question in contemporary left-wing politics where greater confusion, both substantive and terminological, reigns than over "workers control." Of the several forms of confusion, the most dangerous is a stagist conception of workers control as the link between day-to-day trade-union militancy and revolutionary dual power, as the necessary, first step toward the seizure of state power. Workers control is not a demand which communist trade unionists agitate for and seek to implement every day in every way. It is only appropriate to a qualitatively different, higher level of class struggle.

Workers control—dual power at the point of production—is an aspect, usually secondary, of a generalized revolutionary crisis. With one exception—Italy in 1969—workers control has emerged only after, not before, the government was overthrown and the repressive state apparatus was in disarray: Russia 1917, Germany 1918, Spain 1936, Portugal 1974-75. And in Italy’s "Hot Autumn" in 1969, workers control was a subordinate aspect of a mass strike wave centered on economic demands.

There are four characteristic kinds of confusion. The most important is an attempt to exploit terminological ambiguity in the service of a reformist programmatic conception. This is the trade unionization of workers control. In the conventional sense, trade unions normally exercise some control over the conditions of production, job standards and the like. Trotsky, who was very precise in his programmatic formulations, always speaks of "workers control of production" or "of industry" to distinguish this concept from the kind of control that trade unions normally exercise.
In a recent article, "Nuclear Power and the Workers Movement" (WV No. 146, 25 February), we demanded "trade-union control of safety conditions in all industrial situations." This is not a call for generalized dual power at the industrial level. Rather it is a strong trade-union demand. Many unions in many countries have forced management to adhere to a thick rulebook specifying safety standards. This is not "workers control of production." Of course, it is in the interests of reformists and centrists to blur the distinction between this type of trade-union control of working conditions and generalized dual power at the point of production signaling a revolutionary situation.

A second source of confusion is more purely terminological. "Control" is a word which exists in many Indo-European languages with similar but not identical meanings. In European languages other than English, "to control" means to check or monitor the actions of another. For example, the functionary who checks tickets on French trains is called the controleur de ballets. However, in English the term "control" means to administer or direct. While in other languages "workers control" is distinct from and weaker than "workers management," in English the two are usually identified. Thus English-speaking Trotskyists sometimes confuse these two qualitatively different concepts. For example, Felix Morrow in his Revolution and Counterrevolution in Spain uses "workers control" to describe what was actually workers management of nominally nationalized enterprises.

A third area of confusion centers on workers management, which is neither identical with nor necessarily occurs under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Our program is not workers management, but rather the management or administration by a workers government of a centrally directed and planned economy.

It is possible for generalized workers management or, more precisely, self-management to exist as another, distinct form of dual power. Workers control is dual power within the production unit; management is still trying to reassert its traditional authority. In Italy 1969 there were pitched battles of Fiat workers against Fiat foremen and company goons—that’s what we mean by workers control or dual power. Workers management, by contrast, occurs when the bourgeois management abandons the productive units to the workers, while the latter are not subject to economic administration by the state. It is obvious that such an extraordinary situation can occur only when a proletarian state power has not yet consolidated its rule (Bolshevik Russia in late 1917-early 1918) or in a civil war under a weak bourgeois "popular front" government (Spain 1936-37). Workers management is then a situation of dual power between the productive units and the government, which may be either proletarian or bourgeois. The government’s monopoly over the mechanisms of finance is invariably the Achilles heel of workers management.

A fourth point of confusion concerns "workers control" as an institution under a democratically governed workers state with a centralized planned economy. The terminological identity of this concept with "workers control" in a revolutionary, dual-power situation is codified in the Transitional Program and reflects the political language of the Russian experience. That the same term refers to two fundamentally different programmatic concepts is inherently confusing and ideally should be avoided. However, it would be ineffectual scholasticism for us to invent and use different terms.

Nevertheless, comrades must understand the difference. Workers control under socialist economic planning is an authoritative consultative voice at the point of production. It is absolutely not counterposed or antagonistic to the managerial hierarchy of the workers government. The notion that "workers control" has the selfsame character during a revolutionary offensive against capitalism and in a workers state is an economist or syndicalist deviation.

Workers control is not a demand made upon the employer or state; it is a condition of struggle. Workers control cannot be incorporated into a trade-union contract or otherwise institutionalized. By its very nature workers control posits open-ended struggle between workers and management. Comrade Douglas’ document captures well the difference between strong trade unionism and workers control. Putting assembly-line speed in the contract is a strong trade-union demand; workers control means determining line speed against management’s will. A union hiring hall is a strong trade-union demand; workers control is forcing management to hire more people than it wants to employ. These are real and significant differences.

Because workers control cannot be institutionalized, it is wrong to call for workers control in a particular firm or industry as a programmatic norm. In a revolutionary, situation, of course, certain firms and industries are in the vanguard of workers control struggles--the Putilov metalworks in St. Petersburg in 1917, Fiat in Turin in 1969, the Lisnave shipyards in Lisbon in 1974-75. However, a call to action on a particular firm in a revolutionary period is different from a programmatic norm.
Pabloite Revisionism

The leading exponents of reformist and stagist conceptions of workers control are the European Pabloites. In Britain the best-known left-wing advocates of workers control are two freelancing independent Pabloites, Ken Coates and Tony Topham of the Institute for Workers’ Control. The very name reveals a reformist conception. Think of the Institute for Revolutionary Dual Power in Industry! The purely social-democratic nature of the Coates/Topham project is spelled out openly:

"The aims of the Institute for Workers’ Control shall be ... to assist in the formation of Workers’ Control groups dedicated to the development of democratic consciousness, to the winning of support for Workers’ Control in all existing organizations of Labour, to the challenging of undemocratic actions wherever they may occur, and the extension of democratic control over industry and the economy itself..."
—Bulletin of the Institute for Workers’ Control, Vol. 1, No. 1 (no date)
A far more sophisticated exponent of a reformist, stagist position on workers control than the "industrial democrat" Coates is Ernest Mandel. Labeling workers’ control an "anti-capitalist structural reform," he presents it as an institutionalized aspect of trade-union bargaining:

"Workers’ control is the affirmation by the workers of a refusal to let the management dispose freely of the means of production and labour power.... It is a refusal to enter discussions with the management or the government as a whole on the division of the national income, so long as the workers have not acquired the ability to reveal the way the capitalists cook up the books when they talk of prices and profits."
—"Lessons of May," New Left Review, November-December 1968
Mandel simply trivializes workers control as an appendage to every kind of social struggle normally occurring in capitalist society:

"The struggle for workers’ control--with which the strategy of anti-capitalist structural reforms, the struggle for a transitional programme, is largely identified—must... keep close to the preoccupations of the masses, must constantly arise from the everyday reality experienced by the workers, their wives, the students and revolutionary intellectuals." [our emphasis]
—Ibid.
The anti-revolutionary nature of Mandel’s position is clear when he attempts to inject workers control into the French May 1968 general strike. I read the following passage several times because I didn’t understand it. This is because it’s inherently confused and confusing, grafting a reformist, stagist concept of workers control onto a revolutionary dual power situation:

"The general strike of May 1968 ... offers us an excellent example of the key importance of this problem. Ten million workers were out on strike. They occupied their factories. If they were moved by the desire to do away with many of the social injustices heaped up by the Gaullist regime in the ten years of its existence, they were obviously aiming beyond simple wage scale demands."
It is significant that Mandel does not see the strikers as having a revolutionary anti-capitalist impulse, merely wanting to eliminate "many" (sic) of the social injustices associated with the Gaullist regime. He goes on:

"But if the workers did not feel like being satisfied with immediate demands, they also did not have any exact idea of what they did want. Had they been educated in the preceding years and months in the spirit [sic] of workers’ control, they would have known what to do: elect a committee in every plant that would begin by opening the company books; calculate for themselves the various companies’ real manufacturing costs and rates of profit; establish a right of veto on hiring and firing and on any changes in the organization of the work."
—"The Debate on Workers’ Control," International Socialist Review, May-June 1969
But for there to be "workers control of production" there must be production. A functioning workers control committee during a general strike would be scabbing! Workers control and a general strike are two mutually exclusive economic-military tactics, which usually arise in very different situations. As we shall see, workers control is usually an attempt to maintain production in the face of employer sabotage, the disruption of war or severe economic crisis.

The call for workers control during the French May events would not merely have been wrong and confusionist, but dangerous and liquidationist. Under those conditions, the French ruling class would have promised considerable concessions toward workers control--open books, union veto on firing, the right to beat up foremen and all kinds of good things—if only the workers ended the general strike and defused the political crisis.

Mandel himself drew out the liquidationist consequences of his call for workers control during the French May-June 1968 events in an article published at that time:

"It is here that the strategy of ‘anticapitalist structural reforms,’ transition demands, assumes all its validity. The masses cannot seize power in the factories and neighborhoods; that calls for a new and centralized revolutionary leadership that does not as yet exist. But the fact that the masses are not yet in a position to seize power does not at all imply the impossiblity of winning, right now, demands over and above wage increases.
"The workers hold the factories and nerve centers of the nation.... They must immediately establish a de facto power that the bosses and the state cannot cancel out once ‘calm’ has been restored....
"This de facto power consists in democratically elected committees which establish workers control overall production....
"These committees should decide which enterprises would begin operating again, and to what end—that is, exclusively to fill the needs of the working population. They should have veto power over every investment project." [our emphasis]
—"From the Bankruptcy of Neocapitalism to the Struggle for the Socialist Revolution," in Revolt in France (1968)
The French 1968 general strike is a perfect example of when a stagest concept of workers control is dangerous. Workers control would have meant a lowering of the level of class struggle. It would have been equivalent to abandoning a major battle on the verge of victory and retreating into guerrilla war. The correct revolutionary demand for the French May events was the unification and centralization of the strike committees as embryonic soviets, bypassing a distinct period of workers control.
Trotsky on Germany 1931

Trotsky’s 1931 article, "Workers’ Control of Production," is absolutely unambiguous that workers control is not a reform, but a manifestation of dual power in a revolutionary situation:

"Control can be imposed only by force upon the bourgeoisie, by a proletariat on the road to the moment of taking power from them, and then also ownership of the means of production. Thus the regime of workers’ control, a provisional, transitional regime by its very essence, can correspond only to the period of the convulsing of the bourgeois state, the proletarian offensive, and the falling back of the bourgeoisie, that is, to a period of the proletarian revolution in the fullest sense of the word."
However, taken out of historic context and read superficially, Trotsky’s article could be interpreted as positing workers control as a necessary or normal early stage of a revolutionary crisis.

Amid Trotsky’s voluminous writings on revolutionary strategy and tactics, there is only one substantive article on workers control—concerning Germany in 1931. Why did Trotsky bring to the fore the demand for workers control at that particular place and time? Why did he consider factory committees rather than soviets as the most likely form of dual power? Why did he regard workers control rather than a mass strike wave or street fighting as the probable initial form of confrontation with bourgeois authority?

First, the economic conditions militated against the strike tactic. Given a sharp and worsening depression, the tasks of the workers were to prevent plant closures, lockouts and increased unemployment.
Apart from economic conjunctural considerations, Trotsky’s position on workers control was governed by the relations of the Communist Party (CP), which he considered bureaucratic centrist with a potential for revolutionary renewal, to the Social Democrats on the one hand and to the Nazis on the other. In most circumstances the strength of the workers movement against the employers is roughly in line with its strength against the state. Try having a work action in Brazil, Iran or South Korea. However, in Germany 1931 the power of the workers in the shops was far greater than in the streets. The Communists alone, a minority of the proletariat, could not overcome the Nazi stormtroopers; the CP’s sectarianism and the Social Democrats’ legalism prevented united military action against the fascists. However, the Nazi writ did not run into the factories so that in military terms resistance to workers control was far less than to other forms of a proletarian offensive.

The German Social Democrats associated soviets with Communist rule and would have opposed them as a united-front form. The "Third Period" Stalinists refused to work in the Social Democratic-dominated trade unions. The factory committees were the only existing common organizations of Social Democratic and Communist workers. Thus Trotsky saw in the factory committees and workers control the path of least resistance for a united proletarian offensive. His advocacy of workers control was not a universal tactical schema, but a concrete form for a united front of a deeply divided workers movement against the growing fascist threat. If one abstracts Trotsky’s position from the concrete conjuncture and political alignment in Germany 1931, one is liable to project a false tactical schema involving the fetishization of workers control.
The Bolsheviks and Workers Control

The Bolshevik Revolution and Spanish civil war witnessed the most profound workers control struggles and the only experiences of widespread workers self-management. Therefore the assimilation of these two historic experiences is essential to understand our programmatic positions on the question.

Unlike the Russian revolution of 1905, 1917 was not marked by mass strikes. The workers knew that the war had severely damaged and dislocated the Russian economy, industry was on the verge of collapse due to breakdowns and shortages, and the urban population was threatened by famine. Workers control arose primarily to counter capitalist neglect and sabotage, rather than to extract economic concessions. Lenin’s strong support for workers control in this period was motivated by a conservative economic purpose. In a major article, significantly entitled "The Impending Catastrophe and How To Fight It" (September 1917), he states:

"Control, supervision and accounting are the prime prerequisites for combatting catastrophe and famine. This is indisputable and universally recognised. And it is just what is not being done from fear of encroaching on the supremacy of the landowners and capitalists, on their immense, fantastic and scandalous profits...." [emphasis in original]
Shortly after coming to power, the Bolshevik government issued two decrees (14 November and 13 December) designed to institutionalize the dual power already existing within Russian factories. The second decree details the powers of the control commissions:

"The control commission of each enterprise is to establish the amount of materials, fuel, equipment, workers and technicians, etc., required for production, the actual stock in hand and labor available; to estimate the prospects of carrying on or closing down; to maintain labor discipline; to check whether buying and selling conform to state regulations; to watch over productivity, and assist in ascertaining production costs, etc.
"Decisions of the control commission designed to secure the conditions for its operation are binding on the owner." [our emphasis]
It also stipulates that direct management remains in the owners’ hands and that the control commission has no right to expropriate the enterprises on its own:

"The owner retains his managerial rights over the administration and operation of the enterprise. The control commission does not take part in the administration of the enterprise and is not responsible for its operation.... The control commission may, through its higher authorities, raise the question of sequestration of an enterprise or any other compulsory measure with the economic state organs, but it has no right itself to seize and administer an enterprise."—reproduced in Margaret Dewar, Labour Policy in the USSR 1917-1928 (1956)
Why did Lenin put forth a policy he later described as a "contradictory and incomplete measure"? Lenin’s position on workers control is incomprehensible unless one realizes that he was opposed to the nationalization of industry in the short term. He defended this policy as late as spring 1918 against left communist opponents (Bukharin, Radek, Ossinsky). The Bolshevik government did not have available the technical/managerial apparatus capable of administering a socialized, planned economy. Lenin believed that through a combination of concessions and pressure Russia’s capitalists could be made to serve the new Soviet state. Workers control commissions were projected as the lowest level of state economic administration. Secondly, Lenin considered workers control a school to train a proletarian managerial cadre, who could take over the administration of a socialized economy in a gradual, orderly and efficient way.

The Bolshevik attempt to institutionalize workers control broke down almost immediately. Capitalists hostile to soviet power abandoned their factories for counterrevolutionary intrigue. Workers, in turn hostile and distrustful toward their employers, drove them out and took over the factories. Frequently instructions from the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh) not to expropriate an enterprise were met with the response that it has already been done. In the months following the October Revolution, workers control gave way to workers self-management imposed from below.

The instructions of VSNKh to the individual factory committees concerning production and distribution were frequently disregarded. The factory committees sought to maximize enterprise income through unbridled competition for supplies and markets. A Bolshevik leader of the Metal Workers Union, writing in late 1917, described the situation as follows:

"Another proprietor came, who was equally an individualist and anti-social as the former one, and the name of the new proprietor was the control committee. In the Donetz area, the metal works and mines refused to supply each other with coal and iron on credit, selling the iron to the peasants without regard for the needs of the State."
—quoted in Maurice Dobb, Soviet Economic Development Since 1917 (1948)
Another Bolshevik trade unionist in November 1917 summarizes the situation thus:

"Workers control by itself is an anarchistic attempt to achieve socialism in one enterprise, and actually leads to clashes among the workers themselves and to the refusal of fuel, metal, etc. to one another."
—quoted in Paul Avrich, The Russian Revolution and Factory Committees (unpublished doctoral dissertation, 1961)
These quotes are somewhat onesided. The recourse of the factory committees to unrestrained atomized competition did not primarily express either parochial self-centeredness or anarcho-syndicalist prejudices, though both were present. Rather the economic situation reflected the new Bolshevik government’s lack of authority and organization amid the anarchic turmoil of revolution. The workers in the mass supported Lenin’s government to one degree or another, but questioned its viability and permanence. It was understandable for individual factory committees to refuse to sell on credit to a government they believed would not be around long enough to pay.

The disastrous effect of workers self-management and the exigencies of the looming civil war convinced most workers of the need for centralized economic direction. The institution of "war communism" met with general support and little resistance.

The onset of full-scale civil war in mid-1918 led to wholesale nationalization and the subordination of the factory committees to centralized economic direction. However, the main reason that Lenin had earlier opposed general nationalization remained. The Bolshevik government did not have an apparatus capable of administering a nationalized, centralized industry. So it turned to the one politically loyal organization which had a hierarchy conforming to the industrial structure—the trade unions. The economy under "war communism" was administered by the trade unions, not by a separate state body. Industrial management by the trade unions, traditional workers organizations, had the further advantage of allaying syndicalist prejudices against the new soviet state power.

The threat of white terror strengthened the loyalty of the workers to Bolshevik rule and generated a spirit of self-sacrifice. Economic administration by the unions worked fairly well. A policy originally undertaken as a practical expedient was accepted as a programmatic norm for a workers state. The new Bolshevik program adopted at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919 stipulated the trade unions would be the basic organ of economic administration. Point 5 of the section entitled "In the sphere of economics" states:

"The organizing apparatus of socialized industry must first of all rest upon the trade unions. The latter must free themselves from the narrow guild outlook and transform themselves into large productive combinations comprising the majority, and gradually all the workers of a given branch of production."
—Robert H. McNeal, ed., Decisions and Resolutions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1974)
This programmatic statement would cause much trouble a few years later.
The overwhelming economic exigencies of the civil war suppressed any differences within the Bolshevik party over the optimal organization of a workers state, of the relations between the government administration, the trade unions and other workers organizations. Such differences exploded with the end of the civil war in early 1921 amid a mass reaction against the severe austerity and commandism of "war communism."
The Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 saw the semi-syndicalist Workers Opposition advocate the administration of the economy by autonomous tradeunions. Trotsky, short-sightedly concerned with rehabilitating the economy as speedily as possible, advocated the total statification of the unions, liquidating them as autonomous, internally democratic bodies. Lenin, whose views prevailed, occupied a middle position. He insisted on the direct administration of the economy of the state. He also supported autonomous trade unions to represent the interests of specific groups of workers vis-à-vis the government administration hierarchy, which was capable of bureaucratic abuses as well as errors.

Only with the institution of the New Economic Policy in 1921 did the Bolshevik government acquire its own distinct organs of economic administration. This freed the unions to defend the consumerist interests of specific groups of workers. The Labor Code of 1922 stipulated that wages and working conditions be determined by collective bargaining between the unions and state employers.

The early 1920’s also saw the introduction of a new form of workers control as an authoritative consultative voice designed to increase productivity. Production conferences of the entire work force elected standing control commissions to oversee that their recommendations were carried out. The Stalini’st political counterrevolution eroded and eventually suppressed the control commissions, as it did the trade unions and all other independent proletarian bodies.

The Trotskyist Left Opposition in its 1927 "Platform" calls attention to the atrophying of workers control and the growing indifference of the workers toward productivity:

"The production conferences are gradually being reduced to nothing. The majority of the practical proposals adopted by the workers are never carried out. Among many of these workers a distaste for these production conferences is nourished by the fact that the improvements which they do succeed in introducing often result in a reduction of the number of workers."
The "Platform of the Joint Opposition" called for strengthening the control commissions:

"The functions of the control commissions of the production councils must be extended to include supervising the execution of their decisions and investigating their success in protecting the workers’ interests."
The 1938 Transitional Program incorporated workers control in the consultative sense as a programmatic norm in a workers state, an integral part of proletarian democracy and rational economic planning.
Workers Management in the Spanish Civil War

While workers management in the Bolshevik revolution was a short-lived, anarchic episode, workers management was a central element in the Spanish revolution and civil war. Following the defeated military coup of July 1936 most of Spain’s capitalists either fled or were driven out into the areas controlled by Franco’s army. Workers management became widespread throughout Spain and dominant in Catalonia (which then accounted for 70 percent of Spanish industry) where the labor movement was dominated by the anarcho-syndicalists through their trade-union federation, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). Workers management was legalized by the Collectivization Decree of October 1936.
The anarchist masses did not look upon workers management as a temporary situation or expedient caused by the civil war, but as the realization of their ideal program. They believed the libertarian millennium had arrived. Despite this very different political attitude, the initial experience of workers management in Spain resembled that of Russia in 1917-18. The anarchist-managed collectives acted like competing producer cooperatives. In those collectives which inherited ample material and financial reserves, which had new equipment and enjoyed favorable market demand, the workers’ incomes were relatively high. In those collectives without these advantages, the workers suffered accordingly. The situation is well described by Gaston Leval, a French anarchist and prominent CNT militant at the time:

"Too often in Barcelona and Valencia, workers in each undertaking took over the factory, the works, or the workshop, the machines, raw materials, and taking advantage of the continuation of the money system and normal capitalist commercial relations, organised production on their own account, selling for their own benefit the produce of their labour....
"There was not, therefore, true socialisation, but a workers’ neo-capitalism, a self-management straddling capitalism and socialism, which we maintain would not have occured had the Revolution been able to extend itself fully under the direction of our Svndicates."
—Collectives in the Spanish Revolution (1975)
The anarcho-syndicalist cadre, like Leval, were dismayed that the "libertarian" collectives reproduced the irrationality and inegalitarianism of the capitalist market, a situation which also impeded the war against Franco. The CNT hierarchy more-or-less successfully countered the anarchic parochialism of the collectives and imposed some centralized economic direction. In general, the anarcho-syndicalist workers regarded the enterprises as belonging to the CNT as a whole, not to the individual collectives. Through the CNT, the Spanish workers achieved miracles of economic organization. In Catalonia, which had no metal-working industry, the CNT collectives built a munitions industry from the ground up. The Spanish proletariat displayed outstanding labor discipline, self-sacrifice and ingenuity. This is one of the factors that caused Trotsky, in arguing for the unique significance of the Bolshevik Party, to state that in their mass consciousness the Spanish proletariat stood higher, not lower, than the Russian workers of 1917-18.

The CNT attempted, with mixed success, to combine the individual enterprises into vertically-integrated industrial syndicates (e.g., textiles, wood products). However, all the CNT collectives—individual factories, multi-enterprise industrial syndicates (like the light textile syndicate in Alcoy), transport and utilities—had to relate to the rest of the economy through capitalist commercial methods.

Were the CNT collectives economically viable? Those collectives which had a relatively self-contained production process, supplied a localized market, enjoyed a monopolistic position and a large, regular cash flow were generally "profitable." The pride of the CNT industrial collectives was the Barcelona tramways syndicate, a localized monopoly supplying an essential service for immediate cash payment. But those collectives which were part of a long chain of production, imported raw materials, sold on long-term credits or to the government (e.g., the munitions industry) were not economically viable without state support and cooperation. Such collectives were critically dependent upon state credit and, therefore, on parties hostile to workers management and the anarcho-syndicalist masses. One justification the anarchist leaders advanced for entering the central Popular Front government was to secure state finance for the CNT collectives.

The collectives were naturally the most resolute defenders of workers management. Despite the attitudes of the workers and given the absence of a planned, socialized economy, the collectives had an organic tendency to become competing producer cooperatives.

The CNT bureaucracy administered the collectives partly in the interests of what it considered economic rationality and partly to carry out the bidding of its Popular Front partners. The CNT did on behalf of the bourgeois Popular Front government what the Russian trade unions did on behalf of the Bolshevik government; it disciplined the anarchic, localist tendencies of the collectives in the interests of the government’s economic objectives.

The "expanded economic plenum" of the CNT in January 1938 adopted a series of measures resembling "war communism." These measures, of course, grossly violated anarcho-syndicalist principles. An inspectorate was created to "put forward the expected norms which will effectively orientate the different industrial units with a view to improving their economy and administration..." (quoted in Vernon Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution [1972]). These inspectors had the right to sanction the elected factory committees. The plenum also empowered managers to dismiss workers for lateness, absence and failure to meet work norms, as well as those labeled "troublemakers" who "create dissensions between the workers and the managers or the trade union representatives."

The Popular Front government, with the Stalinists in the vanguard, recognized in the factory committees and workers management a locus of independent proletarian power capable of challenging its authority. Therefore the basic policy of the Popular Front was to liquidate workers management and statify the CNT collectives. The CNT was too powerful to achieve this end by direct administrative/military action, so the government resorted to economic sabotage. Capital equipment was requisitioned from the collectives on the pretext that they were needed for the war effort. Leval recounts an incident where the War Ministry, requisitioned two modern milling machines from the Barcelona tramways syndicate. Later it was discovered the ministry had a secret cache of some 40 comparable machines.

The primary method by which the Popular Front sabotaged workers management was through its control of finances. The government literally starved the workers in the CNT collectives. Leval describes how this was done:

"And when, in Catalonia, the Communist leader Comorera became Minister of Finance after the May Days, the means of struggle he adopted were original. It was clear that it was quite impossible to destroy the outstanding influence of the Syndicates of the C.N.T. To attempt to do so would have paralysed production overnight. So, Comorera had recourse to two complementary procedures; on the one hand he deprived the factories of raw materials or deliveries did not arrive on time, thus resulting in production delays which were knowingly criticised; on the other hand they paid for deliveries of cloth, clothing, arms, etc., with a delay which affected the workers’ own budgets. As the wages were distributed under the supervision of the Syndicates, it was against the delegates of the C.N.T. and against the organism of which they were the representatives that the discontent of one section of the workers was directed."
—Collectives in the Spanish Revolution
The turning point of the Spanish revolution, the "May Days" in Barcelona, was precipitated by a military attack by the Popular Front government on workers management. The CNT collective which ran the telephone system was especially irritating to the Popular Front because it enabled the anarchist workers to listen in on communications between the central ministries in Valencia and their Catalan counterparts. On 3 May 1937 the Stalinist commissar of public order in Catalonia, Rodriguez Sala, attempted an armed assault on the Telefónica building. The infuriated response of the Barcelona workers--a massive general strike including the erection of street barricades--was on the verge of sweeping away the government forces when the anarchist ministers, Garcia Oliver and Federica Montseny, intervened to arrange a truce. This gave the central government time to send 6,000 Civil Guards to occupy Barcelona.

In the rightist reaction which followed, the POUM leader Andrés Nin and anarchist Camillo Berneri were assassinated among others, the left-centrist POUM was suppressed and the anarchists were expelled from the government (although they remained loyal to the Popular Front). The "May Days" broke the back of the vanguard of the proletariat; the liquidation of the revolutionary dual power established in July 1936, including workers management, followed apace.

The Trotskyist position toward workers management in the Spanish revolution is governed by the fact that it constituted a form of proletarian dual power in relation to an essentially bourgeois government. While criticizing and opposing anarcho-syndicalist doctrine, we would be the most resolute defenders of workers management in practice, far more so than the treacherous CNT bureaucracy. While maintaining and stepping up production for the war of the Republic against Franco, a Trotskyist leadership would have refused and resisted the Stalinist-inspired state requisitions of capital equipment on the pretext of furthering the war effort. Trotskyists would have demanded the ouster of official representatives of the Popular Front government from all bodies administering the collectives. Above all, the Trotskyists would also have explained that genuine socialization of production required the overthrow of the Popular Front (no less than the defeat of Franco’s army) and the establishment of a planned economy administered by a workers government.

The contrasting experiences of Russia 1917-21 and Spain 1936-39 indicate that our attitude toward workers control and management depends above all on the class nature of the state power, and secondarily on the development of the revolution from a proletarian offensive against capitalist rule to the consolidation of a workers government administering a centralized, planned economy.

[A Marxist Historian]

Yes, according to you Cuba has no ruling class, only several classes existing horizontally and competing for control over a floating state controlled by a cadre of floating petty-bourgeois bureaucrats wrestling against a "proletarian property form." The fact that the bureaucrats manage the entire economy, including the surplus, and determine how much of that surplus they can appropriate for themselves, has no bearing on where they stand in the relations of production--what their class position is. (Because Marx's notion of class wasn't really about people's relationship to the means of production; it was about their relationship to a process of particular kind of private property ownership!) All that is relevant in characterizing the bureaucrats is that they do not privately "own" the state as individual proprietors, they simply control its "ownership" functions (including that of accumulation) collectively in way that enables them to pad accounts under their "ownership." Ergo they clearly do not occupy a distinct (class) location in relation to the means of production. They are just a parasitic caste.

A breath-taking Marxist analysis, breath-taking in its folly.

No, the various classes of Cuban society are *not* "competing for control over a floating state." Floating in midair, in defiance of all social laws of gravity?

Rather, you have a bureaucratic and dictatorial state apparatus fundamentally resting on its support from the working class, but which rises above the different classes and regulates their mutual relations in classical Bonapartist fashion.

A workers state in exactly the same fashion as the empires of Bonaparte the First and Bonaparte the Third were bourgeois states, even though the actual bourgeoisie had little or no control over either Bonaparte, both of whom often treated invididual capitalists with much the same high handedness and brutality that Stalin treated Soviet workers.

You apparently are ignorant of this basic Marxist and especially Trotskyist conception, the foundation of Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet Union.

Now, Hal Draper, who unlike you knew his stuff, argued that Trotsky's conception was wrong, leaning on some early and rightly unpublished (because erroneous) articles by Marx on Louis Bonaparte, which argued that LB was a lumpen adventurer totally independent of the French bourgeoisie, and that his empire was not bourgeois at all.

But rather, or so was Hal Draper's interpretation, essentially a form of bureaucratic State rule independent of classes, similar to Stalin's "bureaucratic collectivism."

Now that would be at least consistent on your part. Not Marxist, but theoretically consistent.

Your analysis however is simply worthless and illiterate.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Well what was Lenin talking about when he praised "state capitalism", suggested it was a necessary stage of development for Russia because of its backwardness, encouraged copying German forms of "state capitalism" during that time, and then said the only difference is that it would be done under "Soviet power" (that sounds okay until you realize he ain't talking about actual workers' control but rather is refering to a state-party managerial bureaucracy running everything "for the workers")?
Was there ever really a dictatorship of the proletariat? If do, it must have been very short lived.

That's a common misunderstanding. What Lenin meant by "state capitalism" was a policy of a proletarian state favorable to private capitalism--to small businessmen and traders (the NEPmen), capitalist farmers (the kulaks) and foreign investment by the imperialists. To revive the collapsed Russian economy in a country stalked by famine and disease.

But maintaining the "commanding heights" of the economy, banking and big industry, under the control of the proletarian state.

A mixed economy, in other words, in which the socialist sector would remain dominant. This is not at all "state capitalism" in the sense used by people like the Cliffites or the LRP who consider state ownership itself to be a form of "state capitalism."

And indeed both the Cliffites like Lucretia (in theoretical terms at any rate, judging by his line of argumentation) and the LRP maintain that under Lenin, Russia was a workers state. Other "state caps" of course feel differently, and sounds like from your POV you're one of them.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

I just finished reading Lenin's "Left Wing" Childness and the Petty Bourgeois Mentality (April 1918), where Lenin spends about half the paper singing the praises of state capitalism (his words) as the necessary precondition for socialism. Lots of other stuff inside that must have made Stalin & Company cream their shorts.

How far down the rabbit hole did counterrevolution in Russia really go?
This piece is written just months after October 1917, and already it eerily reeks of Stalin's conservatism and rule of Russia by bureaucrat managers in the name of the working class. This wasn't the pre-1918 Lenin or Leninism I came to admire as a young revolutionary.
Just exactly were the Bolsheviks doing at that time to actually spread international workers' revolution? Talk is cheap, and I always thought of the Bolsheviks as practical revolutionaries. They had plenty of links to German revolutionaries and sympathetic leftists all over the world at that time, so what happened?

I'm asking you in this thread because you seem capable of considering this seriously and giving a serious answer. I've said what I think of the existing middle class left, and in this piece by Lenin I wonder if I'm discovering the grandfather of this phenomena. Why do they all get to a certain point, become conservative and settle for their place and business enterprises, turning their backs on international revolution and the working class itself?
Are they all just social dems with a more radical public veneer for competitive marketing purposes? Does the non-proletarian class composition of these groups and their leaderships factor into this problem? Has this often hustorically been a key problem of the left, even the Bolsheviks?

In Russia in the year 1918, Lenin was dead right. The economy was in a state of collapse, and needed to be revived by any means necessary to avoid starvation. If, instead of nationalizing everything as the Bolsheviks were forced to do, you could have just had continued capitalist production under workers control, everyone would have been much better off. But because the capitalists were all on the side of the Whites and the foreign imperialists and were sabotaging production, this was simply not an option, and the Bolsheviks stumbled willy-nilly into War Communism, nationalizing everything out of necessity.

They did lots and lots to spread world revolution. Especially the German Revolution. The Bolsheviks signed a peace treaty with the Germans on exactly the terms the Germans wanted, sent their ambassador to Berlin to make nice--and he smuggled in lots of diamonds and other jewels which were used to fund the German Revolution of 1918 that toppled the Kaiser.

In 1919 the Red Army in Ukraine tried to come to the aid of the Hungarian Revolution before it collapsed, planning to smash right through Rumania to come to its rescue, but the collapse of the southern front vs. Denikin (in which the rebellions of Grigoriev and Makhno played a major role) prevented that.

And when the Whites had been mostly defeated by 1920, and the Poles invaded, the Red Army counteroffensive went all the way to Warsaw, and the plan was to conquer reactionary Poland and come to the aid of the rebellious German workers with guns in hand. A revolutionary Polish government led by Felix Dzherzhinsky was created.

Plus you had the foundation of the Comintern, aid to colonial rebels vs. British imperialism in India and elsewhere, etc. etc.

As late as 1923, during the near German Revolution of 1923, while Soviet diplomats were making all sorts of pacifist statements, Trotsky had the Red Cavalry lined up on the Polish border.

After Stalin took over however, things changed.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

I would say that's pretty accurate. MH's primary theoretical error is that he seems to think that class, the role people play in the relations of production, must be underpinned by individual property rights of members of that class. How a class relates to the means of production is reduced to a distributional question, a question of whether or the degree to which its individual members can appropriate part of the surplus (E.g., class is defined by individualized ownership of productive property rather than relations of production, relations which could encompass a variety of property forms.) I have never seen any evidence or logical arguments adduced to demonstrate that this is the case. This theoretical error is rooted in the way he views capitalism, as a system driven by the greed of individual capitalists rather than a system that imposes upon firm owners and managers the need to maximize capital accumulation for the sake of producing more efficient methods of capital accumulation (production for the sake of production, as Marx called it). So in his view if you don't have greedy private proprietors, you don't have capitalism. In other words, he fails to see capitalism as a system of competition that imposes on its participants the drive to maximize accumulation, and instead views it as an ad hoc product of a collection of individual greedy desires. MH has entirely lost sight of the fact that both capitalists and workers are alienated under capitalism. Nobody controls the system of production. It guides and imposes its logic on both classes. This is similarly true for state capitalists, except their drive to develop the means of production through exploitation and re-investment is driven by international competition.

I will get back to your lengthy posting when I have time. As this is more bite-sized, and does get to the heart of the matter, I'll comment now.

I recall having an argument with another Cliffite about the "production for the sake of production" quote here last summer. He couldn't even find it, had to refer me to an article by Chris Harman that quoted it without giving a page number. I do vaguely remember seeing it somewhere in Das Kapital, but Marx put on it none of the emphasis you do, according to my memory. It simply isn't Marx's definition of the nature of capitalism, not at all, just an empirical description of what capitalism looks like on a day to day basis.

The problem with your methodology is that you reify "class" into an abstraction, and fail to understand that social classes are distinct social entities, which evolve historically over time.

The driving force is indeed not "individual greed," a desire for Caribbean cruises and whatnot. It is the struggle of the capitalist class to appropriate for itself a larger part of the social surplus. Some of which the capitalist consume and some of which they reinvest into expanded production, indeed. But either way it is theirs and they want more, just as the workers want more.

Competition is indeed the key moment for capitalism, nature of the system. Monopoly is something that the capitalists can only strive for and approach asymptotically, like the limit of a derivative. If it were ever achieved, the economy would crash. And it never has been.

By your logic, if you had a single world Stalinist state, a universal state capitalism, with no "competition" any longer--well, just what would happen? Just how, exactly, would that be economically unworkable?

If understood as a deformed workers state, the unviability is self-explanatory, as with no imperialist menace to blame for Stalinist bureaucratism, workers wouldn't tolerate it for a second. But that is politics not economics.

Your fundamental error, indeed the fundamental error of Cliffism, is to designate investment of the social surplus by Stalinist bureaucrats in expanded production, the military etc. as "capitalist competition."

What's wrong with this idea? Very simple.

Let us suppose that the USSR, and/or contemporary Cuba, was ruled democratically by the workers, instead of by a Stalinist bureaucracy. Would the social surplus be invested any differently? Only in minor ways. Things would be done less bureaucratically, fewer giant screws cranked out to meet screw production quotas in pounds, fewer fiascos like the Great Leap Forward or Stalin's compulsory collectivization of agriculture, lower salaries for bureaucrats and a lot less corruption. But nothing essential.

The USSR under Lenin and Trotsky was every bit as subject to the world capitalist market as was the USSR. Indeed, if anything more so, as Lenin and Trotsky, unlike Stalin, did not believe in "socialism in one country."

So it is essentially inconsistent for you to consider Soviet Russia as anything other than "state capitalist," just like under Stalin. And indeed you guys do go along with Zinoviev's notion that in abstract economic terms it was.

But, if the fundamental economic nature of the USSR was the same under Lenin as it was under Stalin, why on earth do you guys prefer Lenin to Stalin? It's theoretically inconsistent on your parts. Now, "workers advocate," unlike you, has a consistent line.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Do you mean what Lenin wrote in this work? (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/11.htm)

I see nothing really objectionable in it. The gist of it is that the collectivized property form that will exist in socialism develops within monopoly capitalism, and that the process of establishing socialism and overthrowing class society (and here is where MH could probably learn something) is of transforming the content of that property form by bringing it under the control of "a revolutionary-democratic state, i.e., a state which in a revolutionary way abolishes all privileges and does not fear to introduce the fullest democracy in a revolutionary way."

Anarchists love to point out quotes such as: "For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly. There is no middle course here. The objective process of development is such that it is impossible to advance from monopolies (and the war has magnified their number, role and importance tenfold) without advancing towards socialism."

And they use these quotes to try to attribute to Lenin the position that socialism is at its essence about a collectivized means of production used to serve the interests of people, without any regard to the people doing the using, the planning, etc. In other words, socialism is a matter of distribution, not of workers' control. (The quotes above are followed by the statement "Either we have to be revolutionary democrats in fact, in which case we must not fear to take steps towards socialism." -- Again the process of democratization of decision-making and movement toward socialism are viewed as inextricable.)

This of course is belied by Lenin's continual stress on the content of the state that controls the means of production. It must necessarily be democratic. So those quotes need to be read in context.

Socialism is not a matter of distribution (and it certainly isn't a matter of "workers control," but we have dealt with this profoundly illiterate notion of yours adequately already).

Socialism is a matter of production. It is a higher and better mode of production, as Marx put it, than capitalism, that is capable of such a high level of labor productivity that in its highest stage, communism, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a practical possibility, not a Utopian dream.

And what Lenin meant in that quote you like about a "revolutionary-democratic state" was a workers state. He did not mean, as you hint for my alleged edification, that you would have a "revolutionary democratic state" in a socialist society.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

I'll just answer one of your points here tonight, as it brings us from the realm of airy Hegelian abstractions to the concrete.


...
You really need to pay closer attention to what people say, MH. Because you're constant misreading makes it appear that you're careless. I didn't say that I think the USPS is socialist. I said that if we define socialism as state control, then we have to define the USPS as socialist. But I'm not the person defining socialism as state control, so it's obvious that I similarly would not define the USPS as socialist.

Please explain to me who the greedy capitalists are that profit off the USPS. Who are these private owners of the USPS? The state owns it and controls it. Whatever surpluses it generates goes to the state, which according to you can not possibly operate as a capitalist because it doesn't have "private property" (this is why state capitalism cannot exist, according to you)...



Well, firstly, the only one raising the issue of socialism as "state control" is you. So if you aren't defining socialism as "state control," then it is you not I failing altogether to pay much attention to what other people say.

And in fact, your Lenin quote with the "revolutionary democratic state" looks a lot like, if you aren't defining it that way yourself, you are hiding behind Lenin on this one, trying to impute that to him. And you do seem to be a Lenin admirer, are you not?

But, more interestingly, is your elementary failure to understand how capitalist industry works.

The USPS, by operating at a loss, with postage rates set by the federal government for political reasons more than USPS's futile attempts to make a profit, benefits who?

The capitalists who make use of its services of course. The artificially low rates, by capitalist standards, put money directly into the pocket of capitalists who use the USPS to ship goods, advertising material, etc.

It also benefits workers who mail a letter by the USPS instead of by Fed Ex or what have you. But the great bulk of the business of the Post Office is commercial. Or at least it used to be.

Nowadays, what with bulk mail advertising increasingly going the way of the dinosaur and package delivery more and more by more efficient profit-making commercial services like Fed Ex and UPS, the post office is degenerating (from the capitalist standpoint) into merely a social service for the general population and a financial burden on their state. So the capitalists are moving towards abolishing it, starting with abolishing Saturday service.

Clear?

-M.H.-

[Olentzero]

In what sense was it not a closet embarassment? It certainly was an embarrassment, right?Nope.
As for your "no shred of credible evidence" bit, well, you ain't on trial here, so "innocent till proven guilty" don't apply.

Though if you were, any court in the land would consider it excellent circumstantial evidence. Means, motive, opportunity, all three present in abundance.And all three trumped by people who were actually there for the debates and discussions around the issue. But since that doesn't fit in with your preconceived notions about the ISO, you simply wave it away with "But that's not what really went on" as if you were there. You're talking out your ass on this one.

[A Marxist Historian]

Nope.And all three trumped by people who were actually there for the debates and discussions around the issue. But since that doesn't fit in with your preconceived notions about the ISO, you simply wave it away with "But that's not what really went on" as if you were there. You're talking out your ass on this one.

Your "Nope" is thoroughly contradicted by Jimmy Higgins's posting, where he said that the ISO just about found itself tarred and feathered over its support of Nader in 2004, till they withdrew it, solving the problem and ending a very severe embarrassment.

As for your reportage of all those debates and discussions around the issue, eh, so what. I'm sure they're all perfectly formally accurate, as if that mattered.

I've been around long enough to be able to know what's really going on in this kind of stuff. There are some advantages to being an old vet.

-M.H.-

[Lucretia]

I recall having an argument with another Cliffite about the "production for the sake of production" quote here last summer. He couldn't even find it, had to refer me to an article by Chris Harman that quoted it without giving a page number. I do vaguely remember seeing it somewhere in Das Kapital, but Marx put on it none of the emphasis you do, according to my memory. It simply isn't Marx's definition of the nature of capitalism, not at all, just an empirical description of what capitalism looks like on a day to day basis.

Marx didn't place any theoretical emphasis on base and superstructure, either. I think he used those terms only a few times, each time changing the meaning he was assigning to both terms. But this doesn't stop you from trying to use the model, a model you do not understand if you think it's about trying to distinguish spheres of society where power struggles take place from those where they don't take place.

But let's set aside this double standard you've set up for yourself. About the quote in question: I recall from a previous argument we had on state capitalism that I mentioned the "production for the state of production" quote before and linked it to Marx's writings on the marxists.org web site. So I am confused about why you choose to talk about this passage like it's some obscure thing you still haven't come across in Marx's writings. Did you not follow the reference and read the text for yourself? By the way, even then you engaged in your typical modus operandi and claimed that my quote was taken out of context, yet even when presented with the context could not explain how the context demonstrated that the quote didn't mean what I said it meant.


The problem with your methodology is that you reify "class" into an abstraction, and fail to understand that social classes are distinct social entities, which evolve historically over time.Reification and abstraction are two different things. It is possible to talk about class power in the abstract without reifying it, by treating class as a relationship of coercion and power between people that results from how those people relate to the means of production. This is "abstraction" in the sense that it describes class societies in general, in the abstract (e.g., this is true for feudal societies, tributary societies, capitalist societies), but it is no way reification.

For contrary to what you claim, I understand class as a relationship of power -- power that a minority of members of society exercise over the majority because of the power and control that the minority exercises over the means of production. This, of course, is the entire point Marx was getting at with base and superstructure: that the state, as an institution of concentrated power, does not just emerge from some abstract idea, but rather is derived from control over the means of production.


The driving force is indeed not "individual greed," a desire for Caribbean cruises and whatnot. It is the struggle of the capitalist class to appropriate for itself a larger part of the social surplus. Some of which the capitalist consume and some of which they reinvest into expanded production, indeed. But either way it is theirs and they want more, just as the workers want more.Oy. You seem to have a hard time distinguishing between profit and personal income, which is troubling since it is key to understanding that "making capitalists rich" is not the purpose of capitalism. It's a byproduct. Again, this is why Marx calls capitalism "production for the sake of production," not "production for the sake of getting rich." For Marx, talking about the character failings or greed of capitalists sidesteps the fundamental issue, which is that capitalism requires maximization of profit regardless of how greedy or not capitalists are, regardless of whether capitalists give all their personal income to charity.

Just to clue you in: profit is what a business clears above and beyond its expenditures. A capitalist's personal income is derived from the profit, but does not encompass the entirety of the profit. A chunk of that profit has to go toward reinvestment in the means of production. Why? In order to make the same products as your competitors, but only cheaper. Otherwise, your competitors will try to innovate production to increase profitability, and will have the power to put you out of business. Without this competition (which is a relationship, not a thing) - without this drive to re-invest in the means of production, to prolong the working day, etc., - there is no capitalism. You can, however, theoretically have capitalists who are not greedy, but only run their companies to maximize profitability while taking virtually all of that profit and re-investing it into the means of production.


Competition is indeed the key moment for capitalism, nature of the system. Monopoly is something that the capitalists can only strive for and approach asymptotically, like the limit of a derivative. If it were ever achieved, the economy would crash. And it never has been.

By your logic, if you had a single world Stalinist state, a universal state capitalism, with no "competition" any longer--well, just what would happen? Just how, exactly, would that be economically unworkable?

If understood as a deformed workers state, the unviability is self-explanatory, as with no imperialist menace to blame for Stalinist bureaucratism, workers wouldn't tolerate it for a second. But that is politics not economics.Are you even reading what I write? I already answered this question. If you had single state-integrated world monopoly (it would have to be state integrated, because a distinct state not merged with business would represent a potential political and economic rival), and there was no competition, you would no longer have capitalism. You'd have something resembling bureaucratic collectivism. I am confused about why you are even asking me that question. You seem to be implying that I am the one who thinks competition is superfluous to capitalism, when I am the one who is been talking about competition as the lifeblood of capitalism.


Your fundamental error, indeed the fundamental error of Cliffism, is to designate investment of the social surplus by Stalinist bureaucrats in expanded production, the military etc. as "capitalist competition."

What's wrong with this idea? Very simple.

Let us suppose that the USSR, and/or contemporary Cuba, was ruled democratically by the workers, instead of by a Stalinist bureaucracy. Would the social surplus be invested any differently? Only in minor ways. Things would be done less bureaucratically, fewer giant screws cranked out to meet screw production quotas in pounds, fewer fiascos like the Great Leap Forward or Stalin's compulsory collectivization of agriculture, lower salaries for bureaucrats and a lot less corruption. But nothing essential.Then I have a very simple question for you, MH. If the economy would be run virtually the same way if it were ruled democratically by the workers, and if individual bureaucrats rotate in and out of power even without elections (as you have been at pains to stress repeatedly in our exchanges), why won't the bureaucrats simply permit democracy? What would the big deal be?

Of course, if you studied the history of the Soviet Union during the counter-revolution in late 1920s and early 1930s, you'd see that the threat of starvation, arrest, and terror used against the proletariat (not just peasants) was necessary to enforce economic decisions precisely because the workers would otherwise not go along with those decisions. They are simply not the decisions the workers would have made.

You once again seem to think that which decisions are arrived at regarding the means of production has no relationship to who controls the means of production. In your view, if the right decisions are made regarding distribution (the number of screws made, the way the social surplus is invested, etc.), what you have is socialism or at least something that theoretically could exist under socialism if only those pesky peasants were eliminated (how many peasants are left in Cuba now, anyway?).

In other words, you are the person reifying socialism. For you a socialist economy is a thing, a static state of distribution to be arrived at. Who makes the decisions is irrelevant.

Your assumption (it's an assumption because it is not supported by any evidence, logical or otherwise) that workers in the USSR and Cuba would make roughly the same decisions as the bureaucrats, except without the large bureaucratic incomes, is also highly problematic. Remember that what exists/existed in these countries was competition with non-socialist countries to keep up levels of economic productivity and to fortify its military strength (i.e., the need to extract surplus from the labor process) combined with a highly developed division of labor.

What this means at a practical level in terms of your assumption is that some workers would have to volunteer to occupy inferior positions in the division of labor--positions where the work is highly deskilled and monotonous and the pay is very low--while voluntarily conceding the more rewarding and highly paid jobs to other people. And these unlucky workers would have to make these concessions even knowing that the only difference between poor old them and the happy-go-lucky better-off workers is that the lucky workers possess *marketable* skills and talents -- skills and talents whose value is assigned by competitive market pressures to reduce pay to an absolute minimum while still ensuring reproduction -- in contrast to those poor unlucky manual laborers whose talents and skills aren't as marketable, even if their social contribution is just as important. I hope you're connected enough to reality to realize that this would never happen through a process of amicable collective decision-making. It requires coercion. It requires a state that will disempower some people and force them to do the shitty work. Again, this rigid division you want to make between base and superstructure, economic decisions and who makes those decisions, is a purely idealist construction. It is fundamentally anti-Marxist.

Why do these inferior jobs still exist? Because the division of labor, the pay rate, etc., are still determined by the law of value, the asocial logic of competition, the market drive for efficiency and surplus extraction, not by the wishes of the workers themselves to engage in fulfilling work. Incidentally, this is also the reason why market socialism, worker-managed competition between units of capital, could never work. Workers' control would result in a reorganization of work to make it more humane and rewarding, to diversify tasks, etc. All things that would cut into efficiency (this, by the way, is why Marx views a reasonable amount of abundance to be a prerequisite for socialism).


The USSR under Lenin and Trotsky was every bit as subject to the world capitalist market as was the USSR. Indeed, if anything more so, as Lenin and Trotsky, unlike Stalin, did not believe in "socialism in one country."

So it is essentially inconsistent for you to consider Soviet Russia as anything other than "state capitalist," just like under Stalin. And indeed you guys do go along with Zinoviev's notion that in abstract economic terms it was.Of course the Soviet Union was always subject to competition through the world capitalist market. This is one of the reasons why Lenin and Trotsky emphasized that their transition to socialism required a series of revolutions in the West, and that the regime could only hold out for so long without such revolutions. They thought that a failure to do so would result not in a decades-long stalling of the transition to socialism, but in its rapid reversal. And they were correct. You seem to be operating under the false notion that I think the USSR under Lenin and Trotsky was a beacon of workers' self-management and democracy in the face of international competition. It wasn't. Lenin and Trotsky presided over, to use a phrase you love, "bureaucratically degenerated workers' states" with large amounts of political substitution being necessitated in response to international competition and military threat.

The reason it was not yet a class society was that this political substitution co-existed uneasily with an economy in which the workers still exercised significant control over production, which is borne out by the much higher level of consumption goods and wages vis-a-vis capital goods and military equipment, resulting in a workforce that still largely identified with and trusted the Bolshevik regime as their own even if they didn't view it as ideal. Political power in the form of the workers' state, in other words, was not yet an alien force of class society, a force that depended upon and was derived from elite control over the means of production.


But, if the fundamental economic nature of the USSR was the same under Lenin as it was under Stalin, why on earth do you guys prefer Lenin to Stalin? It's theoretically inconsistent on your parts. Now, "workers advocate," unlike you, has a consistent line.

-M.H.-It wasn't. It evolved, and its evolution was shaped by the contradiction between the aspirations of the revolution and its leaders, and the objective conditions that the revolution confronted (namely, international competition). This is where history is important, MH. I advise you to read some, particularly Kevin Murphy's Isaac-Deutscher-Prize-winning Revolution and Counterrevolution. You seem to think that because the state continued to control the economy, that nothing "essential" changed economically. But once again, you're failing to realize that when the state directly controls the economy, issues of politics become indistinguishable from issues of economics. (Again, it's like you're trying to split off economics from politics because one is the "base" and the other is the "superstructure.") This is where a historical analysis of the evolution of the party, the Soviet state, and their changing relationship to the working classes and the processes of production is important. As Trotsky stated, the state -- and by implication, state control over the economy -- does not have a fixed meaning or content. It is a relationship and is therefore historical.

[workersadvocate]

I'll be honest. I'm quite suspicious of the accuracy and likely "spin factor" or inconvenient fact omissions in any historical narratives published by middle class leftists. I think about "who benefits" from their version of historical tale-telling. Worker-communists have very few independent (not left sect controlled) publishing houses or media outlets availed to us. Where do most leftists get published? Aren't most published leftists middle class "professional activists" or union/civil right org bureaucrats and usually part of some left-sect's leadership? Middle class leftists love publishing their many writings, and of course their writings will reflect their own aspirations and interests. Middle class left groups are going to justify a lack of workers' democracy and workers' control ovet their workplaces and the economt as a whole. Middle class people would rather drink cyanide without chaser then to accept submission and service to workers' power, an end to all of their class and social privileges, proletarianization as inescapable social imperative, and the continuous further pursuit of genuine human equality. That's why one is as likely to find a regular presence and effort by a middle class left group educating/organizing working class masses (especially within the worse off, least organized, 'uneducated', and more oppressed layers of the working class) to harness and exercise their own independent collective class power "from below", is as likely to find a hundred dollar bill floating around unnoticed on the sidewalks of a poor neighborhood. That's not their audience. If they do come to the working class at all, their aim is to get working people to do what is in the interests of their middle class orgs and leaderships (that's what "vanguard" means to them)..in other words, to exploit us working people and to keep real power out of our hands. Middle class left is another way of saying 'left-posing faction of wannabe bourgeoisie and bureaucracy', because that's what happens whenever working people rise in revolution but allow the middle class leftist leaders to trick us into letting them do the governing and coordinating and managing and thinking and writing and speaking for us. They've always got 1001 excuses for why we working people can't run anything ourselves and need benevolent master-savior elites "from above" to play "vanguard". If there was any objectively legitimate grounds for those excuses in 1917-1920s, I still find it implausible and disingenuine in most places on the planet in the 21st century...the international working class isn't insignificant and dwarfed by billions of rural peasants anymore. Half of the world's 7+billion people live in cities and the vast majority of them are working class, and they are more literate and educated and concentrated and interconnected then ever in history. So much for those proud narrow middle class fools with college degrees who say the working class is irrelevant, helpless, anachronistic or doesn't even meaningfully exist anymore! Yes, we need a vanguard (meaning the most class-conscious revolutionary element of the working class) from within our class and inseparable from our class and striving to increase the consciousness, organization and action of our entire class ( or at least as much of our class as possible) for itself and our own independent class interests. It has to actually be a vanguard inseparably exclusively of, by and for the proletariat itself. In the 21st century, we can and we must do it, ourselves alone, and any exceptional middle class people who want to help can get behind OUR proletarian vanguard and support us with their service under our class leadership, accountability and control. This time, how about real working peoples' soviets tell the parties what to do, not the other way around! This time, how about workers democratically control the workplace committees who give orders to their elected and immediately recallable workplace administrators...no more cut-off elite cappie or "red" bosses allowed (admins precariously accountably and temporarily serve the workers in such roles as tasked and conditioned by workplace committees for average workers' compensation and no more)? We could run it better and defend our gains better, as a working class actually organized and self-empowered as the ruling class, as well as the armed militia of the working class itself. Every leader is a worker, every worker is a soldier, every soldier serves the workers' republic of the working class-in-itself and class-for-itself democratically governed as our class-by-itself. We are one in pursuit of our worldwide communism...no fucking around this time.

[RedTrackWorker]

Socialism won't come through the ballot box, and the ISO has never said it will. But on the other hand, a multi-party system in the States would give the radical left a better opportunity to get its message out to the general public. That was why we supported the Nader campaign.

How would having a small capitalist party gain a place in a multi-party system help workers realize their interest as a class in overthrowing capitalism? Hell, now we have over a century of experience showing a working class-based party that isn't revolutionary doesn't help workers become class conscious, so how does helping a non-revolutionary party gain a place in a multi-party system help the working class?

The message I want gotten out wouldn't have anything to do with Nader or the Green Party.

[Olentzero]

There are some advantages to being an old vet.Exactly - 17 years in the ISO, myself. That's how I know you're talking out your ass.

You cite a post by Jimmie Higgins earlier in this thread; I presume you mean this one (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2338176&postcount=28). It contains one simple fact there that punches a huge hole in your hypothesis as to why we refused to support Nader in 2004: He sought, and got, an endorsement from Pat Buchanan's right-wing Reform Party - something he didn't do in 2000.

So let's take your hypothesis here: the ISO dropped Nader in 2004 due to liberal pressure. The converse, then, would be that not succumbing to liberal pressure meant continuing to support Nader. Therefore, the ISO would have ended up campaigning for Nader on the Reform Party ticket in states where he was unable to get onto the Green Party ticket. Describing that as problematic is a gross understatement.

So, Occam's razor time: Which is the simpler, and therefore most likely correct, explanation? The ISO went to extraordinary lengths to provide the semblance of a mask for its liberal inclinations, or they dropped support for Nader after he made at least one major decision that was a political mistake?

[RedTrackWorker]

A Stalinist *bureaucratically deformed* workers state, governing a society in between capitalism and socialism, where social relations are in transition, is pushing it back in the direction of capitalism, as events in the USSR and Eastern Europe at the end of the '80s and beginning of the '90s demonstrated once and for all.


So deformed workers' states have been pushing back in the direction of capitalism their whole existence, then how did they ever move away from capitalism? Oh right, nationalization. So a historically progressive step toward socialism can happen without workers' conscious revolution in a state that is moving backward toward capitalism since its founding?


If you can't tell that there is a basic class difference between Cuba or China or Vietnam vs. Burma or Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Egypt under Nasser, or for that matter the American post office, then you are, well, unperceptive.

I can't see the class difference between them, or between them and Libya. I can see the class difference between them and the degenerated Russian workers' state of the 30's, in which you could still have high level state officials leave the state and join the small, persecuted Fourth International--but I don't think the state of Cuba or China is more likely to contain such elements than the state of Nasser's Egypt or Qaddafi's Libya. And if the state doesn't contain such elements, then what kind of workers' state is it, however deformed?


European social democracies in the 1960s were in no sense workers states, which is why the workers rose in rebellion against them in 1968 and 1969.

Hilarious. In response to a question as to how the European social democracies are different in terms of class than the Stalinist states whose social benefits you like to extol, you point to workers' rebelling against them, but when workers rebelled against the Stalinist states you wrote them off as demanding a "free lunch". The U.S. saw the underlying class affinity with the Stalinist states when it offered them loans at good conditions to help them stabilize their rule when facing workers' rebellions.

[Jimmie Higgins]

How would having a small capitalist party gain a place in a multi-party system help workers realize their interest as a class in overthrowing capitalism? Hell, now we have over a century of experience showing a working class-based party that isn't revolutionary doesn't help workers become class conscious, so how does helping a non-revolutionary party gain a place in a multi-party system help the working class?

The message I want gotten out wouldn't have anything to do with Nader or the Green Party.

Well you can't separate this question from it's context. I think your evidence is probably of existing workers movements being channeled into supporting reform parties rather than revolutionary ones. Yes, that's not a step forward. But where was a large worker's movement in 2004? Probably at a Kerry rally.

If the point was electoralism, as you suggest, then we probably would have supported Peace and Freedom or something like that because at least issue by issue we'd probably agree more with them than the Green party.

The two party system is one of the ways the US ruling class maintains it's ideological hegemony over society. A break-away to the left of the Democrats after the 80s and 90s would have allowed more politics to emerge and get aired in the mainstream. A candidate talking about repealing anti-labor laws after Clinton's years would have created a space for rank and file union workers to argue that supporting the Democrats isn't actually the best ways unions can fight etc. The same with social movements, if the Democrats don't have a monopoly on what is acceptably realistic to talk about in the mainstream, it would have been a boost for people wanting to pull away from NGO or pressure-group style activism. Breaking the hold of the Democrats would mean that it would be more difficult for them to reign-in and de-fang movements as they emerged.

[Lucretia]

Quote out of context, just as I thought. Previous paragraph:

"There is no other standard yet than 'bourgeois right." To this extent (all bolding my emphasis), a form of state is still necessary."

In addition, in the International Publishers version I'm quoting from (p. 78), the last two sentences of your quote are translated rather differently:

"But the state has not yet altogether withered away, since there still remains the protection of 'bourgeois right,' which sanctifies actual inequality. For the complete extinction of the state, complete Communism is necessary."

In other words, Lenin is saying that in a socialist society, the first stage of communism, you'll have a faint shadow of a state, some sort of judicial apparatus to adjudicate wage rates and such (or rather labor certificate rates, if you want to be technical), according to the principle "to each according to his work" as opposed to the fully communist principle "to each according to his need."

But no army, no police, no jails!

In short, none of those "armed bodies of men," whom according to Lenin are the essence of the state!

And not much of a government bureaucracy for that matter, no elections, no parliaments, no presidents.

This is dogmatic twisting of Lenin's words on your part in exactly the same fashion as Stalin employed in his attempts to prove that Lenin believed in socialism in one country!



Well, firstly, as I already commented, there simply can be no "workers control" in a society where there is no working class, even if you technically have some ultra-faint shadow of a state. So your positiing of "workers control" in a socialist society is just more of your illiteracy. It is simply not a meaningful phrase except in a non-socialist society.

But, as it happens, it turns out my source, not NH, is posted to the web, so here is the the piece, which you may now subject to your critique, if you are serious.

It's on the website of the International Bolshevik Tendency, http://www.bolshevik.org/

However, due to the peculiar way they have organized their website, there's no separate link for it. You have to do a bit of clicking to get to it from the above link, first on "Marxist Archives" then on an "other Spartacist articles" type link, then on "Leninism and Workers Control."

So here it is in full.

******************************************
Leninism and Workers Control
By Joseph Seymour
Workers Vanguard no 162, 17 June 1977

The following article is based on a talk by Joseph Seymour at a West Coast Spartacus Youth League educational in mid-March 1977
There is probably no question in contemporary left-wing politics where greater confusion, both substantive and terminological, reigns than over "workers control." Of the several forms of confusion, the most dangerous is a stagist conception of workers control as the link between day-to-day trade-union militancy and revolutionary dual power, as the necessary, first step toward the seizure of state power. Workers control is not a demand which communist trade unionists agitate for and seek to implement every day in every way. It is only appropriate to a qualitatively different, higher level of class struggle.

Workers control—dual power at the point of production—is an aspect, usually secondary, of a generalized revolutionary crisis. With one exception—Italy in 1969—workers control has emerged only after, not before, the government was overthrown and the repressive state apparatus was in disarray: Russia 1917, Germany 1918, Spain 1936, Portugal 1974-75. And in Italy’s "Hot Autumn" in 1969, workers control was a subordinate aspect of a mass strike wave centered on economic demands.

There are four characteristic kinds of confusion. The most important is an attempt to exploit terminological ambiguity in the service of a reformist programmatic conception. This is the trade unionization of workers control. In the conventional sense, trade unions normally exercise some control over the conditions of production, job standards and the like. Trotsky, who was very precise in his programmatic formulations, always speaks of "workers control of production" or "of industry" to distinguish this concept from the kind of control that trade unions normally exercise.
In a recent article, "Nuclear Power and the Workers Movement" (WV No. 146, 25 February), we demanded "trade-union control of safety conditions in all industrial situations." This is not a call for generalized dual power at the industrial level. Rather it is a strong trade-union demand. Many unions in many countries have forced management to adhere to a thick rulebook specifying safety standards. This is not "workers control of production." Of course, it is in the interests of reformists and centrists to blur the distinction between this type of trade-union control of working conditions and generalized dual power at the point of production signaling a revolutionary situation.

A second source of confusion is more purely terminological. "Control" is a word which exists in many Indo-European languages with similar but not identical meanings. In European languages other than English, "to control" means to check or monitor the actions of another. For example, the functionary who checks tickets on French trains is called the controleur de ballets. However, in English the term "control" means to administer or direct. While in other languages "workers control" is distinct from and weaker than "workers management," in English the two are usually identified. Thus English-speaking Trotskyists sometimes confuse these two qualitatively different concepts. For example, Felix Morrow in his Revolution and Counterrevolution in Spain uses "workers control" to describe what was actually workers management of nominally nationalized enterprises.

A third area of confusion centers on workers management, which is neither identical with nor necessarily occurs under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Our program is not workers management, but rather the management or administration by a workers government of a centrally directed and planned economy.

It is possible for generalized workers management or, more precisely, self-management to exist as another, distinct form of dual power. Workers control is dual power within the production unit; management is still trying to reassert its traditional authority. In Italy 1969 there were pitched battles of Fiat workers against Fiat foremen and company goons—that’s what we mean by workers control or dual power. Workers management, by contrast, occurs when the bourgeois management abandons the productive units to the workers, while the latter are not subject to economic administration by the state. It is obvious that such an extraordinary situation can occur only when a proletarian state power has not yet consolidated its rule (Bolshevik Russia in late 1917-early 1918) or in a civil war under a weak bourgeois "popular front" government (Spain 1936-37). Workers management is then a situation of dual power between the productive units and the government, which may be either proletarian or bourgeois. The government’s monopoly over the mechanisms of finance is invariably the Achilles heel of workers management.

A fourth point of confusion concerns "workers control" as an institution under a democratically governed workers state with a centralized planned economy. The terminological identity of this concept with "workers control" in a revolutionary, dual-power situation is codified in the Transitional Program and reflects the political language of the Russian experience. That the same term refers to two fundamentally different programmatic concepts is inherently confusing and ideally should be avoided. However, it would be ineffectual scholasticism for us to invent and use different terms.

Nevertheless, comrades must understand the difference. Workers control under socialist economic planning is an authoritative consultative voice at the point of production. It is absolutely not counterposed or antagonistic to the managerial hierarchy of the workers government. The notion that "workers control" has the selfsame character during a revolutionary offensive against capitalism and in a workers state is an economist or syndicalist deviation.

Workers control is not a demand made upon the employer or state; it is a condition of struggle. Workers control cannot be incorporated into a trade-union contract or otherwise institutionalized. By its very nature workers control posits open-ended struggle between workers and management. Comrade Douglas’ document captures well the difference between strong trade unionism and workers control. Putting assembly-line speed in the contract is a strong trade-union demand; workers control means determining line speed against management’s will. A union hiring hall is a strong trade-union demand; workers control is forcing management to hire more people than it wants to employ. These are real and significant differences.

Because workers control cannot be institutionalized, it is wrong to call for workers control in a particular firm or industry as a programmatic norm. In a revolutionary, situation, of course, certain firms and industries are in the vanguard of workers control struggles--the Putilov metalworks in St. Petersburg in 1917, Fiat in Turin in 1969, the Lisnave shipyards in Lisbon in 1974-75. However, a call to action on a particular firm in a revolutionary period is different from a programmatic norm.
Pabloite Revisionism

The leading exponents of reformist and stagist conceptions of workers control are the European Pabloites. In Britain the best-known left-wing advocates of workers control are two freelancing independent Pabloites, Ken Coates and Tony Topham of the Institute for Workers’ Control. The very name reveals a reformist conception. Think of the Institute for Revolutionary Dual Power in Industry! The purely social-democratic nature of the Coates/Topham project is spelled out openly:
"The aims of the Institute for Workers’ Control shall be ... to assist in the formation of Workers’ Control groups dedicated to the development of democratic consciousness, to the winning of support for Workers’ Control in all existing organizations of Labour, to the challenging of undemocratic actions wherever they may occur, and the extension of democratic control over industry and the economy itself..."
—Bulletin of the Institute for Workers’ Control, Vol. 1, No. 1 (no date)
A far more sophisticated exponent of a reformist, stagist position on workers control than the "industrial democrat" Coates is Ernest Mandel. Labeling workers’ control an "anti-capitalist structural reform," he presents it as an institutionalized aspect of trade-union bargaining:
"Workers’ control is the affirmation by the workers of a refusal to let the management dispose freely of the means of production and labour power.... It is a refusal to enter discussions with the management or the government as a whole on the division of the national income, so long as the workers have not acquired the ability to reveal the way the capitalists cook up the books when they talk of prices and profits."
—"Lessons of May," New Left Review, November-December 1968
Mandel simply trivializes workers control as an appendage to every kind of social struggle normally occurring in capitalist society:
"The struggle for workers’ control--with which the strategy of anti-capitalist structural reforms, the struggle for a transitional programme, is largely identified—must... keep close to the preoccupations of the masses, must constantly arise from the everyday reality experienced by the workers, their wives, the students and revolutionary intellectuals." [our emphasis]
—Ibid.
The anti-revolutionary nature of Mandel’s position is clear when he attempts to inject workers control into the French May 1968 general strike. I read the following passage several times because I didn’t understand it. This is because it’s inherently confused and confusing, grafting a reformist, stagist concept of workers control onto a revolutionary dual power situation:
"The general strike of May 1968 ... offers us an excellent example of the key importance of this problem. Ten million workers were out on strike. They occupied their factories. If they were moved by the desire to do away with many of the social injustices heaped up by the Gaullist regime in the ten years of its existence, they were obviously aiming beyond simple wage scale demands."
It is significant that Mandel does not see the strikers as having a revolutionary anti-capitalist impulse, merely wanting to eliminate "many" (sic) of the social injustices associated with the Gaullist regime. He goes on:
"But if the workers did not feel like being satisfied with immediate demands, they also did not have any exact idea of what they did want. Had they been educated in the preceding years and months in the spirit [sic] of workers’ control, they would have known what to do: elect a committee in every plant that would begin by opening the company books; calculate for themselves the various companies’ real manufacturing costs and rates of profit; establish a right of veto on hiring and firing and on any changes in the organization of the work."
—"The Debate on Workers’ Control," International Socialist Review, May-June 1969
But for there to be "workers control of production" there must be production. A functioning workers control committee during a general strike would be scabbing! Workers control and a general strike are two mutually exclusive economic-military tactics, which usually arise in very different situations. As we shall see, workers control is usually an attempt to maintain production in the face of employer sabotage, the disruption of war or severe economic crisis.

The call for workers control during the French May events would not merely have been wrong and confusionist, but dangerous and liquidationist. Under those conditions, the French ruling class would have promised considerable concessions toward workers control--open books, union veto on firing, the right to beat up foremen and all kinds of good things—if only the workers ended the general strike and defused the political crisis.

Mandel himself drew out the liquidationist consequences of his call for workers control during the French May-June 1968 events in an article published at that time:
"It is here that the strategy of ‘anticapitalist structural reforms,’ transition demands, assumes all its validity. The masses cannot seize power in the factories and neighborhoods; that calls for a new and centralized revolutionary leadership that does not as yet exist. But the fact that the masses are not yet in a position to seize power does not at all imply the impossiblity of winning, right now, demands over and above wage increases.
"The workers hold the factories and nerve centers of the nation.... They must immediately establish a de facto power that the bosses and the state cannot cancel out once ‘calm’ has been restored....
"This de facto power consists in democratically elected committees which establish workers control overall production....
"These committees should decide which enterprises would begin operating again, and to what end—that is, exclusively to fill the needs of the working population. They should have veto power over every investment project." [our emphasis]
—"From the Bankruptcy of Neocapitalism to the Struggle for the Socialist Revolution," in Revolt in France (1968)
The French 1968 general strike is a perfect example of when a stagest concept of workers control is dangerous. Workers control would have meant a lowering of the level of class struggle. It would have been equivalent to abandoning a major battle on the verge of victory and retreating into guerrilla war. The correct revolutionary demand for the French May events was the unification and centralization of the strike committees as embryonic soviets, bypassing a distinct period of workers control.
Trotsky on Germany 1931

Trotsky’s 1931 article, "Workers’ Control of Production," is absolutely unambiguous that workers control is not a reform, but a manifestation of dual power in a revolutionary situation:
"Control can be imposed only by force upon the bourgeoisie, by a proletariat on the road to the moment of taking power from them, and then also ownership of the means of production. Thus the regime of workers’ control, a provisional, transitional regime by its very essence, can correspond only to the period of the convulsing of the bourgeois state, the proletarian offensive, and the falling back of the bourgeoisie, that is, to a period of the proletarian revolution in the fullest sense of the word."
However, taken out of historic context and read superficially, Trotsky’s article could be interpreted as positing workers control as a necessary or normal early stage of a revolutionary crisis.

Amid Trotsky’s voluminous writings on revolutionary strategy and tactics, there is only one substantive article on workers control—concerning Germany in 1931. Why did Trotsky bring to the fore the demand for workers control at that particular place and time? Why did he consider factory committees rather than soviets as the most likely form of dual power? Why did he regard workers control rather than a mass strike wave or street fighting as the probable initial form of confrontation with bourgeois authority?

First, the economic conditions militated against the strike tactic. Given a sharp and worsening depression, the tasks of the workers were to prevent plant closures, lockouts and increased unemployment.
Apart from economic conjunctural considerations, Trotsky’s position on workers control was governed by the relations of the Communist Party (CP), which he considered bureaucratic centrist with a potential for revolutionary renewal, to the Social Democrats on the one hand and to the Nazis on the other. In most circumstances the strength of the workers movement against the employers is roughly in line with its strength against the state. Try having a work action in Brazil, Iran or South Korea. However, in Germany 1931 the power of the workers in the shops was far greater than in the streets. The Communists alone, a minority of the proletariat, could not overcome the Nazi stormtroopers; the CP’s sectarianism and the Social Democrats’ legalism prevented united military action against the fascists. However, the Nazi writ did not run into the factories so that in military terms resistance to workers control was far less than to other forms of a proletarian offensive.

The German Social Democrats associated soviets with Communist rule and would have opposed them as a united-front form. The "Third Period" Stalinists refused to work in the Social Democratic-dominated trade unions. The factory committees were the only existing common organizations of Social Democratic and Communist workers. Thus Trotsky saw in the factory committees and workers control the path of least resistance for a united proletarian offensive. His advocacy of workers control was not a universal tactical schema, but a concrete form for a united front of a deeply divided workers movement against the growing fascist threat. If one abstracts Trotsky’s position from the concrete conjuncture and political alignment in Germany 1931, one is liable to project a false tactical schema involving the fetishization of workers control.
The Bolsheviks and Workers Control

The Bolshevik Revolution and Spanish civil war witnessed the most profound workers control struggles and the only experiences of widespread workers self-management. Therefore the assimilation of these two historic experiences is essential to understand our programmatic positions on the question.

Unlike the Russian revolution of 1905, 1917 was not marked by mass strikes. The workers knew that the war had severely damaged and dislocated the Russian economy, industry was on the verge of collapse due to breakdowns and shortages, and the urban population was threatened by famine. Workers control arose primarily to counter capitalist neglect and sabotage, rather than to extract economic concessions. Lenin’s strong support for workers control in this period was motivated by a conservative economic purpose. In a major article, significantly entitled "The Impending Catastrophe and How To Fight It" (September 1917), he states:
"Control, supervision and accounting are the prime prerequisites for combatting catastrophe and famine. This is indisputable and universally recognised. And it is just what is not being done from fear of encroaching on the supremacy of the landowners and capitalists, on their immense, fantastic and scandalous profits...." [emphasis in original]
Shortly after coming to power, the Bolshevik government issued two decrees (14 November and 13 December) designed to institutionalize the dual power already existing within Russian factories. The second decree details the powers of the control commissions:
"The control commission of each enterprise is to establish the amount of materials, fuel, equipment, workers and technicians, etc., required for production, the actual stock in hand and labor available; to estimate the prospects of carrying on or closing down; to maintain labor discipline; to check whether buying and selling conform to state regulations; to watch over productivity, and assist in ascertaining production costs, etc.
"Decisions of the control commission designed to secure the conditions for its operation are binding on the owner." [our emphasis]
It also stipulates that direct management remains in the owners’ hands and that the control commission has no right to expropriate the enterprises on its own:
"The owner retains his managerial rights over the administration and operation of the enterprise. The control commission does not take part in the administration of the enterprise and is not responsible for its operation.... The control commission may, through its higher authorities, raise the question of sequestration of an enterprise or any other compulsory measure with the economic state organs, but it has no right itself to seize and administer an enterprise."—reproduced in Margaret Dewar, Labour Policy in the USSR 1917-1928 (1956)
Why did Lenin put forth a policy he later described as a "contradictory and incomplete measure"? Lenin’s position on workers control is incomprehensible unless one realizes that he was opposed to the nationalization of industry in the short term. He defended this policy as late as spring 1918 against left communist opponents (Bukharin, Radek, Ossinsky). The Bolshevik government did not have available the technical/managerial apparatus capable of administering a socialized, planned economy. Lenin believed that through a combination of concessions and pressure Russia’s capitalists could be made to serve the new Soviet state. Workers control commissions were projected as the lowest level of state economic administration. Secondly, Lenin considered workers control a school to train a proletarian managerial cadre, who could take over the administration of a socialized economy in a gradual, orderly and efficient way.

The Bolshevik attempt to institutionalize workers control broke down almost immediately. Capitalists hostile to soviet power abandoned their factories for counterrevolutionary intrigue. Workers, in turn hostile and distrustful toward their employers, drove them out and took over the factories. Frequently instructions from the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh) not to expropriate an enterprise were met with the response that it has already been done. In the months following the October Revolution, workers control gave way to workers self-management imposed from below.

The instructions of VSNKh to the individual factory committees concerning production and distribution were frequently disregarded. The factory committees sought to maximize enterprise income through unbridled competition for supplies and markets. A Bolshevik leader of the Metal Workers Union, writing in late 1917, described the situation as follows:
"Another proprietor came, who was equally an individualist and anti-social as the former one, and the name of the new proprietor was the control committee. In the Donetz area, the metal works and mines refused to supply each other with coal and iron on credit, selling the iron to the peasants without regard for the needs of the State."
—quoted in Maurice Dobb, Soviet Economic Development Since 1917 (1948)
Another Bolshevik trade unionist in November 1917 summarizes the situation thus:
"Workers control by itself is an anarchistic attempt to achieve socialism in one enterprise, and actually leads to clashes among the workers themselves and to the refusal of fuel, metal, etc. to one another."
—quoted in Paul Avrich, The Russian Revolution and Factory Committees (unpublished doctoral dissertation, 1961)
These quotes are somewhat onesided. The recourse of the factory committees to unrestrained atomized competition did not primarily express either parochial self-centeredness or anarcho-syndicalist prejudices, though both were present. Rather the economic situation reflected the new Bolshevik government’s lack of authority and organization amid the anarchic turmoil of revolution. The workers in the mass supported Lenin’s government to one degree or another, but questioned its viability and permanence. It was understandable for individual factory committees to refuse to sell on credit to a government they believed would not be around long enough to pay.

The disastrous effect of workers self-management and the exigencies of the looming civil war convinced most workers of the need for centralized economic direction. The institution of "war communism" met with general support and little resistance.

The onset of full-scale civil war in mid-1918 led to wholesale nationalization and the subordination of the factory committees to centralized economic direction. However, the main reason that Lenin had earlier opposed general nationalization remained. The Bolshevik government did not have an apparatus capable of administering a nationalized, centralized industry. So it turned to the one politically loyal organization which had a hierarchy conforming to the industrial structure—the trade unions. The economy under "war communism" was administered by the trade unions, not by a separate state body. Industrial management by the trade unions, traditional workers organizations, had the further advantage of allaying syndicalist prejudices against the new soviet state power.

The threat of white terror strengthened the loyalty of the workers to Bolshevik rule and generated a spirit of self-sacrifice. Economic administration by the unions worked fairly well. A policy originally undertaken as a practical expedient was accepted as a programmatic norm for a workers state. The new Bolshevik program adopted at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919 stipulated the trade unions would be the basic organ of economic administration. Point 5 of the section entitled "In the sphere of economics" states:
"The organizing apparatus of socialized industry must first of all rest upon the trade unions. The latter must free themselves from the narrow guild outlook and transform themselves into large productive combinations comprising the majority, and gradually all the workers of a given branch of production."
—Robert H. McNeal, ed., Decisions and Resolutions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1974)
This programmatic statement would cause much trouble a few years later.
The overwhelming economic exigencies of the civil war suppressed any differences within the Bolshevik party over the optimal organization of a workers state, of the relations between the government administration, the trade unions and other workers organizations. Such differences exploded with the end of the civil war in early 1921 amid a mass reaction against the severe austerity and commandism of "war communism."
The Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 saw the semi-syndicalist Workers Opposition advocate the administration of the economy by autonomous tradeunions. Trotsky, short-sightedly concerned with rehabilitating the economy as speedily as possible, advocated the total statification of the unions, liquidating them as autonomous, internally democratic bodies. Lenin, whose views prevailed, occupied a middle position. He insisted on the direct administration of the economy of the state. He also supported autonomous trade unions to represent the interests of specific groups of workers vis-à-vis the government administration hierarchy, which was capable of bureaucratic abuses as well as errors.

Only with the institution of the New Economic Policy in 1921 did the Bolshevik government acquire its own distinct organs of economic administration. This freed the unions to defend the consumerist interests of specific groups of workers. The Labor Code of 1922 stipulated that wages and working conditions be determined by collective bargaining between the unions and state employers.

The early 1920’s also saw the introduction of a new form of workers control as an authoritative consultative voice designed to increase productivity. Production conferences of the entire work force elected standing control commissions to oversee that their recommendations were carried out. The Stalini’st political counterrevolution eroded and eventually suppressed the control commissions, as it did the trade unions and all other independent proletarian bodies.

The Trotskyist Left Opposition in its 1927 "Platform" calls attention to the atrophying of workers control and the growing indifference of the workers toward productivity:
"The production conferences are gradually being reduced to nothing. The majority of the practical proposals adopted by the workers are never carried out. Among many of these workers a distaste for these production conferences is nourished by the fact that the improvements which they do succeed in introducing often result in a reduction of the number of workers."
The "Platform of the Joint Opposition" called for strengthening the control commissions:
"The functions of the control commissions of the production councils must be extended to include supervising the execution of their decisions and investigating their success in protecting the workers’ interests."
The 1938 Transitional Program incorporated workers control in the consultative sense as a programmatic norm in a workers state, an integral part of proletarian democracy and rational economic planning.
Workers Management in the Spanish Civil War

While workers management in the Bolshevik revolution was a short-lived, anarchic episode, workers management was a central element in the Spanish revolution and civil war. Following the defeated military coup of July 1936 most of Spain’s capitalists either fled or were driven out into the areas controlled by Franco’s army. Workers management became widespread throughout Spain and dominant in Catalonia (which then accounted for 70 percent of Spanish industry) where the labor movement was dominated by the anarcho-syndicalists through their trade-union federation, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). Workers management was legalized by the Collectivization Decree of October 1936.
The anarchist masses did not look upon workers management as a temporary situation or expedient caused by the civil war, but as the realization of their ideal program. They believed the libertarian millennium had arrived. Despite this very different political attitude, the initial experience of workers management in Spain resembled that of Russia in 1917-18. The anarchist-managed collectives acted like competing producer cooperatives. In those collectives which inherited ample material and financial reserves, which had new equipment and enjoyed favorable market demand, the workers’ incomes were relatively high. In those collectives without these advantages, the workers suffered accordingly. The situation is well described by Gaston Leval, a French anarchist and prominent CNT militant at the time:
"Too often in Barcelona and Valencia, workers in each undertaking took over the factory, the works, or the workshop, the machines, raw materials, and taking advantage of the continuation of the money system and normal capitalist commercial relations, organised production on their own account, selling for their own benefit the produce of their labour....
"There was not, therefore, true socialisation, but a workers’ neo-capitalism, a self-management straddling capitalism and socialism, which we maintain would not have occured had the Revolution been able to extend itself fully under the direction of our Svndicates."
—Collectives in the Spanish Revolution (1975)
The anarcho-syndicalist cadre, like Leval, were dismayed that the "libertarian" collectives reproduced the irrationality and inegalitarianism of the capitalist market, a situation which also impeded the war against Franco. The CNT hierarchy more-or-less successfully countered the anarchic parochialism of the collectives and imposed some centralized economic direction. In general, the anarcho-syndicalist workers regarded the enterprises as belonging to the CNT as a whole, not to the individual collectives. Through the CNT, the Spanish workers achieved miracles of economic organization. In Catalonia, which had no metal-working industry, the CNT collectives built a munitions industry from the ground up. The Spanish proletariat displayed outstanding labor discipline, self-sacrifice and ingenuity. This is one of the factors that caused Trotsky, in arguing for the unique significance of the Bolshevik Party, to state that in their mass consciousness the Spanish proletariat stood higher, not lower, than the Russian workers of 1917-18.

The CNT attempted, with mixed success, to combine the individual enterprises into vertically-integrated industrial syndicates (e.g., textiles, wood products). However, all the CNT collectives—individual factories, multi-enterprise industrial syndicates (like the light textile syndicate in Alcoy), transport and utilities—had to relate to the rest of the economy through capitalist commercial methods.

Were the CNT collectives economically viable? Those collectives which had a relatively self-contained production process, supplied a localized market, enjoyed a monopolistic position and a large, regular cash flow were generally "profitable." The pride of the CNT industrial collectives was the Barcelona tramways syndicate, a localized monopoly supplying an essential service for immediate cash payment. But those collectives which were part of a long chain of production, imported raw materials, sold on long-term credits or to the government (e.g., the munitions industry) were not economically viable without state support and cooperation. Such collectives were critically dependent upon state credit and, therefore, on parties hostile to workers management and the anarcho-syndicalist masses. One justification the anarchist leaders advanced for entering the central Popular Front government was to secure state finance for the CNT collectives.

The collectives were naturally the most resolute defenders of workers management. Despite the attitudes of the workers and given the absence of a planned, socialized economy, the collectives had an organic tendency to become competing producer cooperatives.

The CNT bureaucracy administered the collectives partly in the interests of what it considered economic rationality and partly to carry out the bidding of its Popular Front partners. The CNT did on behalf of the bourgeois Popular Front government what the Russian trade unions did on behalf of the Bolshevik government; it disciplined the anarchic, localist tendencies of the collectives in the interests of the government’s economic objectives.

The "expanded economic plenum" of the CNT in January 1938 adopted a series of measures resembling "war communism." These measures, of course, grossly violated anarcho-syndicalist principles. An inspectorate was created to "put forward the expected norms which will effectively orientate the different industrial units with a view to improving their economy and administration..." (quoted in Vernon Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution [1972]). These inspectors had the right to sanction the elected factory committees. The plenum also empowered managers to dismiss workers for lateness, absence and failure to meet work norms, as well as those labeled "troublemakers" who "create dissensions between the workers and the managers or the trade union representatives."

The Popular Front government, with the Stalinists in the vanguard, recognized in the factory committees and workers management a locus of independent proletarian power capable of challenging its authority. Therefore the basic policy of the Popular Front was to liquidate workers management and statify the CNT collectives. The CNT was too powerful to achieve this end by direct administrative/military action, so the government resorted to economic sabotage. Capital equipment was requisitioned from the collectives on the pretext that they were needed for the war effort. Leval recounts an incident where the War Ministry, requisitioned two modern milling machines from the Barcelona tramways syndicate. Later it was discovered the ministry had a secret cache of some 40 comparable machines.

The primary method by which the Popular Front sabotaged workers management was through its control of finances. The government literally starved the workers in the CNT collectives. Leval describes how this was done:
"And when, in Catalonia, the Communist leader Comorera became Minister of Finance after the May Days, the means of struggle he adopted were original. It was clear that it was quite impossible to destroy the outstanding influence of the Syndicates of the C.N.T. To attempt to do so would have paralysed production overnight. So, Comorera had recourse to two complementary procedures; on the one hand he deprived the factories of raw materials or deliveries did not arrive on time, thus resulting in production delays which were knowingly criticised; on the other hand they paid for deliveries of cloth, clothing, arms, etc., with a delay which affected the workers’ own budgets. As the wages were distributed under the supervision of the Syndicates, it was against the delegates of the C.N.T. and against the organism of which they were the representatives that the discontent of one section of the workers was directed."
—Collectives in the Spanish Revolution
The turning point of the Spanish revolution, the "May Days" in Barcelona, was precipitated by a military attack by the Popular Front government on workers management. The CNT collective which ran the telephone system was especially irritating to the Popular Front because it enabled the anarchist workers to listen in on communications between the central ministries in Valencia and their Catalan counterparts. On 3 May 1937 the Stalinist commissar of public order in Catalonia, Rodriguez Sala, attempted an armed assault on the Telefónica building. The infuriated response of the Barcelona workers--a massive general strike including the erection of street barricades--was on the verge of sweeping away the government forces when the anarchist ministers, Garcia Oliver and Federica Montseny, intervened to arrange a truce. This gave the central government time to send 6,000 Civil Guards to occupy Barcelona.

In the rightist reaction which followed, the POUM leader Andrés Nin and anarchist Camillo Berneri were assassinated among others, the left-centrist POUM was suppressed and the anarchists were expelled from the government (although they remained loyal to the Popular Front). The "May Days" broke the back of the vanguard of the proletariat; the liquidation of the revolutionary dual power established in July 1936, including workers management, followed apace.

The Trotskyist position toward workers management in the Spanish revolution is governed by the fact that it constituted a form of proletarian dual power in relation to an essentially bourgeois government. While criticizing and opposing anarcho-syndicalist doctrine, we would be the most resolute defenders of workers management in practice, far more so than the treacherous CNT bureaucracy. While maintaining and stepping up production for the war of the Republic against Franco, a Trotskyist leadership would have refused and resisted the Stalinist-inspired state requisitions of capital equipment on the pretext of furthering the war effort. Trotskyists would have demanded the ouster of official representatives of the Popular Front government from all bodies administering the collectives. Above all, the Trotskyists would also have explained that genuine socialization of production required the overthrow of the Popular Front (no less than the defeat of Franco’s army) and the establishment of a planned economy administered by a workers government.

The contrasting experiences of Russia 1917-21 and Spain 1936-39 indicate that our attitude toward workers control and management depends above all on the class nature of the state power, and secondarily on the development of the revolution from a proletarian offensive against capitalist rule to the consolidation of a workers government administering a centralized, planned economy.

I feel the need to respond to this ridiculous slander that my position on the state is Stalinist. Engels and Lenin clearly stated there would be a state, a specialized body of coercion (or as Lenin called it, "the organized, systematic use of force against persons"), in the lower stage of communism primarily as a means of enforcing the remnants of "bourgeois law" in the realm of distribution. It is thus a state in the most general sense, of having the form of a distinct institution of coercion. But it will not be a state in the more specific sense of standing above society as an alien force that stamps the logic of exploitation and brutality differentially on various classes (for there will be no class antagonisms, as there will be no classes under socialism). The state will operate democratically, will enforce collectively made decisions on individuals who attempt to subvert or avoid democratic decisions, and will thus not be an agent of class rule. (It will will assume an "alien will" only from the perspective of anti-social individuals, not entire classes or of society as a whole.) But it is still a state in the general sense of the term Lenin and Engels ascribed to it. All of this is perfectly in line with the texts of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and is not Stalinist in any way.

As for your remarks on workers' control vs. workers' management, the piece in question is useful. However it tries to erect to the level of universal principle various programmatic statements Lenin made in response to specific historical conjunctures. Depending on the context, workers' control over production may need to be exercised more by centralized but nevertheless democratically accountable state institutions (remember -- the state will exist even in the lower phase of communism, just not in the "political sense" as a mechanism for facilitating class exploitation) than by a more diffuse, decentralized level of the individual workplace democracy (what the piece called workers' self-management).

It's not that one is good or the other is bad, one is realistic and the other is utopian. The ultimate objective in a communist society is workers' control in the sense of workers' self-management ("when people have become so accustomed to observing the fundamental rules of social intercourse and when their labor has become so productive that they will voluntarily work according to their ability" -- i.e., under their own management, not that of any external authority). But this goal cannot be achieved immediately after a workers' revolution because as Lenin acknowledged, many people had not been habituated into looking out for the common good, to making decisions on the basis of social needs rather than the needs of one specific workplace.

It is also important to note that even in the transition to workers' self-management under the higher-phase of communism, workers are still collectively to exercise authority over work-places through their control over the state. It's still, in other words, the workers who are making the decisions, just at a more centralized level that will hopefully prevent them from acting as little miniature capitalists looking out for only their own interests to the exclusion of the rest of society. The fact that Lenin was unequivocal in viewing workers' control as essential to socialism is evident in his position in the trade union debate, the position that Trotsky later acknowledged was correct: because bureaucratic political substitution was unavoidable at the level of the state (which resulted in disempowering workers), it was important to maintain unions in part because they could act as an independent institution through which workers could assert some degree of control at the level of the workplace and thereby offset the bureaucratic distortions at the level of the state. Lenin recognized that even during the period of the transition socialism was not about the right economic decisions being made, regardless of who makes them -- in a way that allow socialist economics to flourish even when workers were disempowered.

[RedTrackWorker]

To Jimmie Higgins:
My evidence isn't "existing workers movements being channeled into supporting reform parties"--it's that the goal of revolutionary Marxism as I understand it requires the working class coming to consciousness of their interests and tasks through their experience of struggle.

James Cannon said it quite well I think:

It has been argued here that ‘we must go through the experiences with the workers.' That is a very good formula, provided you do not make it universal. We go with the workers only through those experiences which have a class nature. We go with them through the experiences of strikes, even though we may think a given strike untimely. We may even go with the workers through the experience of putting a reformist labor party in office, provided it is a real labor party and subject to certain pressures of the workers, in order that they may learn from their experience that reformism is not the correct program for the working class.
But we do not go through the experience of class collaboration with the workers. There we draw the line. We did not go through the experience of the workers when they supported the imperialist war. We drew back when they went through the experience of people's fronts in Europe. We stood on the side and we told them they were wrong. We did not compromise ourselves. If another man takes poison, you do not have to join him in the experiment. Just tell him it is no good. But don't offer to prove it by your personal example.

How did telling workers to vote for a capitalist party in 2000 help them learn through experience that reformism wasn't an answer and a workers' revolution is necessary? You say, "A break-away to the left of the Democrats after the 80s and 90s would have allowed more politics to emerge and get aired in the mainstream"--well, sure, that's so vaguely put that it can't be proven false--but our criteria isn't a greater diversity in dialogue--which I already pointed out most Western European countries already have--but increasing class consciousness, increasing consciousness of the necessity of socialist revolution.

Your particular point "A candidate talking about repealing anti-labor laws after Clinton's years would have created a space for rank and file union workers to argue that supporting the Democrats isn't actually the best ways unions can fight" is strikingly weak as both Clinton and Obama promised labor law reform so I fail to understand how a candidate talking about labor law reform is a means to argue against supporting Democrats. Maybe Nader had bigger reforms in mind (I don't know) but from that kind of pragmatic angle, a worker could reasonably say to you, "Well, sure Nader's promising bigger reforms but this other guy has more of a chance of winning and implementing his smaller promises"--what would you say to that worker? Oh, that you can't trust the Democrats, see how often they've betrayed. Worker: "So I can trust Nader?" You (?): "Breaking the hold of the Democrats would mean that it would be more difficult for them to reign-in and de-fang movements as they emerged."

Well, yes breaking the hold of the Democrats by helping establish a different left capitalist party would make it more difficult for the Democrats to do their job...and make it easier for the new left capitalist party to do it. Again, you can refer to countries that have multi-party systems to see this process.

I don't know a more patient way to sum this up other than saying voting for Nader in 2000 would've been good for recruiting on campuses but has nothing in common with the principles, strategies or tactics of the revolutionary workers' movement, lessons paid for with blood time and time again.

[Jimmie Higgins]

To Jimmie Higgins:
it's that the goal of revolutionary Marxism as I understand it requires the working class coming to consciousness of their interests and tasks through their experience of struggle.And when the working class is more or less passive and struggle is low but at the same time class anger is high?


How did telling workers to vote for a capitalist party in 2000 help them learn through experience that reformism wasn't an answer and a workers' revolution is necessary? You say, "A break-away to the left of the Democrats after the 80s and 90s would have allowed more politics to emerge and get aired in the mainstream"--well, sure, that's so vaguely put that it can't be proven false--but our criteria isn't a greater diversity in dialogue--which I already pointed out most Western European countries already have--but increasing class consciousness, increasing consciousness of the necessity of socialist revolution.As Marxist socialists we believe that revolution will ultimately be necessary and we were upfront about that and our politics, why we chose to support this effort at confronting the Democratic party is because we saw such a development as something that advanced the possibility of better conditions for class consciousness and potentially organization to develop on a wider scale.

Yes breaking a monopoly of the two capitalist parties would open up politics in a general way and yes, this is not a cure-all as Europe and other countries show. But in many of these countries the existence of these other reformist parties allows a greater audience for revolutionary ideas and consequentially there is more of a revolutionary left in many of these places. The Bolsheviks spent so much energy debating and polemicising because they were not only trying to win people from existing reformist parties and currents but also at many points from other revolutionary non-marxist politics and parties. Our immediate tasks are not at all at that level yet for the most part because there has been over the last generation, retreat, demoralization, ruling class triumphalism, and a lack of struggle.


Your particular point "A candidate talking about repealing anti-labor laws after Clinton's years would have created a space for rank and file union workers to argue that supporting the Democrats isn't actually the best ways unions can fight" is strikingly weak as both Clinton and Obama promised labor law reform so I fail to understand how a candidate talking about labor law reform is a means to argue against supporting Democrats.He was calling out the Democrats for failing to ever fulfill their promises to labor while perusing neo-liberal policies instead and he was calling for a repeal of Taft-heartly which Clinton, Gore, and Kerry did not support... but again it's not like Nader was going to become President, the important thing was that he was bringing criticisms of the Democrats to the mainstream.


Maybe Nader had bigger reforms in mind (I don't know) but from that kind of pragmatic angle, a worker could reasonably say to you, "Well, sure Nader's promising bigger reforms but this other guy has more of a chance of winning and implementing his smaller promises"--what would you say to that worker? Oh, that you can't trust the Democrats, see how often they've betrayed. Worker: "So I can trust Nader?" You (?): "Breaking the hold of the Democrats would mean that it would be more difficult for them to reign-in and de-fang movements as they emerged."No the argument was never - Nader will win and there'll be great reforms. The argument was, you can't vote for the Democrats, (in 2004 for example) they support the war in Iraq and anti-war people should vote for Nader to show that a sizable percentage of people won't accept "less-worse" than the Republicans.


Well, yes breaking the hold of the Democrats by helping establish a different left capitalist party would make it more difficult for the Democrats to do their job...and make it easier for the new left capitalist party to do it. Again, you can refer to countries that have multi-party systems to see this process.Where did I argue that establishing a multi-party system, rather than breaking the monopoly that the Democrats hold, was a goal for us? When the Green Party was having internal battles after 2000 and the pressure from liberals and the Democrats for "helping Bush win" we supported the Left who saw the purpose of the party as taking on the Democrats as opposed to the Right who argued for "building the party" and dodging direct confrontations with the Democrats. When the "David Cobb" safe-state, build the party for the long-term faction won out, we rejected those efforts and did not support Cobb.


I don't know a more patient way to sum this up other than saying voting for Nader in 2000 would've been good for recruiting on campuses but has nothing in common with the principles, strategies or tactics of the revolutionary workers' movement, lessons paid for with blood time and time again.What revolutionary workers movement are you currently relating to? You mean a few scattered groups with little meaningful organic connection to the working class?

Anyway, this is another straw-man. There was no current movement debating the question of reform or revolution so to see the immediate task at hand as being raising class consciousness of workers to revolutionary consciousness is not connected to the situation that our class was in prior to the economic crisis. The question for the left of the labor movement and people in social struggles generally was not working class-self emancipation or reforms is was do you support the Democrats to be your ally and advocate or no. The answer we usually give is simply no, but sometimes protest votes can be a clearer expression of discontent than just abstinence. Such an expression of a rejection of lesserevilism would help raise people's confidence to struggle and reject the "realistic" politics of the Democrats.

And finally you accuse us of doing this for recruitment purposes? Well sure whenever we are participating in a movement aside from trying to promote our politics generally and also the tactics we thing will help that movement, we hope to win people on those arguments, and we also hope that some of the activists involved who are seriously considering the political questions of the day will also be won to revolutionary poltics and hopefully our politics and our group. But then if you accuse us of hoping to win some of the more conscious people involved in these struggles to our politics, how are we also not increasing the consciousness of people in the necessity of revolution. Either we hoped to recruit some of the politically closer green-party activists or we were low-balling politics which would mean not winning those activists and saying, not building a Green party is all you need to do, you can't accuse us of both.

And for regular street propaganda. To hear the critics in this thread describe it, it's as though we were arguing for people to vote Nader, and then if we convinced them of that, then we said, oh and also we are Socialists now that you are voting for Nader let us explain that. In fact it's the opposite: we're socialists, this is what we believe and we think voting for Nader will show people in this country that millions of people reject Gore's neo-liberalism or Kerry's "end the war through victory" politics.

[ellipsis]

I met Jimmie higgins at the recent Occupy Oakland move-in day march, he was rolling deep so ISO folks, so I guess I have to retract my earlier statement slightly. Mad props to the Bay area(oakland?) ISO folks who showed up.

Sidenote, there were a good number of wobblies about.

[RedTrackWorker]

To Jimmie Higgins:

In an earlier post you said support for Nader versus the Dems would help argue against "NGO or pressure-group style activism"--I don't see anything in your last post that wouldn't be acceptable to NGO and pressure-group reformist activists.

Your justification of "revolution isn't what people were talking about" ("The question for the left of the labor movement and people in social struggles generally was not working class-self emancipation or reforms") and all this stuff on "broad left" throughout this thread amounts to burying the development of a revolutionary party beneath centrism and reformism--it's a cynical adaptation to the low level of class struggle.

If you would look at http://lrp-cofi.org/PR/propagitPR56.html it lays all this out: Lenin arguing that the newspaper must be at the level of workers who understand the need for the revolution, must raise its political level not lower it; Trotsky saying that to avoid the fundamental questions because we have to speak immediately to what the masses are talking about "means to fall to a fatal level of vulgarity"; Cannon: "the road to the masses leads through the vanguard and not over its head".

The point isn't proof-texting--the quotes are just summarizing. The point is an analysis of how we work toward socialist revolution and how we build a revolutionary party to do that. Your analysis is that masses aren't discussing revolution versus reform so vote for Nader as a step. My analysis is that no matter how isolated revolutionaries are, telling workers to vote for a capitalist party (or any non-revolutionary party at a time of low struggle) is to go against the fundamental lessons we must teach: the political independence of the working class, that workers can only rely on their own power in alliance with the oppressed masses, etc.

You say you're training revolutionaries and talking about revolution while saying "vote Nader"--I say "action speak louder than words" and the act of telling people to vote Nader, join Chavez's party, vote for the great 32BJ contract, don't criticize the union bureaucrats that talk left and will help us look good (TWU Local 100), mock those sectarians critiquing us in the Chicago Teacher's Union, ignore those sectarians talking about permanent revolution in Egypt, all that will drown out the readings of Marxist theory in cadre education.

Where do you think reformist and centrist "Marxist" parties come from anyway? How do you think they function to recruit people and keep up a Marxist appearance? Do you think they always "know" they're centrist?

[Jimmie Higgins]

Around and around we go, will it ever stop? No.

Pretty much everything I'm going to write here I've already argued earlier in this thread. I doesn't even matter what I have to say of course.

Your justification of "revolution isn't what people were talking about" ("The question for the left of the labor movement and people in social struggles generally was not working class-self emancipation or reforms") and all this stuff on "broad left" throughout this thread amounts to burying the development of a revolutionary party beneath centrism and reformism--it's a cynical adaptation to the low level of class struggle.No, it's trying to work with the materials we have now and figuring out a way forward when all the institutions and many of the forces previous revolutionaries have used to try and estimate consciousness and class forces have been gutted, decimated, or co-opted.

Adapting to the low level of struggle would mean that we'd participate in movements and say, this is it, this is all we need: occupy is the new society, the Green party can replace the Democrats and be a more progressive version, and yet in every single movement we have been involved in we have tried to expand that movement beyond it's initial starting point.

In occupy we are arguing against the pacifist liberals on the one hand who push consumerist politics and against the far-lefts who want to leap over the question of the unions and "replace unions" with the occupy movement. We try in concrete ways to link the struggle to real class struggles and our comrades helped found labor committees in occupy, we try to bring the issue of racism to the forefront of the movement etc.

This is not the economism approach you try to anachronistically accuse us of.


If you would look at http://lrp-cofi.org/PR/propagitPR56.html it lays all this out: Lenin arguing that the newspaper must be at the level of workers who understand the need for the revolution, must raise its political level not lower it; Trotsky saying that to avoid the fundamental questions because we have to speak immediately to what the masses are talking about "means to fall to a fatal level of vulgarity"; Cannon: "the road to the masses leads through the vanguard and not over its head".1)What was Lenin talking about here? In the midst of a large scale upsurge in working class activity other Social-Democrats were arguing that strikes are enough, legal reforms are enough and that the goal of the movement (since socialism was impossible in Russia in their view in beginning of the century) should only be to make life better for workers!

So first of all we argue and operate under the understanding that these by themselves are not enough, but we think revolutionaries do need to fight for reforms that can lead to greater independence or struggle or organizing.

2) I'm not sure where that Trotsky quote is from, but I'd suspect it was a similar argument as the Lenin one - there's mass struggle and some argue that that struggle alone is enough.

Of course again, this is a straw-man when applied to our group because it assumes that we hide our politics which as I have said repeatedly we don't. Yes of course when people are anti-war, revolutionaries should engage workers in the movements that exist but they should not just "go with the flow". In the context of the anti-war movement this would mean blaming everything on Bush, ignoring imperialism, etc. By contrast we tried to argue against the liberal politics that dominated the movement, constantly argued that this was a bi-partisan war and the role of the Democrats was to actually persuade the skeptical population to back the war. We held teach-ins on imperialism, tried to link the movement to the anti-racist struggles of Arabs in the US and we tried to expose the class nature of military recruiting.

3) What vanguard? People have to be engaged in struggle for there to be a vanguard. What we have now are pockets of people who've come to revolutionary consciousness, but there's not much of a vanguard. I found that quote by Canon in the article you linked, and again, he was saying they were targeting the CP. Well the CP did have organic connections to militant workers and anti-racist fighters and so on - so again this quote assumes that there is struggle and there is a vanguard that can be organized into a revolutionary party. There isn't really a vanguard right now, there are little grouping and small networks or labor militants and social movement activists and organized Marxists and anarchists who could be the organic vanguard of the class with a return to struggle.

I absolutely agree that revolutionaries shouldn't adapt to the long low-level of struggle (as true reformists do). This is why we have tended to err on the side of anticipating a potential radicalization in movements. Objectivly we know the polarization of the neoliberal era would lead to some kind of larger revolt, but subjectively there's no fool-proof way to know it would come from Occupy rather than Republic Windows and Doors.

But you can adapt to low levels of struggles on a revolutionary side too. And that's exactly what sectarians do. So when groups hand out anti-ISO leaflets to try and poach from a pool of dozens of people attracted to our group of 100s - well they are setting the bar pretty low. We, however, are more focused on wining an audience away from the Democrats and liberal poltics and towards class conscious and revolutionary politics.


You say you're training revolutionaries and talking about revolution while saying "vote Nader"--I say "action speak louder than words" and the act of telling people to vote Nader, join Chavez's party, vote for the great 32BJ contract, don't criticize the union bureaucrats that talk left and will help us look good (TWU Local 100), mock those sectarians critiquing us in the Chicago Teacher's Union, ignore those sectarians talking about permanent revolution in Egypt, all that will drown out the readings of Marxist theory in cadre education. Well when did we argue for people to join Chavez's party? This is what we said about Chavez after the 2002 coup:


But Chávez is not a revolutionary. He is a populist, seeking to reconcile various social forces to advance his own nationalist agenda. From recent actions, Chávez seems to be continuing where he left off before military leaders arrested him: reconcile with the upper class, union bureaucracy, and church officials through attempts at dialogue such as the Federal Government Commission initiative.

What is this about Egypt and permanent revolution? The international character of the uprisings in Africa and the middle east as well as the decisive power of the revolt spreading to workers at central arteries of the Egyptian economy see to confirm important aspects of Trotsky's argument.

[A Marxist Historian]

Marx didn't place any theoretical emphasis on base and superstructure, either. I think he used those terms only a few times, each time changing the meaning he was assigning to both terms. But this doesn't stop you from trying to use the model, a model you do not understand if you think it's about trying to distinguish spheres of society where power struggles take place from those where they don't take place.

Well, it is nothing of the sort. Politics is about power. The base-superstructure model isn't used all that often by Marx as it goes back a long ways before Marx. Originated in fact by Harrington, the real founder of political science, way back in the late 17th century.

You can't really understand politics without it, and you don't have to be a Marxist to use it.

Political science and sociology are two different fields, they operate on somewhat different rules, and the base-superstructure model is the classic best way to link them.

E.P. Thompson's assault on base/superstructure was one component of his degradation of English Marxism, which all too many "Western Marxists" bought into. Perry Anderson's rather gentle critique is well known. Peter Fryer's brilliant defense of Lenin and dialectics in the 1950s against Thompson and Thompsonism, which you are more or less regurgitating here, is republished in the current issue of Spartacist, is up on line on their website, and deserves serious attention from all alleged "Western Marxist" theoreticians, like yourself.


But let's set aside this double standard you've set up for yourself. About the quote in question: I recall from a previous argument we had on state capitalism that I mentioned the "production for the state of production" quote before and linked it to Marx's writings on the marxists.org web site. So I am confused about why you choose to talk about this passage like it's some obscure thing you still haven't come across in Marx's writings. Did you not follow the reference and read the text for yourself? By the way, even then you engaged in your typical modus operandi and claimed that my quote was taken out of context, yet even when presented with the context could not explain how the context demonstrated that the quote didn't mean what I said it meant.

Oh. So that's an argument with you I was recalling then.

I don't recall you posting any link to a writing of Marx with a quote. What I remember is a link to an article by Chris Harman with an unsourced quote from Marx. But perhaps I managed to overlook it. Care to repost?


Reification and abstraction are two different things. It is possible to talk about class power in the abstract without reifying it, by treating class as a relationship of coercion and power between people that results from how those people relate to the means of production. This is "abstraction" in the sense that it describes class societies in general, in the abstract (e.g., this is true for feudal societies, tributary societies, capitalist societies), but it is no way reification.

Pure E. P. Thompson. Class as a "process," that "happens."

No, class is not a "relationship." A class is a distinct grouping of actual human beings whose relationship to the means of production differs from that of other groupings of human beings. Consulting Webster's and looking up the word "class" is something you might find useful.

And your Thompsonian reification of class into "a relationship of coercion and power," a political not an economic relationship, guts, or better yet, abstracts out, the essentials of what "class" is all about into a dead, empty, inferior to Hegelian abstraction.

And you climb even deeper into your hole in the next paragraph, which is very far from what Marx had in mind. As Marx himself put it on a similar occasion, "if that is Marxism then I am no Marxist."



For contrary to what you claim, I understand class as a relationship of power -- power that a minority of members of society exercise over the majority because of the power and control that the minority exercises over the means of production. This, of course, is the entire point Marx was getting at with base and superstructure: that the state, as an institution of concentrated power, does not just emerge from some abstract idea, but rather is derived from control over the means of production.

And then we have your next two paragrapha. Later you accuse me of not reading what you wrote. Well, here I'm just scratching my head as you retail elementary Marxist truisms that differ in no way whatsoever from what I said, as far as I can tell. It's not so much that you didn't read what I said, but that the glasses you read them through are so thick you don't even seem to understand what I am saying, perhaps because the terms I use are too elementary, simple and easy to understand for you to be able to follow.

I mean, I say greed is not what it's about, explain what it's really about, and then--you more or less repeat what I said, except in more academic language, and then continue to blat on about how I reduce it all to greed! A bit weird.



Oy. You seem to have a hard time distinguishing between profit and personal income, which is troubling since it is key to understanding that "making capitalists rich" is not the purpose of capitalism. It's a byproduct. Again, this is why Marx calls capitalism "production for the sake of production," not "production for the sake of getting rich." For Marx, talking about the character failings or greed of capitalists sidesteps the fundamental issue, which is that capitalism requires maximization of profit regardless of how greedy or not capitalists are, regardless of whether capitalists give all their personal income to charity.

Just to clue you in: profit is what a business clears above and beyond its expenditures. A capitalist's personal income is derived from the profit, but does not encompass the entirety of the profit. A chunk of that profit has to go toward reinvestment in the means of production. Why? In order to make the same products as your competitors, but only cheaper. Otherwise, your competitors will try to innovate production to increase profitability, and will have the power to put you out of business. Without this competition (which is a relationship, not a thing) - without this drive to re-invest in the means of production, to prolong the working day, etc., - there is no capitalism. You can, however, theoretically have capitalists who are not greedy, but only run their companies to maximize profitability while taking virtually all of that profit and re-investing it into the means of production.

Then you go on to say:



Are you even reading what I write? I already answered this question. If you had single state-integrated world monopoly (it would have to be state integrated, because a distinct state not merged with business would represent a potential political and economic rival), and there was no competition, you would no longer have capitalism. You'd have something resembling bureaucratic collectivism. I am confused about why you are even asking me that question. You seem to be implying that I am the one who thinks competition is superfluous to capitalism, when I am the one who is been talking about competition as the lifeblood of capitalism.

Ah, there we go. So you are a closet bureaucratic collectivist, just like I suspected.

A truly capitalist world "state capitalist monopoly" would collapse economically. It just wouldn't work. It wouldn't turn into "something resembling bureaucratic collectivism."



Then I have a very simple question for you, MH. If the economy would be run virtually the same way if it were ruled democratically by the workers, and if individual bureaucrats rotate in and out of power even without elections (as you have been at pains to stress repeatedly in our exchanges), why won't the bureaucrats simply permit democracy? What would the big deal be?

What would the big deal be? That they would be out on their asses. They wouldn't "rotate in and out of power." For them, a very big deal indeed indeed. The difference wouldn't be in the basic economic structures, the economic building blocs, but merely in how decisions were made, through democratic discussion rather than bureaucratic fiat. And of course there would be far, far less skimmed off the top by officials.

Just like trade unions. If the Teamsters Union were democratized, and revolutionaries put in charge, would the basic structure necessarily have to change? Not necessarily. In fact, Jimmy Hoffa learned most of his organizing techniques from revolutionary Trotskyist trade unionist Farrell Dobbs. So one might be surprised at how little they would change.

But there'd be no more dissidents beaten up behind union halls, no more pension funds going into the greedy hands of the Mafia (and lately the even greedier hands of the Feds, now that the US government has "democratized" the union) and no more bureaucrats with salaries in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.



Of course, if you studied the history of the Soviet Union during the counter-revolution in late 1920s and early 1930s, you'd see that the threat of starvation, arrest, and terror used against the proletariat (not just peasants) was necessary to enforce economic decisions precisely because the workers would otherwise not go along with those decisions. They are simply not the decisions the workers would have made.

Even funnier, as Russian/Soviet history is my field, and I wrote extensively about this period in my dissertation. Your Cliffite delusions about what was going on then are as far off in the opposite direction as the official Stalinist version.

Collectivization of the peasantry was compulsory indeed. There were poor peasants who supported it, but they were the minority. Not that Russian peasants were necessarily all anti-collectivist, but simply that collective farming without tractors, which only began to be cranked out *after* forced collectivization was already well underway, was crazy economic nonsense, resulting in famine.

The Stalinist industrialization campaign, which called forth and abused all the revolutionary idealism of the Russian workers, and ended unemployment, was supported quite enthusiastically, at first, by the great bulk of the working class. During this period the CPUSSR recruited literally hundreds of thousands of workers into its ranks. And then promoted much of them into the Soviet bureaucracy.

Over a million factory workers were outright promoted into the Stalinist bureaucracy, many by way of "affirmative action" engineering school courses (like a young steelworker named Brezhnev) and many directly right off the factory floor, as huge numbers of people had to be recruited to run the brand new huge industrial edifice being created. Naturally this was very popular among factory workers.

By the mid 1930s, there were more Stalinist bureaucrats in the USSR than there had been factory workers in Russia in 1917. And in fact most of them were the same people. As Robert Davies put it, it was a "dictatorship of the ex-proletariat." You had a new proletariat recruited off the farm doing the work in the factories, and a new labor aristocracy supporting the regime emerging out of it, dominating factory life and opinion and welcoming Stalinist purges of alleged "Trotskyite wreckers," the so-called "Stakhanovites."

This began to break down with the famine and industrial disasters of 1932-33, which created real dissent and disruption, the rebirth of the Trotskyist underground, and lots of underground factional discontent *within* the CPUSSR.

After the famine ended, the economy was straightened out, and living standards improved in the mid '30s, most of the factory workers recruited into the CPUSSR in the late '20s and early '30s, inspired by the ultraleft idealism of "Third Period" Stalinism, were purged in the mass purges leading up to the Great Terror, where those factory workers who had actually made it up the greasy pole into the Stalinist bureacracy walked over the corpses of the old, tired burnt-out ex-revolutionaries who made up the bulk of the bureaucracy into their jobs, and the CPUSSR became what it was ever after that--a party of privileged bureaucrats and intelligentsia.



You once again seem to think that which decisions are arrived at regarding the means of production has no relationship to who controls the means of production. In your view, if the right decisions are made regarding distribution (the number of screws made, the way the social surplus is invested, etc.), what you have is socialism or at least something that theoretically could exist under socialism if only those pesky peasants were eliminated (how many peasants are left in Cuba now, anyway?).

So, besides being a closet bureaucratic collectivist, you're a closet Stalinist, who really thinks that it is possible to have socialism in one country.

What is socialism? It is a mode of production that is higher, more advanced, than capitalism. Which means, at the most basic level, a much higher level of productivity, making the economic abundance possible that is the material basis for a society of "from each according to his need, to each according to his (at first) work (first stage, then later just plain
need)."

Can't be done under a capitalist system. The abolition of capitalism is needed not merely to get rid of "alienation," the preoccupation of the early Marx which he rarely even mentions in later works, but because the capitalist system breaks down and falls into crisis due to its internal contradictions, leading inevitably into economic crisis, like right now, decline of living standards and society in general, like right now, and ultimately into war. Like America's wars destroying large parts of the Muslim world, turning Iraq and Afghanistan especially into rubble. Allout war at this point would destroy the planet.

The idea of ending all that merely by putting the workers in command instead of the capitalists, all by itself, is absurd. If the Spartacus uprising had won and the slaves had taken control over ancient Rome, could they have made it a socialist society? Of course not.

How many peasants in Cuba? Beats the hell out of me. Not my field.



In other words, you are the person reifying socialism. For you a socialist economy is a thing, a static state of distribution to be arrived at. Who makes the decisions is irrelevant.


NO NO NO. It ain't a "state of distribution," like your average liberal who thinks he is a socialist thinks. It's what Marx said it is.

It's a MODE OF PRODUCTION.

I am simply repeating myself here, but possibly by putting it into all caps I can get that into your thick head.




Your assumption (it's an assumption because it is not supported by any evidence, logical or otherwise) that workers in the USSR and Cuba would make roughly the same decisions as the bureaucrats, except without the large bureaucratic incomes, is also highly problematic. Remember that what exists/existed in these countries was competition with non-socialist countries to keep up levels of economic productivity and to fortify its military strength (i.e., the need to extract surplus from the labor process) combined with a highly developed division of labor.


So you think that if the workers were in charge, they wouldn't keep up the levels of economic productivity? They wouldn't fortify their military strength?

Let us hope that when workers take power, they don't listen to the siren songs of you Cliffites. If so, the capitalists will simply cut their throats.

A truly revolutionary Cuba would be much more of a threat to capitalist America than Castro's hollowed-out regime on the verge of disintegration. Therefore it would, to defend itself, if anything have to spend more of workers' resources on military production and renovating the capital stock for higher productivity, and ask workers to make more sacrifices for that, than Castro does.

And therefore would be unviable unless the revolution spread, sooner or later you'd get Kronstadt-type uprisings of backward elements in the working class not willing to make those sacrifices.



What this means at a practical level in terms of your assumption is that some workers would have to volunteer to occupy inferior positions in the division of labor--positions where the work is highly deskilled and monotonous and the pay is very low--while voluntarily conceding the more rewarding and highly paid jobs to other people.


A remarkably ignorant statement. That was a problem even Brezhnev had a perfectly good, rather obvious solution for.

After the old revolutionary idealism of the early years had disappeared (and Stalin's gulags were abolished by Khrushchev), how did Khrushchev, and later Brezhnev, get people to do necessary shitty unskilled labor in Siberia? At gunpoint?

No, they did the obvious thing. If you worked in unpleasant occupations in bad conditions, you got paid better. Workers building oil pipelines or whatever in Siberia got wages double or triple those in Leningrad or Moscow, summer vacations in the sunny Crimea, etc.

There were also attempts to revive the revolutionary idealism of the early years, big propaganda campaigns in the press about how let's fulfill the visions of Lenin and build a new Siberia, but mostly they fell pretty flat by then. By then, it was money that talked in the cynical atmosphere of the Brezhnev years.

Now that doesn't exactly follow the economic logic of a capitalist wage system. But then, the USSR wasn't a capitalist country.

Your next paragraph is simply delusional, with no relationship to reality even in the Stalinist USSR, much less in a future socialist society.

Which raises the interesting question, just how would you get workers to be garbage collectors, toilet cleaners, etc. in the socialist society of the future. By coercion perhaps? Or by Brezhnev's method? Or what? Let's see what your answer is.



And these unlucky workers would have to make these concessions even knowing that the only difference between poor old them and the happy-go-lucky better-off workers is that the lucky workers possess *marketable* skills and talents -- skills and talents whose value is assigned by competitive market pressures to reduce pay to an absolute minimum while still ensuring reproduction -- in contrast to those poor unlucky manual laborers whose talents and skills aren't as marketable, even if their social contribution is just as important. I hope you're connected enough to reality to realize that this would never happen through a process of amicable collective decision-making. It requires coercion. It requires a state that will disempower some people and force them to do the shitty work. Again, this rigid division you want to make between base and superstructure, economic decisions and who makes those decisions, is a purely idealist construction. It is fundamentally anti-Marxist.

Why do these inferior jobs still exist? Because the division of labor, the pay rate, etc., are still determined by the law of value, the asocial logic of competition, the market drive for efficiency and surplus extraction, not by the wishes of the workers themselves to engage in fulfilling work. Incidentally, this is also the reason why market socialism, worker-managed competition between units of capital, could never work. Workers' control would result in a reorganization of work to make it more humane and rewarding, to diversify tasks, etc. All things that would cut into efficiency (this, by the way, is why Marx views a reasonable amount of abundance to be a prerequisite for socialism).


So then, people would "reorganize work" so cleaning toilets would be fun?

Well, sooner or later, sure, we'll find ways of having robots do that kind of stuff. But that would require a much higher technological level than exists right now, and is not something that will happen overnight.

IMHO, it will be generations before we can complete the transition from capitalism to a society where, really, it's "from each according to his ability." And in the first stage of communist society, you indeed will still have what Lenin called "the narrow foundations of bourgeois right," where you use economic means to get people to clean toilets, by paying them better than people doing more pleasant work. Just like Brezhnev did.



Of course the Soviet Union was always subject to competition through the world capitalist market. This is one of the reasons why Lenin and Trotsky emphasized that their transition to socialism required a series of revolutions in the West, and that the regime could only hold out for so long without such revolutions. They thought that a failure to do so would result not in a decades-long stalling of the transition to socialism, but in its rapid reversal. And they were correct. You seem to be operating under the false notion that I think the USSR under Lenin and Trotsky was a beacon of workers' self-management and democracy in the face of international competition. It wasn't. Lenin and Trotsky presided over, to use a phrase you love, "bureaucratically degenerated workers' states" with large amounts of political substitution being necessitated in response to international competition and military threat.


The phrase Lenin actually used once or twice was "deformed workers state."

Ah, so you do remember a bit of Trotskyism and can recite it by rote, even though that contradicts much of the rest of what you have to say.

And indeed you had a "rapid reversal," a Thermidor as Zinoviev and Trotsky put it, with the birth of a Stalinist regime undermining the workers revolution and finally, in the year 1991, destroying it altogether.

But how was that new regime different, in fundamental socioeconomic terms, from what you had afterwards under Stalin? Trotsky's answer is that it wasn't. Let's see what yours is, below.


The reason it was not yet a class society was that this political substitution co-existed uneasily with an economy in which the workers still exercised significant control over production, which is borne out by the much higher level of consumption goods and wages vis-a-vis capital goods and military equipment, resulting in a workforce that still largely identified with and trusted the Bolshevik regime as their own even if they didn't view it as ideal. Political power in the form of the workers' state, in other words, was not yet an alien force of class society, a force that depended upon and was derived from elite control over the means of production.

It wasn't. It evolved, and its evolution was shaped by the contradiction between the aspirations of the revolution and its leaders, and the objective conditions that the revolution confronted (namely, international competition). This is where history is important, MH. I advise you to read some, particularly Kevin Murphy's Isaac-Deutscher-Prize-winning Revolution and Counterrevolution.

So your answer is, based on Murphy, that workers by and large supported Stalin until 1928, and then they stopped. And that's why the USSR stopped being a workers state then.

I've already commented on both the positive and the negative features of Kevin Murphy's book in this thread. Really, you're claiming I don't read your stuff? This is almost funny, try looking in the mirror once in a blue moon when you say silly stuff like that.

Well, once again. Now Murphy's version, a bit more sophisticated than yours, maintains that workers still trusted the regime in the 1920s, even if they had their criticism, but that changed with the Stalinist industrial revolution.

And he provides lots of solid evidence, well researched, about workers' attitudes to the state during the NEP.

But when he gets to 1928, all of a sudden we go from solid research to the occasional fragmentary bits of evidence about some workers here and some workers there being unhappy about all this. And of course there were dissenters, there was even an active Trotskyist underground with some real support in the factories, which Murphy if anything underplays.

But we've gone from solid analysis to a rather feeble attempt at lawyering for Cliffism.

Fact is, the bulk of the Soviet working class supported the Soviet state and regarded it as their own pretty much up until the bitter end. All serious Soviet historians not blinded by capitalist or Cliffite dogma agree on this. And it's possible to record the exact moment when they stopped.

It was in the miners rebellion of 1989, where coal miners from Stakhanov-land, the heart of the most solid support for Stalinism in the Soviet working class, not only went on strike as they had in 1962 under Khrushchev, one of the two main reasons Khrushchev was dumped by the other bureaucrats, but actually took over entire towns, displacing the bureaucracy and setting up soviets to run them just like in 1917.

That marked the end of the USSR as a viable workers state, and it collapsed almost immediately thereafter.



You seem to think that because the state continued to control the economy, that nothing "essential" changed economically. But once again, you're failing to realize that when the state directly controls the economy, issues of politics become indistinguishable from issues of economics. (Again, it's like you're trying to split off economics from politics because one is the "base" and the other is the "superstructure.") This is where a historical analysis of the evolution of the party, the Soviet state, and their changing relationship to the working classes and the processes of production is important. As Trotsky stated, the state -- and by implication, state control over the economy -- does not have a fixed meaning or content. It is a relationship and is therefore historical.

The state, like class, is not a "relationship." It is, as Lenin put it, armed bodies of men. Who indeed have a relationship to the mode of production, they are its guardians, or to be precise the guardians of the class that rules in that mode of production, the capitalists. But they are not themselves a "relationship," but a real material entity, made up of real human beings carrying real rifles, pepper spray, tear gas canisters, etc., riding in real tanks, sitting at the control panels of real nuclear missiles.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Exactly - 17 years in the ISO, myself. That's how I know you're talking out your ass.

You cite a post by Jimmie Higgins earlier in this thread; I presume you mean this one (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2338176&postcount=28). It contains one simple fact there that punches a huge hole in your hypothesis as to why we refused to support Nader in 2004: He sought, and got, an endorsement from Pat Buchanan's right-wing Reform Party - something he didn't do in 2000.

Thereby giving the ISO the perfect excuse to abandon its support of him. Being as supporting Pat Buchanan totally alienated the left liberal Democrats the ISO orients to.

Did he do that in 2000? No. The big Nader scandal of 2000 was the scandal that had recently come out of him being involved in low-level union busting. Not something that really bothered your average 2000 Nader supporter that you hoped to recruit much, being as the Green Party is after all a petty capitalist party. So you guys had no trouble more or less ignoring that. Granted unionists didn't care for that, but by then the TDU had already flopped, so no big deal, you were recruiting students by and large.


So let's take your hypothesis here: the ISO dropped Nader in 2004 due to liberal pressure. The converse, then, would be that not succumbing to liberal pressure meant continuing to support Nader. Therefore, the ISO would have ended up campaigning for Nader on the Reform Party ticket in states where he was unable to get onto the Green Party ticket. Describing that as problematic is a gross understatement.

Indeed. But that's what happens to you when you support capitalist politicians like Nader. Best to avoid it in the first place by not doing that.[/QUOTE]

So, Occam's razor time: Which is the simpler, and therefore most likely correct, explanation? The ISO went to extraordinary lengths to provide the semblance of a mask for its liberal inclinations, or they dropped support for Nader after he made at least one major decision that was a political mistake?[/QUOTE]

What is Nader in the first place? A left eco-liberal, though one rather short on principles. Supporting Nader in 2000 wasn't a mask for liberal inclinations but an example of them.

-M.H.-

[Lucretia]

MH, it’s difficult to take half of this seriously. The other half is frightening, if indeed you are somebody who has written a dissertation on Russian history and has extensive experience in left organizing, for it betrays a profound ignorance on basic questions of logic and elementary points of Marxist theory.

First let’s brush aside the points that can’t be taken seriously. You seem to think that my position on whether state capitalism can exist on a global scale makes me a “bureaucratic collectivist,” but I suppose you are so ignorant of Russian history and the Marxist theoretical tradition (you know, the subject you wrote your dissertation about) that you are unaware that my position is identical to Bukharin’s. I’ll quote Tony Cliff’s passage on this, since it seems you haven’t read it (yes, I really do think you don’t read oppositional stuff), despite going on and on about how evil “Cliffites” are in every post:


If the production of the whole world were controlled by one authority, that is, if the Stalinist bureaucracy could unite the world under its rule and the masses were forced to accept such a régime, the resulting economy would be a system of exploitation not subject to the law of value and all its implications. Examining the problem – in hypothetical form at that date (1915), of course – Bukharin reached this very conclusion. In his book, World Economy and Imperialism, he explains that if the national state were to organise the national economy, commodity production would remain “in the first place the world market”, and the economy would be, therefore, state capitalist. But if “the organisation of the whole [I]world economy as one gigantic state trust” took place (which, incidentally, Bukharin did not believe possible), “we would have an entirely new, unique, economic form. This would be capitalism no more, for the production of commodities would have disappeared; still less would it be socialism, as the domination of one class over the other will have remained (and even grown stronger). Such an economic structure would, most of all, resemble a slave-master’s economy, with the absence of the slave market.” Note that Bukharin and Tony Cliff, like me, do not at any point say that it is historically possible to transition from multiple state capitalisms into one monopoly. We, like you, recognize that such a system is only an exercise in abstract speculation, for it would represent as you say “economic collapse."

Your next point that is gut-bustingly hilarious is your accusation that I am a Stalinist, followed by your rather Stalinist sounding declaration that “the Stalinist industrialization campaign … was supported quite enthusiastically, at first, by the great bulk of the working class.” This claim is part of what historians have dubbed “the continuity thesis,” which has found its most vocal champions in Stephen Kotkin and Sheila Fitzpatrick (for a thorough critique of her specific errors, see Geoff Eley’s “History with the Politics Left Out—Again?” in volume 45, number 4 of the Russian Review), and it is obvious why Ortho Trots support it. If it could be shown that the economic decisions of Stalinist industrialization were fully embraced by the workers, then the Russian economy, even if not its political system, was still basically socialist in the sense of enjoying widespread worker support and approval. In terms of its content regarding the economy, this position is literally no different than what a Stalinist apologist would suggest. Unfortunately for them, it has also been thoroughly debunked by the work of Donald Filtzer (see his Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialisation) and Jeffrey Rossman (Worker Resistance Under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor). It is nothing short of hilarious that you claim to be some expert historian yet you are dreadfully unaware that these debates are increasingly being decided against your treasured position.

In another classic MH moment, you chide my definition of class as a “process that happens” as “pure E.P. Thomspon,” then in the next paragraph approve of my understanding of class as a relationship of power that is exercised through control over the means of production. I hope everybody here can see that if a person accepts class as a relationship of power realized through productive control, that they must also accept that relationship as a historical process determined in daily class struggle. After all, control over the means of production, through the state or otherwise, is a continuously evolving phenomenon. (And remember, MH, that “historical process” is, as I will show below, Trotsky’s definition of the state – I suppose you would be similarly dismissive of his definitions!) Your arguments, MH, are simply incoherent in a way that reveals your idea of working out theoretical issues mostly consists of rote memorization of the SL party line, without any real attempt to think through the issues, especially not in a synthetic way.

Such confusion and inconsistency is also evident in your understanding of socialism. On the one hand, you keep declaring that socialism is a “mode of production” that is about “production” and not distribution” You then want to declare that the economies of the workers’ states were “in transition” between capitalism and socialism. Yet the only concrete distinction you have ever made between the economy of the workers’ state in the Soviet Union and a socialist economy (an economy in which, as Engels said, “all the branches of production are run by society as a whole”) is one of a “higher level of productivity.”

Now you’re obviously right that high productivity is a precondition for socialism, but it’s not its definining feature. And that’s your main problem, MH. It still seems, for you, that workers’ control of production at some level of decision-making is simply not an essential characteristic of socialism, so a society can be transitioning to socialism in a situation in which the workers have just as little control over production as they do in a western capitalist society. It never dons on you that if generating ever more powerful means of production is sufficient for that economy to be “transitioning to socialism,” then capitalism itself is a transition to socialism. If this is not your position, and you can identify some other aspect of the workers’ states' economy in its relationship to workers, besides low productivity, that distinguishes it from socialism, then please clarify. But I have yet to see it. By the way, Marx was clear on this question, the transition to socialism had to be both economic and political. As with base and superstructure, the two operated in tandem with one another. You could not have political rule by bureaucrats at the same time as undergoing an economic transition to socialism.

As for your further confusion about the state, which you claim "is not a 'relationship'" but rather "armed bodies of men," I just once again have to repeat your falling into the fallacy of insisting that it must be either one or the other. Could the state not be a body of armed men whose existence and use of force is premised upon and reinforces class relationships, thereby making it the embodiment of a very specific set of historical relationships? I advise you to check out Bob Jessop's The State: A Strategic-Relational Approach. At the very least, consider dusting off your Trotsky writings, especially the passage in What Next wherein he criticizes his erstwhile theoretical opponents for the fact that, according to them, "The state and the bureaucracy are thereby taken not as historical processes but as eternal categories: how can the holy church and its God-inspired priests sin?" Trotsky reminds them: "Yet, if a workers’ bureaucracy which has raised itself over the proletariat, waging battle in a capitalist society, could degenerate into the party of Noske, Scheidemann, Ebert, and Wels, why can’t it degenerate after raising itself over the victorious proletariat?"

Of course, class is also a relationship. It is not an empty atomistic space workers occupy. A class location derives its objective meaning only from how it links up to the means of production, and thereby links to other classes who also relate in a particular way to the means of production (owning it, controlling it, etc.). This is Marxism 101, MH. Might I suggest a remedial course?

[RedTrackWorker]

To Jimmie Higgins:

Your basic claim is something along the lines of the ISO working to build a broad left (meeting people where they're at and developing the movement) and a revolutionary core (having teach-ins on imperialism). Is that fair enough in broad outline?

Lucretia raised the issue of ISR as it would seem that that journal would be the centerpiece of the training of the revolutionary core, but pieces like the newest one by Doug on Occupy: "from what I could tell wasn't published by a Leninist. It was filled with all sorts of banalities, and I cringe to think that ISO would try to use it as an educational tool for its members" (Lucretia). I fully agree (and I think Doug's a member of the ISO so the fact that Lucretia--someone who is sympathetic to Tony Cliff's political tendency--can't tell the article is by a Leninist is...well, you decide). So there's a straight forward critique of what the ISO is doing to train a revolutionary core and I could give many more examples of the type of revolutionary lessons the ISO is teaching.

The other side of the issue is my claim that how you relate to other movements (not the simple fact that you do relate to other movements) undermines the training of revolutionary cadre. I'll repeat my last post:

My analysis is that no matter how isolated revolutionaries are, telling workers to vote for a capitalist party (or any non-revolutionary party at a time of low struggle) is to go against the fundamental lessons we must teach: the political independence of the working class, that workers can only rely on their own power in alliance with the oppressed masses, etc.

You give the example of helping found the labor committee and there's another example of the "how" being fucked up. It's not the fact of helping found it but how Amy M. of the ISO has participated. She helped a TWU Local 100 bureaucrat block the labor committee arguing for "no givebacks" in the Local 100 contract fight and then she introduced Samuelsen to a rally and had not a single word to say about the fact that his contract "strategy" was avoiding the kind of united, mass struggle around class-wide demands that occupy had shown was possible and necessary. Instead she gave a very rhetorically effective speech about how inspirational occupy was and how we all need to fight and such generalities. And she also didn't say anything about Local 100 helping 32BJ workers who at the time did not have their contract settled. In other words, she helped Samuelsen burnish his "radical" credentials while he sits in the way of one of the most potentially powerful unions entering the class struggle. And it pisses off this sectarian track worker right here.

[Lucretia]

RTW and JH: It seems that the fundamental disagreement here is clear, so I wonder if either of you can correct me if I am wrong. RTW is asserting that a Leninist group at this stage should be focusing more on recruiting small numbers of cadre as a precondition for being able to build a truly mass revolutionary movement, through propagating an unapologetically class-based and Marxian analysis of the political situations faced by the movements Leninists are involved in.

JH seems to counter this with arguing that, while not outright "hiding" the fact they are socialists, Leninists in non-revolutionary times should focus more on pushing for political decisions that will place workers in situations where they will draw revolutionary Marxist conclusions on their own. The goal from JH's perspective thus seems to be to stretch out the Leninist message of working-class independence, etc., across multiple steps--first, you show workers that the democrats can't be trusted, then you win them over to a fully Marxist program once they realize the Dems aren't an alternative. (JH, if this isn't your position, I apologize. But this is honestly what you appear to be saying. If it is not, please explain in clear and precise terms exactly how this summary is not accurate. No need to bury the rebuttal within and across paragraphs about what the ISO is doing in occupy.)

If all of this is a correct rendering of the debate, I would endorse RTW's position. JH's model still seems to rely unduly on spontaneity, such as the idea that certain political situations (working against the two-party system) have a built-in logic that will nudge workers in the direction of revolution, without actively having it explained them the specific reasons why the democrats can't be trusted (which of course, would require bringing up things like class independence, the nature of politics under capitalism, and so on). Instead, in JH's model, the only real argument is for not being able to trust the democrats, but as RTW suggests, this argument is compatible with a variety of reformist positions. Moreover, I fail to see how the ISO would be able to make the argument for class-independence effectively, even down the road in more "revolutionary," if the target audience of Nader supporters can simply throw back in the ISO's face that the ISO itself sacrificed the principle when supporting Nader. By the way I think this is one of the major risks of spreading the task of revolution across steps, when one step is effectively conceived of as "practice" (building a "broad left," what have you) and the other as true "party building" (spreading an identifiably Marxist analysis). It risks making your politics incoherent by having one step contradict the other. Of course party building requires multiple steps, but an explicitly Marxian class analysis should be the guiding subjective element across all the steps, not something that is muted--not necessarily hidden, but muted--early on.

As RTW suggests, it's not simply the fact of getting involvement in movements. It's not simply the fact of arguing against the Democrats. It's the subjective element -- the how -- that is key to forging an effective left capable of winning the struggles necessary to make it "broad" again. To try to bracket the how of Marxian class analysis to the side, saving it for a later stage, is in my view to forgo a truly revolutionary politics.

[RedTrackWorker]

I think I basically agree with Lucretia's take above. The most immediate conflict does seem to be rendered as whether to emphasize propaganda or agitation at this point, but that conflict can only be judged by the "totality of the ideas, the program, the tactics, and organization" in question. If it wasn't the case that Lucretia could say so convincingly that "I fail to see how the ISO would be able to make the argument for class-independence effectively...if the target audience of Nader supporters can simply throw back in the ISO's face that the ISO itself sacrificed the principle when supporting Nader"--and if that wasn't just a specific example of more, then I would be driven to rethink my stance.

Lucretia wrote: "To try to bracket the how of Marxian class analysis to the side, saving it for a later stage, is in my view to forgo a truly revolutionary politics."

Trotsky once said "We must give a scientific explanation of society, and clearly explain it to the masses. That is the difference between Marxism and reformism." (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/tpdiscuss.htm) Now the Cliffite/IS tradition rejects the transitional program but I don't see how they can reject this statement categorically. While there's a strong tendency in the IS tradition to stress spontaneity and to downplay party building, from their own tendency's standpoint what is the difference between a revolutionary perspective and a reformist one? It is not the word or subjective intention "revolution" but the actual understanding/consciousness of the necessity of socialist revolution and how to get there. "Revolutionary clarity"--not goodwill--is necessary and that's what this dual conception of broad left/revolutionary core covers up for. The fact that fundamental principles are thrown aside at a moment's notice for the "broad left" side of development shows the real trajectory--what else could it signify?

[Olentzero]

Recruiting cadre is undeniably important, but it shouldn't be the exclusive, or even main, focus of a revolutionary organization. There is no inherent virtue in being a small group of cadre alone; in fact it can be a serious obstacle to growing and developing prior to times of mass unrest. Revolutionary organizations shouldn't stay tiny, biding their time and waiting for the spark that sets off the conflagration. They need to be organizing and preparing for that struggle well in advance.

That is, in fact, where cadre comes from. Recruiting people who may not necessarily be complete masters of Marxism but who nonetheless are openly sympathetic to socialist ideas and arguments, and willing to join the organization. Practical experience through intervening as open, unapologetic socialists in movements and campaigns (which the ISO does) is what turns people into cadre. We win people to Marxism, and turn them into cadre, through involvement in the ISO - we don't win them to Marxism first and then bring them into the ISO.

And winning them to Marxism starts from the day they join, if not before then while they are still contacts; it's not put off until later. The ISO views making Marxists out of members as integrated with the process of organizing and preparing for the coming struggle, not a process separate from it.

Size alone is not an indicator of quality, but I believe the fact that the ISO is one of the largest organizations on the radical left in the United States speaks volumes about the success of its methods in recruiting, developing, and retaining revolutionary cadre.

[Lucretia]

Recruiting cadre is undeniably important, but it shouldn't be the exclusive, or even main, focus of a revolutionary organization. There is no inherent virtue in being a small group of cadre alone; in fact it can be a serious obstacle to growing and developing prior to times of mass unrest. Revolutionary organizations shouldn't stay tiny, biding their time and waiting for the spark that sets off the conflagration. They need to be organizing and preparing for that struggle well in advance.

That is, in fact, where cadre comes from. Recruiting people who may not necessarily be complete masters of Marxism but who nonetheless are openly sympathetic to socialist ideas and arguments, and willing to join the organization. Practical experience through intervening as open, unapologetic socialists in movements and campaigns (which the ISO does) is what turns people into cadre. We win people to Marxism, and turn them into cadre, through involvement in the ISO - we don't win them to Marxism first and then bring them into the ISO.

And winning them to Marxism starts from the day they join, if not before then while they are still contacts; it's not put off until later. The ISO views making Marxists out of members as integrated with the process of organizing and preparing for the coming struggle, not a process separate from it.

Size alone is not an indicator of quality, but I believe the fact that the ISO is one of the largest organizations on the radical left in the United States speaks volumes about the success of its methods in recruiting, developing, and retaining revolutionary cadre.

I don't think anybody here is arguing that there is a virtue to being small, that the process of developing cadre happens apart from on-the-ground political and social struggle, or that people need to have mastered the ins-and-outs of the entire classical Marxist canon before joining a Leninist party. Certainly not I, not JH, and not RTW. So I wonder who it is you think you're contradicting with this post. :confused:

[Olentzero]

I don't think anybody here is arguing that there is a virtue to being small, that the process of developing cadre happens apart from on-the-ground political and social struggle, or that people need to have mastered the ins-and-outs of the entire classical Marxist canon before joining a Leninist party. Certainly not I, not JH, and not RTW. So I wonder who it is you think you're contradicting with this post. :confused:This.
RTW is asserting that a Leninist group at this stage should be focusing more on recruiting small numbers of cadre as a precondition for being able to build a truly mass revolutionary movementRecruiting cadre is not a precondition for building a truly mass revolutionary movement; hell, the idea of any party being able to build a truly mass revolutionary movement is in and of itself absurd. Building cadre comes from a revolutionary organization involving itself in the issues and struggles of the day from an open, unapologetic Marxist standpoint. They are then in a much better position to fight for leadership in a truly mass revolutionary movement when it rises from below. Compare how well the Tahrir Square demonstrations have been doing, a full year after they started, with the much more checkered (but nonetheless important) successes of the Occupy movement in the US and Europe.

[Lucretia]

Olentzero, I think you are misinterpreting that statement. Obviously mass movements exist without socialist cadre. It is where socialists go to recruit cadre based on both JH's and RTW's arguments. "Truly mass revolutionary" in this context means one capable and willing to carry out a socialist revolution. Such a force has not developed in Egypt, where a "political" revolution is floundering.

[RedTrackWorker]

Recruiting cadre is not a precondition for building a truly mass revolutionary movement; hell, the idea of any party being able to build a truly mass revolutionary movement is in and of itself absurd.

I really don't know where this is coming from. Where have I or anyone said recruiting cadre is a precondition for building a revolutionary movement or the party builds the revolutionary movement? I think training revolutionary cadre is essential to and a precondition for the success of a revolutionary movement--not its creation or existence.

You previous post (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2349668&postcount=171) on how to recruit and train is so abstract it's almost impossible to argue with, but the conclusion about the ISO's success in "recruiting, developing, and retaining revolutionary cadre" would have to be defended by offering a political defense of how the ISO is training which in the context of this thread could start with a reply to how voting for Nader doesn't undermine the lesson of the political independence of the working class as a key principle of Marxism and Trotskyism and how revolutionary cadre are going to be successfully trained on such fare as Doug's article on Occupy in the latest ISR. Otherwise the label "revolutionary" in your post is meaningless and your stuff about the size of groups just serves to distract from a more serious discussion of fundamentals.

[Olentzero]

Obviously mass movements exist without socialist cadre.That really isn't clear from your statement here:
recruiting small numbers of cadre as a precondition for being able to build a truly mass revolutionary movement seeing as how 'precondition' pretty much means 'the second can't exist without the first'.

I honestly don't think the political revolution is floundering in Egypt; a full year after the original events that brought down Mubarak, and Tahrir is still packed full of people putting pressure on the military junta now running the country. That's not floundering. And one big reason it's not floundering is that radical and revolutionary organizations in Egypt had spent years beforehand organizing among ordinary working Egyptians, involving themselves as best they could in the struggles. The cadre built out of that practical experience - not just simply being won over to Marxism while waiting for the bigger struggles to break out - were a major factor in the initial successes of the movement and its ability to keep going a year after it started.

[Olentzero]

Also, your definition of "truly mass revolutionary movement" is too narrow. For example, would you not classify the mass movement that brought down tsarism in Russia as 'truly revolutionary' because its goal was not clearly socialist in nature?

[Lucretia]

Also, your definition of "truly mass revolutionary movement" is too narrow. For example, would you not classify the mass movement that brought down tsarism in Russia as 'truly revolutionary' because its goal was not clearly socialist in nature?

I honestly don't know why you're trying to latch onto this issue as a basis for criticism. RTW cleared this up pretty easily in his post above, so maybe you're insistence on hanging onto it is because you have no other basis for trying to put the ISO's critics on the defense? But to reiterate the meaning I intended to convey with "truly mass revolutionary movement," I would remind you of Marx's descriptions of the proletariat at the first truly universal class, and the socialist revolution as the first truly universal revolution. Now take "universal" and replace it with mass.

Is that clear enough for you? It would be obvious to anybody reading this thread that main topic of discussion between JH, RTW, and I has been how to build a party capable of carrying out a revolutionary socialist transformation of society, not the topic of how to have a popular uprising that replaces one military dictatorship with another -- which is precisely what has happened in Egypt. Now can we please get back to the topic at hand, or do you want to turn this into a thread on whether or not the Egyptian spring was the world's first spontaneous socialist revolution?

[Jimmie Higgins]

JH seems to counter this with arguing that, while not outright "hiding" the fact they are socialists, Leninists in non-revolutionary times should focus more on pushing for political decisions that will place workers in situations where they will draw revolutionary Marxist conclusions on their own. The goal from JH's perspective thus seems to be to stretch out the Leninist message of working-class independence, etc., across multiple steps--first, you show workers that the democrats can't be trusted, then you win them over to a fully Marxist program once they realize the Dems aren't an alternative. (JH, if this isn't your position, I apologize. But this is honestly what you appear to be saying. If it is not, please explain in clear and precise terms exactly how this summary is not accurate. No need to bury the rebuttal within and across paragraphs about what the ISO is doing in occupy.)

For the 12th time no. We are not directly "party-building" by working in broader circles, we are trying to help push conditions which will make more radicalization and independent politics more possible.

You are conflating different things: "party" building on the one hand and then how those groups of revolutionaries, already won to marxism, should relate to the broader layers of people with mixed ideas.

For the first part, aside from all the myths and straw-men put out in threads like this, we are doing exactly what you say that RTW advocates. It's mostly done very modestly, through study groups and in the ones and twos, maybe threes and fours during larger movements that are shifting leftwards.

For the second part, how do revolutionaries relate to broad layers of people in the absence of existing left organizations and permanent formations let alone in the absence of a worker's movement or big working class reformist parties.

When looking at the terrain of the US and what the conditions of the class are like, it's anachronistic and ahistorical to try and compare our situation to the bolsheviks battling opportunism or even the SWP trying to figure out what to do about a situation where the CP actively tries to prevent them from organizing in unions and has the monopoly on revolutionary-cred due to their relationship to the USSR at a time when millions of workers still saw that as a good and viable alternative. There are valuable and essential lessons, but there are few actual parallels.

So what are the obstacles for greater class consciousness right now (actually in the recent past since things are changing now)? Lack of workers organizations; lack of even broader mixed movements; passivity and a sense of defeat among the rank and file in the trade unions leading to greater control by the leadership; the hold of the Democratic party in defining what is acceptable politics for workers and movements to hold.

So identifying these issues as well as others that may (hopefully) not be as controversial here (like fighting racism and other oppression, anti-imperialist war, etc) is what guides our decision about if it would be worth it to try and help build these struggles or movements. Then within these movements we have our more practical ideas about what will help these things move forward and this is based on our class politics and ideology. At the same time we would also like to specifically promote our politics and win some people to them.


JH's model still seems to rely unduly on spontaneityIf I believed this why the fuck would I be in an organization that thinks that there needs to be a revolutionary party of the organized vanguard in order for a revolution to have a good chance of actually succeeding?! I could save myself a whole lot of shit from sectarians with agendas by being an independent activists and Marxist.


such as the idea that certain political situations (working against the two-party system) have a built-in logic that will nudge workers in the direction of revolution, without actively having it explained them the specific reasons why the democrats can't be trusted (which of course, would require bringing up things like class independence, the nature of politics under capitalism, and so on). Again you are conflating things. We don't have a "transitional program" because there is no working class movement to try and win to this program, it's just propaganda that calls itself a transitional program when leftists today employ them. We do have short-term and long-term goals in various movement work we do because within a given movement there are demands and positions to try and win that will help move things forward. But we don't think that people breaking from the Democrats are a panacea, just something that would make it much easier for both class and radical politics to make inroads to a much greater extent.


Instead, in JH's model, the only real argument is for not being able to trust the democrats, but as RTW suggests, this argument is compatible with a variety of reformist positions. Moreover, I fail to see how the ISO would be able to make the argument for class-independence effectively, even down the road in more "revolutionary," if the target audience of Nader supporters can simply throw back in the ISO's face that the ISO itself sacrificed the principle when supporting Nader. By the way I think this is one of the major risks of spreading the task of revolution across steps, when one step is effectively conceived of as "practice" (building a "broad left," what have you) and the other as true "party building" (spreading an identifiably Marxist analysis). It risks making your politics incoherent by having one step contradict the other. Of course party building requires multiple steps, but an explicitly Marxian class analysis should be the guiding subjective element across all the steps, not something that is muted--not necessarily hidden, but muted--early on.Yes as I have now repeatedly explained, we don't go into ANY movement, we try and evaluate which ones, from our perspective, can potentially either push class consciousness further directly or are on a fault-line that keeps the system together. Further, we argue for why were are participating in X struggle or reform. We don't go into anti-war movements saying "killing is wrong" we say, "as socialists we are against this war as an imperialist war" and explain our view. Out of that revolutionary perspective we participate, but do not dissolve ourselves as you keep claiming. In fact we wouldn't even be able to argue our short-term strategies inside movements without also getting into the politics of it. "Why should the anti-war coalition go out of it's way to work with US groups fighting repression of Arabs in the US, won't that make the movement seem like terrorists?" "Why shouldn't we put 'peace is patriotic' on the flier for our coalition?" etc. These are all arguments I've had and even if I wanted to hide my politics it would be impossible to try and do so.

Finally the arguments that we don't try and win people to politics or that by participating in a protest vote like with Nader, we are confusing people or causing people to become liberals rather than the opposite just falls off me like water due to my personal experiences. Where the hell do you think I get my politics from? I maybe read some Marx before being in the ISO, I never read Lenin or Trotsky, I was reading things about globalization and all the trendy radical liberal stuff in 2000. It was the anti-globalization movement (and I also voted for Nader before I ever met the ISO) that convinced me that another world was possible, but it was the arguments and reading and organizing with the ISO that made me a revolutionary who knew what that other world could be and how people might realistically build it. I was not only interested in the ISO, but Socialist Alternative and IWW and I even planned to go to a Spart meeting but when I got to the room, no one was there for the meeting. But the ISO comrades were the ones who made the best arguments to me, were engaged in the struggles I wanted to be in, and were also the most patient with my mixed ideas at the time.


As RTW suggests, it's not simply the fact of getting involvement in movements. It's not simply the fact of arguing against the Democrats. It's the subjective element -- the how -- that is key to forging an effective left capable of winning the struggles necessary to make it "broad" again. To try to bracket the how of Marxian class analysis to the side, saving it for a later stage, is in my view to forgo a truly revolutionary politics.I feel I keep having to explain this and then only to have you state exactly what I said we are NOT trying to do derives more form you (and others) trying to connect evidence to your forgone conclusion than anything else.

I have repeatedly said and then given examples of how this is one process, we are not building our group by hiding our politics, just the opposite. We engage in broader movements as a way to try and help create better conditions for class struggle because unless there is a rank and file union movement, unless there are massive numbers of people in an occupy or anti-racist movement, then we are stuck talking to the handfuls of people who came across a book and got interested in radical politics or met some revolutionary at some point. When there are large movements and workers engaging in struggle, then it's possible for millions of people previous who wouldn't give a thought to radical politics, to actually find relevant answers in revolutionary politics.

The article posted by RTW is a recipe for sectarianism. Without being able to relate to broader layers of people, without a realistic assessment of where the class is generally at right now, groups increase the isolation that the system has already caused us. It's like the group I mentioned with a "All power to the soviets" sign - who is that for? It's posturing aimed at other revolutionaries to help them poach members by saying, "look we're the most radical here". And the groups like this, where do they have to go to reach an audience? To ISO and other radical's events where they try and poach people walking in the door because they are too inward-focused to actually relate to even left-leaning workers.

[Lucretia]

JH, you keep mentioning strawmen, but I am a little perplexed if this was an accusation hurled at either me or RTW. Although I can only speak for myself, I can say that I have attempted to honestly and accurately represent your argument in every post I have made. And I can’t see any obvious examples of where RTW had done any differently. Might the problem be a misunderstanding rather than the deliberate construction of “strawmen”?

But more to the issue at hand. I don’t think I am “conflating” party-building with working in broad circles. I am suggesting that the goal of a revolutionary party should be to party-build when it gets involved in radical circles, rather than watering down its politics in an effort to “relate” to less class conscious people, thereby postponing the act of party-building until some “step” or “stage” that will never arrive. The difference is that RTW and I view the process of party-building as the method through which party members in non-revolutionary times should try to relate to left movements. You seem to want to parse this process out into two different steps. I won’t repeat again that I think this parsing out is artificial and stagist.

Nobody here is arguing that our position in the 21st century US is identical to the context confronted by the Bolsheviks in the 1910s or the SWP in the 1970s. But the important thing that all the groups have in common is a desire to build a strong revolutionary party (that is your desire, right?). The question is, what sorts of lessons can we learn from them? And in what ways do their different contexts invalidate what they sought to establish as general principles of party building? These are serious questions that require more of an analysis than dismissively waving your hand and glibly saying “There are valuable and essential lessons [such as?], but there are few actual parallels.”

We generally agree about which obstacles are holding back workers from greater class consciousness (I note again the absence of any talk about revolutionary consciousness). But I would add to it that another obstacle is a Leninist left that is dominated numerically by a group that views its role as watering down its message in order to attract people of multiple levels of consciousness into social struggles in appeals that look like they could have been written by reformist groups (“Vote for Ralph Nader to break the two-party duopoly!”). You can keep calling this a “straw man” all you want, but that’s precisely what such a slogan represents – an abandonment of independent class politics and a specifically socialist message in order to attract broad swaths of people to a political message perfectly compatible with reformism.

And, by the way, nobody is saying you “believe” that the ISO relies unduly on spontaneity. I am saying that, in spite of what you personally believe, that’s what its political behavior indicates. I’ve explained why, but the best you can do to counter my argument is to say that you get a lot of shit for trying to organize a vanguard – but this is precisely what RTW and I are faulting your group for not doing effectively because it spends the vast bulk of its time in movements watering its politics down rather than being upfront and uncompromising about its long-term political vision within those movements.

One of the biggest problems I have with the ISO is, as I already mentioned, its implicit view that “certain political situations have a built-in logic that will nudge workers in the direction of revolution.” This is why I brought up the example of the ISO’s strategy to undermine the democrats by supporting Nader. I mentioned that this was not a way to build a revolutionary left (a party, vanguard, a mass movement or anything in between) because it lacked any revolutionary subjective component. The campaign consisted of a set of generic claims about the democrats that, as RTW mentioned, was something you might expect to hear come out of the mouth of an upset petty-bourgeois democrat who wanted to resurrect FDR. Abandoning the Democrats on its own is not a path to advancing revolutionary class consciousness. They have to be abandoned for specific purposes. That is the point RTW was getting at when he mentioned the importance of the how of relating to movements – the subjective component that you seem not to take too seriously in your mad dash to create mass movements.

The way the ISO relates to movements does not mean that it will never be able to recruit revolutionary cadre. Your experience illustrates that it can be effective at times, and I appreciate your willingness to share it. I do think, however, that their approach is not nearly as effective as it could be for all the reasons that I and RTW have mentioned here. In fact, I think it can lead to an awful lot of disillusionment, which might (I am not in a position to know) be one reason there has been something of a revolving door problem in the group's membership.

[RedTrackWorker]

Jimmie Higgins, no one has accused you of "hiding" your politics. What you've been accusses of is "watering down" them and engaging in actions that contradict them, such as the support for Nader contradicting the lessons of the working class emancipating itself and part of that being learning that the capitalist state has to be overthrown not reformed through elections.

You have said how different things are now then when past Marxist debates have taken place. Sure, but does that mean we can abandon the political independence of the working class? Or does voting for Nader someone not do so? Because the point isn't that you or the ISO didn't say socialist stuff at the same time as voting for Nader but that the sure fact of voting for a capitalist politician sends a message louder than talk about working class self-emancipation. Your particular experience doesn't really address the issue as the claim isn't that the vote for Nader will somehow become an immediate and unpassable obstacle to everyone around the ISO but that it violates the principle of working class political independence.

""The article posted by RTW is a recipe for sectarianism. Without being able to relate to broader layers of people, without a realistic assessment of where the class is generally at right now, groups increase the isolation that the system has already caused us."

I don't understand this at all. What do you think sectarianism is? What does "relate" to broader layers of people mean or argue for not having a "realistic assessment of where the class is generally at right now"?

My quick-and-dirty understanding of the article is that:
1. Socialist revolution is necessary
2. A successful revolution depends upon clarity over the fundamental questions facing the movement
3. That clarity requires revolutionary-minded workers to organize themselves to get that clarity through study and intervention in the struggle
4. When such a revolutionary international doesn't exist, the most important and immediate task facing revolutionaries (those who not just subjectively desire revolution but want to objectively contribute to one's success) is the clarification of the fundamentals and the self-organization of those revolutionaries who see that need.

My understanding of sectarianism is putting the interests of one's sect before those of the movement. What is yours (these references to "sectarians with agendas" and "poaching" don't have a place in any Marxist analysis of organizations that I know)?

What is lacking in the above general outline? You keep pointing to the need for a bigger struggle to really get to a mass movement and revolutionary possibilities. Sure, of course. Workers and others in general will come to revolutionary consciousness based on experiences of struggle, not lectures but...is that it? Just more struggle? That conclusion leads to the charge of spontaneity, which you reject, but if you reject it, then you must accept the consequences, which is that the movement is all is not enough of a rebuttal to the charge of violating principles in voting for Nader.

[Olentzero]

I honestly don't know why you're trying to latch onto this issue as a basis for criticism. RTW cleared this up pretty easily in his post above, so maybe you're insistence on hanging onto it is because you have no other basis for trying to put the ISO's critics on the defense?There's a simpler reason for this, which I believe proper netiquette forbids me from mentioning explicitly.

As for your question about Egypt, I've never argued that the Egyptian revolution is or was socialist because I don't believe it is. It is revolutionary, however, in that it didn't dissipate into passivity once Mubarak was replaced by the military junta (which, by the way, was not the result of mass action but a maneuver by the Egyptian government to save its own skin). They're still out there in the hundreds of thousands - if not millions - challenging the ruling class, demanding the military step down as rulers. So, while it is not socialist, it is certainly a mass revolutionary movement. Not built by socialist parties or organizations but by the Egyptian working class itself. Socialists and revolutionaries who are serious about being relevant are in the middle of all of it fighting for the leadership of that movement, working with people where they are politically and through that process winning them to Marxism. Not looking for the thoroughly convinced yet until now politically inactive Marxists, which is the upshot of "building cadre in preparation for being able to build a mass revolutionary movement".

[Olentzero]

In fact, I think it can lead to an awful lot of disillusionment, which might (I am not in a position to know) be one reason there has been something of a revolving door problem in the group's membership.If there really was a revolving door problem in the ISO, the summer conferences would be as small as they were some twenty years ago when they were held at Oberlin College instead of Chicago. Hell, even ten years ago they weren't even breaking 1,000 - whereas the last five or so years it's grown to push 1,500 - if not 2,000. Haven't been to once since 2007, unfortunately, so even I take that second figure with a grain of salt. Jimmie, how many showed up the year we had two conferences in Chicago and California?

Of course not all in attendance are ISO members, but the growth is still a damned good indicator that people are coming in and staying. I won't deny people leave the ISO for any number of reasons, either, but it's pretty clear that the number of people who stay is increasing.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

There's a simpler reason for this, which I believe proper netiquette forbids me from mentioning explicitly.

As for your question about Egypt, I've never argued that the Egyptian revolution is or was socialist because I don't believe it is. It is revolutionary, however, in that it didn't dissipate into passivity once Mubarak was replaced by the military junta (which, by the way, was not the result of mass action but a maneuver by the Egyptian government to save its own skin). They're still out there in the hundreds of thousands - if not millions - challenging the ruling class, demanding the military step down as rulers. So, while it is not socialist, it is certainly a mass revolutionary movement. Not built by socialist parties or organizations but by the Egyptian working class itself. Socialists and revolutionaries who are serious about being relevant are in the middle of all of it fighting for the leadership of that movement, working with people where they are politically and through that process winning them to Marxism. Not looking for the thoroughly convinced yet until now politically inactive Marxists, which is the upshot of "building cadre in preparation for being able to build a mass revolutionary movement".
Hey Olentzero, it's been a while. Just thought I would underscore what you are saying here. Having lots of people in the street doing "something" to challenge the status quo, is fine, but unless there is some kind of revolutionary leadership, you get bupkis. This kind of new left approach is a hallmark of your group. It is a bankrupt approach. So you are with the masses as they follow Islamic clerics in Iran calling that a "revolution." In Egypt, where there is a grave danger that Islamists will wind up leading, you don't try to break the Egyptian masses away, you follow. Just like when you pander to Obama (I mean you wouldn't want to upset someone that is so happy to have a person of color as president, so why would you want to upset some person in the street who is so happy that Mubarak is deposed?). In Egypt the stakes are higher -- and tailing this kind of mass movement becomes suicidal for socialists. Swimming against the stream really means proclaiming a Marxist program even when it is unpopular with the proletariat and petite bourgeoisie.

You will, no doubt, protest that you will try to make contacts and win some people over to socialism. Any group worth its salt in Egypt, would today be proclaiming the dangers of the Islamic Brotherhood, the need for working class independence, and the need for proletarian revolution. You bark about secterianism -- well this is a mistake that your organization makes over and over. It demonstrates an incapacity to lead.

[Olentzero]

In Egypt, where there is a grave danger that Islamists will wind up leading, you don't try to break the Egyptian masses away, you follow.No, we absolutely fucking do NOT. End of story, and end of my conversation with you. Nothing you have to say from here on in is worth the energy needed to respond.

For Lucretia and others reading along, however, here is a recent interview (http://socialistworker.org/2012/02/02/egyptian-revolution-after-one-year) in SW with Mostafa Ali of the Revolutionary Socialists. He speaks at length about the gains made by the Muslim Brotherhood, and I think it's quite clear what the actual attitude is of the party on the ground there with the closest links to the ISO. One section is worth quoting at length:
On the other hand, another reason for the drop in strikes was the same as why the Muslim Brotherhood did so well in elections--that many workers are willing to wait for the new parliament to act on their demands. There are still many illusions that have to be overcome. But as a result, I think we can expect workers to start returning to protest to show that they expect their demands to be met. Only this time, they won't be protesting the NDP and Mubarak, but a parliament controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood that is continuing the old regime's attacks on the working class.

All of this is part of the radicalizing consciousness, which is most advanced among a lot of young people who understand now that winning this revolution is not going to be an easy matter. They recognize that mass demonstrations in Tahrir aren't enough, and that that the ruling class is much more violent and oppressive, and willing to do whatever it takes to hold onto power.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Sensitive, aren't we? Look, this is serious stuff. Go back and read your group's paper from mid-1978 on and read what you had to say about Iran. Learn from it. Don't just get all pissy because you feel insulted. If that seems like it was good propaganda, and a good way to lead the masses in Iran, fine. You do seem personally committed to socialism. I believe that you have hitched your wagon to a group that, unless somehow transformed, will not lead but will follow. The reason we get so caught up in history, to the chagrin of some on this forum, is to learn from mistakes.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Sensitive, aren't we? Look, this is serious stuff. Go back and read your group's paper from mid-1978 on and read what you had to say about Iran. Learn from it. Don't just get ally pissy because you feel insulted. If that seems like it was good propaganda, and a good way to lead the masses in Iran, fine. You do seem personally committed to socialism. I believe that you have hitched your wagon to a group that, unless somehow transformed, will not lead but will follow. The reason we get so caught up in history, to the chagrin of some on this forum, is to learn from mistakes.

I don't have copies of the paper from a year after the group was formed, but seriously, that's your argument? Our position on Iran is that we did support the initial revolution and we have used this historical example as an argument for why it's necessary to have an organized vanguard before a revolutionary crisis hits otherwise workers will be outflanked.

But even if in 1978 before the take-over and counter-revolution our group argued what you claim, or what you read the Sparts claim we argued... " If that seems like it was good propaganda, and a good way to lead the masses in Iran" how in the wide shitting world do you think a couple of dozen socialists in the US can LEAD THE IRANIAN WORKERS AND MASSES?!

That's completely out of touch with reality.

[Olentzero]

I feel I just need to add, in response to LB, that if you think the articles from SW were the only thing we had to say on the Iranian revolution, you should score a copy of Revolutionary Rehearsals from Haymarket Books and read a fuller analysis from after the fact. I can't take you seriously if you clearly demonstrate ignorance, willing or otherwise, of other sources of information.

[Lucretia]

I think it is worth repeating, as you have already mentioned, that RR was not produced at the time of the Iranian rev. It is very easy to have a correct analysis in retrospect.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

It's the methodology, comrades. You are so steeped in it that you cannot see it. Are you disowning your group's public line, in your central organ -- and referring me to a book written after the fact? That seems odd.


how in the wide shitting world do you think a couple of dozen socialists in the US can LEAD THE IRANIAN WORKERS AND MASSES?!As part of an international tendency, presumably that was the goal -- or to find co-thinkers in Iran who held to a revolutionary line. I don't know exactly what it would have taken to positively change things in Iran, on the ground, at the time. I do know that FOLLOWING most of the Iranian left in support of Khomeni and the "Iranian Revolution" was antithetical to it.

I was active at that time, and the only group that I know of that correctly analyzed and produced revolutionary propaganda about what was happening in Iran was the Spartacist League. The rest of the US left was overtly hostile to the SL for pointing out that the Mullahs were reactionaries, and that an enemy of the Shah was not a friend of the proletariat. At the time, the ISO, the SWP, the RCP were all hailing the Iranian "revolution."


ONE YEAR ago, brave activists in Egypt electrified the world. Sweeping into Tahrir Square in Cairo, and similar sites in other cities and towns, protesting outside government offices, and striking for living wages, workers' rights and against corrupt managers, they overturned a dictator and drove forward a process of mass democratic upheaval that has been dubbed "the Arab Spring." In the process, Egypt's revolution became an inspiration to millions around the world.
Every step of the way, millions of ordinary people struck blows for women's rights, independent unions, democracy and social justice. But at every step, they were also brutalized by a military apparatus intent on blocking real change. Even after the dictator, President Mubarak, was toppled, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has continued to rule via "state of emergency" law, while responding to the revolutionary process with arrests, torture, beatings, and killings. Since Mubarak's fall, as many as 14,000 people have been subjected to military tribunals and the beatings and torture associated with them. As a result, one year later, the revolution hangs in the balance.
So, what is missing from this? A clear analysis stating that the Muslim Brotherhood are counterrevolutionaries. That removing the army from power is not meaningful unless something better, the working class, replaces it in power. Your paper suggests it comrades, but it is mealymouthed and could be easily missed.

So here's your recent headline:

Solidarity with Egypt's revolution

January 26, 2012


Rah rah sisboom bah! Oooops. What kind of revolution is this? A worker's revolution? There are some opportunities here, but you knuckleheads think that because there is some kind of mass movement against a really bad government, that it will lead to something better. That's not Marxism. It is a very cavalier approach to the future of Egypt and the middle east.

[Lucretia]

There's a simpler reason for this, which I believe proper netiquette forbids me from mentioning explicitly.

As for your question about Egypt, I've never argued that the Egyptian revolution is or was socialist because I don't believe it is. It is revolutionary, however, in that it didn't dissipate into passivity once Mubarak was replaced by the military junta (which, by the way, was not the result of mass action but a maneuver by the Egyptian government to save its own skin). They're still out there in the hundreds of thousands - if not millions - challenging the ruling class, demanding the military step down as rulers. So, while it is not socialist, it is certainly a mass revolutionary movement. Not built by socialist parties or organizations but by the Egyptian working class itself. Socialists and revolutionaries who are serious about being relevant are in the middle of all of it fighting for the leadership of that movement, working with people where they are politically and through that process winning them to Marxism. Not looking for the thoroughly convinced yet until now politically inactive Marxists, which is the upshot of "building cadre in preparation for being able to build a mass revolutionary movement".

Well, nobody is contesting that the situation in Egypt is "revolutionary" in some generic sense. You brought it up in the context of a discussion about the proper approach socialists should take in relating to mass movements if those socialists want to have a socialist revolution, not a political revolution that replaces one set of thugs with another.

The point that RTW and I have repeatedly made is that a revolutionary situation is when socialist parties should content for leadership, because their leadership is necessary for a socialist revolution to occur. They don't just occur spontaneously on their own. So in order to be prepared for such situations, socialists should be spending their energy in non-revolutionary times developing a cadre of well trained and committed socialist activists who will fight for leadership in the revolutionary moments. They should do this by working in mass movements with an uncompromising class-based Marxist line. You and JH seemed to be in disagreement with us on this issue, hinting that it is "sectarian" and won't advance the mass movement to a point where it will have revolutionary potential. I wonder if you might elaborate on this disagreement with more specifics, because most of what I have heard are vague claims that are either consistent with or irrelevant to what we've been saying -- including our criticisms of the ISO's approach.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I was active at that time, and the only group that I know of that correctly analyzed and produced revolutionary propaganda about what was happening in Iran was the Spartacist League. The rest of the US left was overtly hostile to the SL for pointing out that the Mullahs were reactionaries, and that an enemy of the Shah was not a friend of the proletariat. At the time, the ISO, the SWP, the RCP were all hailing the Iranian "revolution." So then how is this evidence that the ISO isn't really revolutionary if all of the rad left had this view? Hmm. As for the Sparts, even a broken clock is right twice a day. If the left in the US with little on the ground connection to workers in Iran couldn't figure out developments as they happened, but then reassessed afterwards, then what's the issue? The Sparts supported US intervention in Haiti which is totally wacky and insane (and talk about "crossing class lines") and then they corrected that.

Making a mistake based on limited information is no big sin - but why do you STILL support the USSR's operations in Afghanistan? Making a mistake and sticking to it decades later - now that's problematic.


So, what is missing from this? A clear analysis stating that the Muslim Brotherhood are counterrevolutionaries. That removing the army from power is not meaningful unless something better, the working class, replaces it in power. Your paper suggests it comrades, but it is mealymouthed and could be easily missed. So we are right, but the problem with the ISO is that some articles on Obama and the Muslim Brotherhood aren't clear enough for you?


Rah rah sisboom bah! Oooops. What kind of revolution is this? A worker's revolution? There are some opportunities here, but you knuckleheads think that because there is some kind of mass movement against a really bad government, that it will lead to something better. That's not Marxism. It is a very cavalier approach to the future of Egypt and the middle east.We never claimed it's a worker's revolution, why would you insinuate that we do? As I said in the last post, our view is generally that if you don't have an organized revolutionary vanguard and a revolutionary situation happens, then things aren't looking good for success - the whole book "Revolutionary Rehearsals" drums that point over and over again (it's not my favorite book personally, but it's good for that argument anyway).

But it's happening now and people are organizing, revolutionaries and working class fighters but also people with ideas tied to other classes - that's the nature of any revolution regardless of weather revolutionary working class politics find expression or lead.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Well, nobody is contesting that the situation in Egypt is "revolutionary" in some generic sense. You brought it up in the context of a discussion about the proper approach socialists should take in relating to mass movements if those socialists want to have a socialist revolution, not a political revolution that replaces one set of thugs with another.And yes, what is the point about Egypt that should be made last January? Hey, worker, you know how you wish that there was an alternative to the seemingly invincible status-quo? Well, Egyptian protesters are dead; they may win a battle, but they are dead because they didn't organize prior to a revolutionary situation.

That would be a great argument to have with anarchists in the Occupy movement who believe in spontaneity and disregard organizing, but to average workers in January 2011 who don't think massive change is possible. It's the same with Wisconsin - what's the lead? People are standing up to working class attacks, or "well the unions leaders will sell this out". That's what the SW is for, our coworkers, other activists, and people we meet on the street and we try and stress what we see as the main thing people around us should take away from a quick interaction. No one is going to read SW or Worker's Vanguard and become a Marxist right away, that takes more in-depth discussion and reading and experience.

What I think is sectarian is that some groups see the point of their publications, not to reach a wider audience, but to try and score points in a sort of inbred leftist way. The Sparts go to demonstrations with a packet about how the ISO is terrible, there are 100,000 people at an anti-war rally and they think the question on these liberals minds is "is the ISO really revolutionary?". It's insane. The task of radicals now should be to bring more people into struggle and try and win more people to revolutionary politics, not poach from a small pool of people already radicalizing. If Sparts were actually in the same coalition and they want to argue that this or that strategy or argument is not going to help the movement forward, then that's great. If they want to stand outside the coalition meeting and say, "don't trust these radicals" then yes I see it as sectarian.


The point that RTW and I have repeatedly made is that a revolutionary situation is when socialist parties should content for leadership, because their leadership is necessary for a socialist revolution to occur. They don't just occur spontaneously on their own.There is no disagreement on this.


So in order to be prepared for such situations, socialists should be spending their energy in non-revolutionary times developing a cadre of well trained and committed socialist activists who will fight for leadership in the revolutionary moments. This is what we do. We try and recruit, we try and win arguments about how to view and understand what's going on, we try and win practical arguments in movements. In Occupy, we want to try and recruit the best and radicalizing activists but we also want to have marxist ideas and tactics competitng against ideas we don't think will help the movement grow like lifestyle, moralist pacifism or insurrectionism, and attempts to turn occupy in a Democratic party "get out the vote" campaign.


They should do this by working in mass movements with an uncompromising class-based Marxist line. You and JH seemed to be in disagreement with us on this issue, hinting that it is "sectarian" and won't advance the mass movement to a point where it will have revolutionary potential. I wonder if you might elaborate on this disagreement with more specifics, because most of what I have heard are vague claims that are either consistent with or irrelevant to what we've been saying -- including our criticisms of the ISO's approach.And I keep saying this disagreement is a straw-man that exists in your head.

The disagreement is how to do this. Do you go like the Sparts and RTW's group and protest outside our events, or do you try and go to the other 99.9999999% of the US population who are open to revolutionary arguments and ideas? Do you stand on the sidelines of movements or do you try and show in practice why revolutionary marxist ideas are valuable and essential to the movement? Is our task to win people away from miniscule left groups who are "misleading the workers" when in fact no left groups (reformist electoral or not) are leading or misleading workers - or is our task to encourage workers to begin to take action so that there is even the possibility for radicalization on a larger scale and win workers away from liberalism to revolutionary politics.

You keep saying that we don't want to organize a revolutionary group, but that's not the issue at all. We already make this our priority, in fact we've been relatively successful, though objectively the entire left is well below where we need to be, the question is what to do beyond that? One of the things that attracted me to the ISO was an outward focus, I think this is what the left has needed to do, to reconnect marxism to the working class and with a revival of class struggle now, it's more vital than ever that we break from some of the bad habits that groups have developed over a long period of retreat.

[Olentzero]

I think it is worth repeating, as you have already mentioned, that RR was not produced at the time of the Iranian rev. It is very easy to have a correct analysis in retrospect.Jesus Christ, do you really expect revolutionaries to have the correct perspective straight out of the gate every time? You should examine the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1920 sometime as a very illustrative example of even the best revolutionaries getting it completely fucking wrong - and examining their mistakes and learning from them.

This is not to admit that the ISO, a year after its founding, supported the Iranian mullahs during the Iranian Revolution, because frankly I don't have the materials from 1978 in front of me to prove or disprove that assertion. And given the way LB misinterpreted other SW articles he's cited, I'm really not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Regardless, it is no sin to make mistakes, if at some point you admit those mistakes (preferably as soon as possible after it becomes clear that it is a mistake), take steps to correct it, and learn from the experience so as not to make the same mistake again. I think it's pretty clear from Revolutionary Rehearsals and our attitude towards the Egyptian revolution - as evidenced from the interview I linked to upthread - that if the ISO did in fact make such a mistake in 1978 regarding Iran, they learned from it and the lessons now inform our perspective today.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

So then how is this evidence that the ISO isn't really revolutionary if all of the rad left had this view? Hmm. As for the Sparts, even a broken clock is right twice a day. If the left in the US with little on the ground connection to workers in Iran couldn't figure out developments as they happened, but then reassessed afterwards, then what's the issue? The Sparts supported US intervention in Haiti which is totally wacky and insane (and talk about "crossing class lines") and then they corrected that.

Making a mistake based on limited information is no big sin - but why do you STILL support the USSR's operations in Afghanistan? Making a mistake and sticking to it decades later - now that's problematic.

So we are right, but the problem with the ISO is that some articles on Obama and the Muslim Brotherhood aren't clear enough for you?

We never claimed it's a worker's revolution, why would you insinuate that we do? As I said in the last post, our view is generally that if you don't have an organized revolutionary vanguard and a revolutionary situation happens, then things aren't looking good for success - the whole book "Revolutionary Rehearsals" drums that point over and over again (it's not my favorite book personally, but it's good for that argument anyway).

But it's happening now and people are organizing, revolutionaries and working class fighters but also people with ideas tied to other classes - that's the nature of any revolution regardless of weather revolutionary working class politics find expression or lead.

Because even a "broken clock" with a lobotomy should know to never support Islamic reaction and to NEVER TIE THE WORKING CLASS to Islamic reactionaries. So why is your preferred role to cheerlead? And you had good company in urging the Iranian working masses into a suicidal alliance with Khomeini so it's okay? It's understandable? How come the Sparts got it so right and your group got it so wrong?

But I guess you have an affinity for Islamic reaction. Explain to me again how you were supporting social progress in Afghanistan by supporting CIA backed Islamic reactionaries. I guess if you liked them in Afghanistan, you might as well give them a pass in Egypt. Was it progressive when they skinned school teachers alive for teaching women how to read? Or was that just a small misstep for an otherwise progressive, anti-imperialist movement?

If your organization has ever explicitly repudiated it's disasterous line in Iran it would be news to me. The SL's line on Haiti was certainly fucked up (although you don't even have it quite right), but I'm not sure what that has to do with this discussion. It was contrary to every position they've had before or since and was labeled by the SL as a "betrayal."

If your Org actually has some feet on the ground in Egypt and are pissing the opportunity away by going with the flow -- shame on them. If they are clearly exposing all of the extreme danger of what is going on to the proletariat, and not just enthusing about how great the "Egyptian Revolution" good for them. But that is not the way the ISO operates.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

I think it's pretty clear from Revolutionary Rehearsals and our attitude towards the Egyptian revolution - as evidenced from the interview I linked to upthread - that if the ISO did in fact make such a mistake in 1978 regarding Iran, they learned from it and the lessons now inform our perspective today. So Olent, you don't even know if you did? And if you did, but it's not clear to you, you're sure such tendencies have been corrected? I can see that the ISO really emphasizes education about it. Yes, you are definitely well-armed as a group to not do that again, if you actually did it, whatever it was.

[RedTrackWorker]

The disagreement is how to do this. Do you go like the Sparts and RTW's group and protest outside our events, or do you try and go to the other 99.9999999% of the US population who are open to revolutionary arguments and ideas? Do you stand on the sidelines of movements or do you try and show in practice why revolutionary marxist ideas are valuable and essential to the movement? Is our task to win people away from miniscule left groups who are "misleading the workers" when in fact no left groups (reformist electoral or not) are leading or misleading workers - or is our task to encourage workers to begin to take action so that there is even the possibility for radicalization on a larger scale and win workers away from liberalism to revolutionary politics.

Thank you for ceasing the insinuations about "sectarians" and finally coming out with it directly. One of the striking things about the ISO is how it only polemicizes with left groups when they do something very easy to argue against such as support a dictator. If you're arguing this "broad left" focus can be squared with a focus on "revolutionary clarity" and isn't a stage, this completely undercuts that remark.

Let's try to break this down:
First, putting "go to the masses" versus "go to organized left group events" as completely opposed and having to choose one or the other is, I suspect you know, bullshit. If you do know it's bullshit, why do you put it like that? In case you don't know, I find it particularly easy to go to both seeing as I work in workplace that represents a crosssection of the NYC and international working class (except the undocumented since its civil service). I haven't encountered a single "liberal" worker there though. Mixed consciousness with illusions in the Democrats, yes, but not liberal. I've found much more interest in the LRP's propaganda (and had much more interesting and revolutionary discussions) there than I have from any ISOer, who uses these excuses of us "standing on the sidelines" or "workers would never read our stuff" to turn down reading our stuff. This is particularly disgusting to charge since you well know the LRP has a revolutionary Marxist workplace bulletin and your group does not despite being so much larger. Which is why your comment that "our task" is to start action represents your outlook more accurately than your claim you're not putting forward a stage before revolutionary clarity, because otherwise your group would have a Marxist workplace bulletin somewhere to take Marxist ideas to those workers you keep counterposing to engaging with as opposed to small groups like the LRP.

And name a single movement the LRP has stood on the sidelines of. It should be easy to name one since we're either doing that all the time or never according to your comment. For myself, I do stand on the sidelines when a train's coming but other than that, I'm in the thick of things.

To get back to the key question of "revolutionary clarity"--how are you supposed to advance and deepen revolutionary consciousness by ignoring almost everyone other than you that claims to be revolutionary? Do those debates matter or not? Just like voting for a capitalist and lecturing on "class independence" contradict one another, talking about revolutionary theory while ignoring any kind of significant theoretical engagement with other revolutionary theories sends a contradictory message and one who's message tends to be "we're the largest" rather than "we have the necessary clarity about the tasks a revolutionary organization needs".

Please tell me how when you talk like this I'm not supposed to hear Trotsky's voice condemning those who call the Bolshevik-Leninists "sectarian" because they have principles and defend them.

I think that your, JH, refusal to deal with the charges about the Chicago Teachers Union based on the idea that we're "sectarians with agendas" (which even if true, wouldn't change the facts of the case) and your trotting out ISO lies about the LRP here without a second thought are sectarian acts in the Marxist sense (putting the interests of the sect before the movement--because those claims help protect your organization but weaken the consciousness of the movement as a whole and serve as an obstacle to any real discussion).

[workersadvocate]

If your Org actually has some feet on the ground in Egypt and are pissing the opportunity away by going with the flow -- shame on them. If they are clearly exposing all of the extreme danger of what is going on to the proletariat, and not just enthusing about how great the "Egyptian Revolution" good for them. But that is not the way the ISO operates.
This concerns me, but not just with ISO. It seems like almost every left tendency pulls this go with the flow bullshit when rebellions occur "on our own doorstep", or they actually defend the ruling class and its state against rebels, or they merely pose on the sidelines picking at and poaching from other left sects. What a goddamn mess the middle class left is. Who did the right thing during the August Uprising in Britain? Every middle class left tendency on Earth seems to have a major section in Britain, especially inside London..and I believe all here would agree Britain is still a major imperialist power and clearly the middle class chauvinist fascist-sympathizer segment of the British population are begging for a whooping at the hands of working people and especially the poor and specially oppressed. So what gives? I think it's because most of the left put all its cookies in the middle class cookie jar...what did you expect! If union bureacrats, middle class Labourites and BBC weren't giving permission for joining that rebellion, the middle class left syre wasn't going to join it...and that really says everything important about today's left.
Well, except the fact that some "left" groups fucking caved to chauvinism and middle class elitist narcissism, denouncing the rebellion in ways that might have made Mosley and Powell blush. You know, lots of leftists in the 20s and 30s flipped over to fascism, back when the left actually had some real organic ties and involvement with the working class and its struggles. So why should I be surprised if it happens yet again with a middle class mostly white left with little to do with the working class anymore ---and I really don't see how union bureaucracies and apparatuses can be considered working class these days---during this era of capitalist decay?

Then of course, what's going on with Occupy movement?
Is it just another opportunity to recruit a few people to "vanguard" left sects that don't do a damn thing when real mass rebellions from below occur on our own doorstep? If another LA Rebellion style uprising occured in a major US city tomorrow, would the left basically have its thumbs up its ass and be unable to do anything to advance that to a internationalist workers' revolution? Would the left be paralyzed because all the social stratum it has invested itself in would be the same assholes out condeming the rebellion or telling the workers and poor and oppressed to chill out and just "get along" and follow the left 'leadership' agents and partners of capitalism? Would they merely publish an article about the rebellion weeks after the fact as new material to help recruit a few newbies in leftist activist circles? Aren't you sick of losing and being irrelevant, even during mass uprisings from below? Do we really have another 50 years to screw around trying to build sect "vanguards" that are alienated from the working class itself and aren't doing anything to organize the working class MASSES into our own independent classwide fighting movement ( so when our class rebels and the middle classes stand against us, we can use our own independent collective strength to put them also up against the walls and move from rebellion to accomplishing our revolutionary tasks like we actually intend the working class to seize power)?,,

[A Marxist Historian]

Was busy, and now can get back to this interesting but time-consuming thread.

I notice that discussion has shifted to Egypt and the ISO and Islam. An interesting topic, and Lev B. and others have made some good points on this. But one thing at a time.


I feel the need to respond to this ridiculous slander that my position on the state is Stalinist. Engels and Lenin clearly stated there would be a state, a specialized body of coercion (or as Lenin called it, "the organized, systematic use of force against persons"), in the lower stage of communism primarily as a means of enforcing the remnants of "bourgeois law" in the realm of distribution. It is thus a state in the most general sense, of having the form of a distinct institution of coercion. But it will not be a state in the more specific sense of standing above society as an alien force that stamps the logic of exploitation and brutality differentially on various classes (for there will be no class antagonisms, as there will be no classes under socialism). The state will operate democratically, will enforce collectively made decisions on individuals who attempt to subvert or avoid democratic decisions, and will thus not be an agent of class rule. (It will will assume an "alien will" only from the perspective of anti-social individuals, not entire classes or of society as a whole.) But it is still a state in the general sense of the term Lenin and Engels ascribed to it. All of this is perfectly in line with the texts of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and is not Stalinist in any way.

If nothing else, this thread got me to take another look at Lenin's pamphlet.

Yes, Lenin uses one or two loose formulations towards the end of the pamphlet, one of which you've dragged out. Which contradict both the whole thrust of the pamphlet, and explicitly contradict a whole string of specific quotes I could reproduce here from earlier in the pamphlet. And I will if you insist, though I am not fond of quote-mongering in the classic dogmatic Stalinist fashion.

Why is this? Well, he was writing in the summer of 1917, with a revolution in full blast, and by the last few pages, he was more interested in getting it to the press than 100% precision.

But anyway, what did Lenin really think about coercion to maintain norms of "bourgeois right" in the early stage of communism, when you have the "bourgeois norm" of "to each according to his work," and anti-social behavior generated by capitalist heritage could still be a big problem?

Well, you have "bourgeois norms" like that in every trade union, regulating fairness in claiming preferred shifts etc. etc. How are they enforced? By a "special body of armed men"? Well, in some unions, the Teamsters for example.

But in fact they are usually enforced by community sentiment, just as in the primitive tribal communism that Engels talks about, or in a good family, the example Lenin uses. As Lenin fully explains in the main body of the pamphlet.

Does the single sentence you've picked out contradict this? Well, more or less, though Lenin was really shifting his attention at that point away from future socialism to the more immediate conception of a dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia Right Now. A sloppy formulation on his part which you're taking advantage of.

In fact, there have been lots of societies where the armed community, not cops or troops, enforce social norms. Though armies have always been with us, the very institution of a police force is a fairly recent invention historically speaking. In America, the New York City police force, the first in the country, came into being as late as the 1820s.

Before then, in Puritan Massachusetts it was the community which dealt with evildoers, dragging them to the stocks when they danced on the Sabbath or whatever. And in the South the slaveowners were *required by law* to bear arms on Sunday, so that if there was a slave rebellion on the day of rest, a white community posse could be called out instantly to suppress it.

A world socialist society, the early stage of communism, will look like that from an enforcement perspective, except that our community norms will be a helluvalot different from theirs.

This is something Lenin addresses very explicitly, when he talks about ancient traditional moral norms which everyone understands, which will be enforced by the community not by special bodies of armed men, just like in a good family.


As for your remarks on workers' control vs. workers' management, the piece in question is useful. However it tries to erect to the level of universal principle various programmatic statements Lenin made in response to specific historical conjunctures. Depending on the context, workers' control over production may need to be exercised more by centralized but nevertheless democratically accountable state institutions (remember -- the state will exist even in the lower phase of communism, just not in the "political sense" as a mechanism for facilitating class exploitation) than by a more diffuse, decentralized level of the individual workplace democracy (what the piece called workers' self-management).

It's not that one is good or the other is bad, one is realistic and the other is utopian. The ultimate objective in a communist society is workers' control in the sense of workers' self-management ("when people have become so accustomed to observing the fundamental rules of social intercourse and when their labor has become so productive that they will voluntarily work according to their ability" -- i.e., under their own management, not that of any external authority). But this goal cannot be achieved immediately after a workers' revolution because as Lenin acknowledged, many people had not been habituated into looking out for the common good, to making decisions on the basis of social needs rather than the needs of one specific workplace.

Well, you are engaging in confusionist misuse of the terms "workers control" and "workers self-management," which is why I posted the piece.

Seymour explains quite well what people usually mean by them these days, and what people used to mean back when it was a Bolshevik slogan, which is different. You however are making a quite illegitimate substitution of "workers control," a conception which has very particular meanings which in one way or another everyone understands in their different ways, for "control by the producers," which is another matter altogether.

In a capitalist society, "producers" include peasants, independent craftspeople, and a good slice of the petty bourgeoisie. Indeed in early stages of capitalism, most businessmen worked with their hands in their own shops, and were producers too. And some still are. Steve Jobs got his hands dirty cranking out Apples in the first days of the company, I do believe.

In a socialist (as opposed to communist) society, everybody is a producer, if they are mature and healthy, or they don't eat. "To each according to his work."

So by asserting that "workers control" is the essence of Marxism, even though Marx never used the phrase, you are revising Marxism in syndicalist fashion, and also dissolving the working class into the population at large in populist fashion.

Literally in fact. The Populists of the late 19th century did not advocate rule by the workers, but rule by "the producers," by whom they meant first and foremost the peasantry.

Nowadays that production in America has gone out of style and producerism has been replaced by consumerism, the Occupy Wall Street populists, instead of calling for socialism and/or the rule of the working class, want to be the advocates of "the 99 percent." Which I suspect you see as "workers control."


It is also important to note that even in the transition to workers' self-management under the higher-phase of communism, workers are still collectively to exercise authority over work-places through their control over the state. It's still, in other words, the workers who are making the decisions, just at a more centralized level that will hopefully prevent them from acting as little miniature capitalists looking out for only their own interests to the exclusion of the rest of society. The fact that Lenin was unequivocal in viewing workers' control as essential to socialism is evident in his position in the trade union debate, the position that Trotsky later acknowledged was correct: because bureaucratic political substitution was unavoidable at the level of the state (which resulted in disempowering workers), it was important to maintain unions in part because they could act as an independent institution through which workers could assert some degree of control at the level of the workplace and thereby offset the bureaucratic distortions at the level of the state. Lenin recognized that even during the period of the transition socialism was not about the right economic decisions being made, regardless of who makes them -- in a way that allow socialist economics to flourish even when workers were disempowered.

Quoting Lenin on behalf of workers control in the 1921 trade union debate is very strange indeed. If Workers Opposition partisans here, of whom there are many, had noticed, you'd get some serious complaints. What was Lenin's conception of the role of unions, and why they needed to be independent of the state? For workers control over production, like Kollontai wanted? No.

Rather, to *defend* the workers' material interests against their own state, which had altogether too many petty bourgeois elements in it in its apparatus. It was in this period that in one speech I think he actually referred to the Russian workers' state as "bureaucratically deformed." Something Trotsky was insufficiently sensitive to.

Remember, this was exactly the period in which Lenin and Trotsky side by side were advocating one man management vs. syndicalist deviationists of all stripes.

And by that measure, Lenin's loyal supporter Stalin in those debates is another workers control advocate, an interesting position.

BTW, I do agree that Lenin was correct vs. Trotsky, but I am unfamiliar with any point at which Trotsky acknowledged this. Instead he argues in his autobio that it was a false dispute, as the real issue was the need to turn away from "war communism" to the NEP, and that the adoption of the NEP made the entire dispute irrelevant. And that in the context of "war communism," what he advocated was the only practical alternative.

His actual position was not that union control should be abolished, but rather that the unions should be "militarized," should look like that other workers' instution the Red Army, and control production jointly with the state apparatus, which they should merge with. Indeed he even argued that his would mean in practice more actual control by unions over production. And some union officials agreed with him and supported his faction.

Bukharin had his own personal platform, half of which came from Trotsky's and half of which came from Alexandra Kollontai and the Workers Opposition--in combination. No wonder Lenin got skeptical of his theoretical acumen, "doesn't understand dialectics" is how he put it in the "testament."

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

So deformed workers' states have been pushing back in the direction of capitalism their whole existence, then how did they ever move away from capitalism? Oh right, nationalization. So a historically progressive step toward socialism can happen without workers' conscious revolution in a state that is moving backward toward capitalism since its founding?

That is a perfectly reasonable question worth answering. How did it happen?

Because of a tremendous working class victory during WWII, where the Soviet working class and peasantry in uniform, despite Stalin's misleadership, expunged Hitler fascism from the face of the earth.

What made Romania and whatnot deformed workers states was the destruction of capitalism in the eastern half of Europe, essentially by the Soviet working class.

Which by the way set off a whole lot of spontaneous working class revolutionary fervor wherever the Red Army set foot, which of course was promptly suppressed by Soviet troops under Stalin's orders, before it got out of hand. There's your first Stalinist pushback towards capitalism, before these new states even came into existence.

As the SWP's Militant put it in its favorite headline about Soviet military victories:

"Hail Trotsky's Red Army."

The nationalizations were a symptom of that, not the main event. Under the circumstances, there was huge working class pressure all over Europe, East and West, for nationalizations and all the other radical reforms that were carried out in East Europe, and were *not* carried out in Western Europe, where welfare state measures were substituted to pacify the workers.

The Stalinists originally wanted to jointly suppress all this side by side with Churchill and Roosevelt and De Gaulle, but when the West declared Cold War against the USSR, Stalin and his acolytes changed their line abruptly.

And yes, the remnants of capitalist rule still there in Eastern Europe were usually uprooted through tightly bureaucratically controlled mass mobilizations of workers, not imposed at gunpoint by Soviet troops. Indeed, in Czechoslovakia this was done by the Czechoslovak Communist Party, a mass party, with no Soviet troops involved at all, as Soviet troops withdrew from Czechoslovakia very early on, not returning till 1968.

The Czech Trotskyists wrote up a description of this ugly, ultra-Stalinist, bureaucratically deformed parody of a revolution which was published in Fourth International, the SWP's theoretical magazine, in 1948. I read it many years ago. A great antidote to Chris Harman's anti-communist nonsense.

You really ought to take a look at, if you haven't already, at the two Spartacist Prometheus Bulletins on all this, the one on WWII and the PMP, and the one by Norden on Tito and Yugoslavia. Both posted in full to MIA by the way, so you don't even have to buy them.



I can't see the class difference between them, or between them and Libya. I can see the class difference between them and the degenerated Russian workers' state of the 30's, in which you could still have high level state officials leave the state and join the small, persecuted Fourth International--but I don't think the state of Cuba or China is more likely to contain such elements than the state of Nasser's Egypt or Qaddafi's Libya. And if the state doesn't contain such elements, then what kind of workers' state is it, however deformed?

If Cliffite state capitalism is social democratic, Sy Landyite state capitalism is--bureaucratic. The LRP's analysis focuses on the fates of individual state officials rather than that of the working class.

Yes, most Soviet officials before Stalin's Great Terror had been genuine working class revolutionaries in 1917. Not the ideal people to run a bureaucratically degenerated workers state, because what happens if they remember their past and start thinking about what they are doing? And one or two actually did, defecting in various directions, some like Ignace Reiss to Trotskyism. (Others becoming bourgeois liberals or social democrats or even fascists like Butenko).

But by the 1930s every one of them, almost without exception, was a true blue, died in the wool, loyal Stalinist. The Great Terror of 1937-38, which you guys see as a marker of social transformation--had absolutely no social or political or economic content. It was purely bureaucratic. Indeed, the raw, apolitical workers who replaced the old, tired, burnt-out revolutionaries in Stalin's apparatus, the Brezhnevs and Khrushchevs, were more "proletarian" in percentage terms of raw sociology than the veterans of 1917 that they replaced.

After that blood purge, indeed it became extremely unlikely that a Soviet official would be winnable to revolutionary Marxism. Ever. But that's an utterly personalistic criterion, reflecting perhaps the tiny size of the LRP and its deep desire to recruit people wherever it can get them. It just isn't Marxist.



Hilarious. In response to a question as to how the European social democracies are different in terms of class than the Stalinist states whose social benefits you like to extol, you point to workers' rebelling against them, but when workers rebelled against the Stalinist states you wrote them off as demanding a "free lunch". The U.S. saw the underlying class affinity with the Stalinist states when it offered them loans at good conditions to help them stabilize their rule when facing workers' rebellions.

Good conditions? Ask the Yugoslavs about that one! In the '80s, the West was treating Tito's successors about the way the EU is treating Greece.

The Poles got totally suckered by the IMF too.

The reason the Spartacists used that rather angular "free lunch" phrase at one point was that, given the state then of the Polish economy, if you had a totally healthy workers state in Poland, it would have been just as unable to grant Solidarity's impossible economic demands as Jaruzelski was.

In fact, the Solidarity expectation was that they could win those demands because the Soviets would pour rubles in to keep the peace, extracted of course from Soviet workers.

And meanwhile, as early as 1980, Walesa was visiting New York City, publicly endorsing Ronald Reagan in the US elections vs. Carter, and having private lunches with New York bankers and promising that if Solidarity came to power, the loans would all be paid off every penny. Which they were, and they were paid off out of the hides of the Polish working class, which Solidarity allegedly represented.

The contrast of all this to France and Italy in 1968 is enormous. De Gaulle in particular was keeping down the wages of French workers to an extreme degree, because he had ambitions of France once again being a world power, with a nuclear deterrent and the capability to wage colonial wars all over again. An expensive proposition.

But when wages damn near doubled in France and Italy due to workers' revolts, did the economy get paralyzed? Far from it.

The Western European bourgeoisie, unlike Stalinist Poland, was fully able to afford huge increases in working class standards of living. They just didn't want to, and they had to be wrested out of the capitalists' hands through almost-revolutionary class struggle, which if not diverted into purely economic demands by the Stalinists, could and should have resorted in the overthrow of Western European capitalism.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

MH, it’s difficult to take half of this seriously. The other half is frightening, if indeed you are somebody who has written a dissertation on Russian history and has extensive experience in left organizing, for it betrays a profound ignorance on basic questions of logic and elementary points of Marxist theory...

Well, I should reassure you a bit on this point. Believe me, there are plenty of folk who have written dissertations on Russian history who have said a remarkable number of stupid things, some downright howlers, as in the recent book on Trotsky by famous Soviet historian Robert Service which was so thoroughly demolished in, of all places, the American Historical Review.

And likewise of course for people with trade union experience, which I regret to say is not quite the same thing as "organizing experience." Can't claim I organized any shops, though I did indeed have quite a bit of experience in unionism in general and on the picket line in particular. (Come to think of it I did manage to "organize" one one-man shop, but given the particular circumstances that's nothing really to boast about...)

So I am not claiming that I am right just because of a certain piece of paper on my wall, or my old union card. I do get annoyed however when you accuse me of ignorance.

So tonight, I will skip over most of your old post, which by now perhaps you and others on Revleft have forgotten, and answer the Russian/Soviet history stuff, since that is after all my field. I'll get back to the rest if I detect much sign of continued interest in our argument here.

I won't get into your and Cliff's Bukharinism, just note once again Lenin's very critical opinion of Bukharin's theoretical acumen. He didn't think too much of the stuff Bukharin was writing in 1916, called him an "imperial economist" I recall. I did like Bukharin's 1912 pamphlet vs. the "Austrian" bourgeois economists, which Monthly Review published a good while back. The ideal thing to read before arguing with a marginalist. But I digress...


Your next point that is gut-bustingly hilarious is your accusation that I am a Stalinist, followed by your rather Stalinist sounding declaration that “the Stalinist industrialization campaign … was supported quite enthusiastically, at first, by the great bulk of the working class.” This claim is part of what historians have dubbed “the continuity thesis,” which has found its most vocal champions in Stephen Kotkin and Sheila Fitzpatrick (for a thorough critique of her specific errors, see Geoff Eley’s “History with the Politics Left Out—Again?” in volume 45, number 4 of the Russian Review), and it is obvious why Ortho Trots support it. If it could be shown that the economic decisions of Stalinist industrialization were fully embraced by the workers, then the Russian economy, even if not its political system, was still basically socialist in the sense of enjoying widespread worker support and approval. In terms of its content regarding the economy, this position is literally no different than what a Stalinist apologist would suggest. Unfortunately for them, it has also been thoroughly debunked by the work of Donald Filtzer (see his Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialisation) and Jeffrey Rossman (Worker Resistance Under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor). It is nothing short of hilarious that you claim to be some expert historian yet you are dreadfully unaware that these debates are increasingly being decided against your treasured position.

Rossman's book is excellent, make considerable use of it in my dissertation in fact. He's talking about the textile sector, the stepchild of Soviet industrialization under Stalin. Because it produced consumer goods, textile workers lost out in the First Five Year plan and rose in revolt, whereas coal miners and steelworkers and so forth felt differently. In Moscow, underground Trotskyists tried to spread the revolt from the provinces to Moscow itself, with some success.

Filtzer's book OTOH is pretty bad. I only mention it in footnotes, a detailed critique would be tiresome. A vastly better account of Soviet labor-management relations is in Vladimir Andrle's Workers in Stalinist Russia, which is not pro-Stalinist at all, indeed Vladimir Andrle is an exiled Czech sociologist who has gone Catholic, with an extremely low opinion of the Stalinist system, but an excellent understanding, unlike Filtzer, of how it works.

The "continuity thesis" of the so-called "Soviet revisionists," that the difference between the USSR under Lenin and the USSR under Stalin was not fundamental, is not only false, it is shared by the anti-communists. But just as some of the bourgeois historians of the "totalitarian school" have made certain contributions to historical understanding, so have some of the "revisionists."

Notably, Sheila Fitzpatrick's 1980s argument about the vital role of "vydvizhenie," working class upward social mobility into the Stalinist bureaucracy, is a real contribution, which I emphasize in my dissertation. This phenomenon was not ignored by Trotsky, we all know his opinion of the "Lenin levy." But it was not emphasized by him in public, as certainly talking about the increasingly proletarian composition of the Stalinist bureaucracy would not have been polemically useful in the 1930s.

It is far from unique to her, although it certainly is identified with her. Thus, Robert Davies for example referred to the USSR under Stalin as a "dictatorship of the ex-proletariat," and Andrle says at one point in his book that it was downright difficult at the height of the First Five Year Plan for a skilled worker in heavy industry *not* to get promoted into the Stalinist bureaucracy.

To the best of my knowledge, by the way, my recognition of the value of Fitzpatrick's ideas in this area is as far as I know unique to me among "ortho-Trots." Certainly the Spartacists are barely aware that she exists, as far as I know. (Except for those who've read my dissertation of course.)

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

So then how is this evidence that the ISO isn't really revolutionary if all of the rad left had this view? Hmm.

Well, Jimmie, I expect you know what my answer to that one is already, but I'll say it anyway.

Because the rest of the rad left weren't really revolutionary either. Except for the Spartacists.

As for Egypt, here you have the Muslim Brotherhood, who are dangerous and vicious counterrevolutionary reactionaries of the worst sort, and have been since they were first founded. Indeed until fairly recently, they were famous for their hatred of unions, leftists, and labor movements.

And now, finally, the group you guys support in Egypt, which allied with them for years, has started to sharply criticize them--*after* they've won an election and become the dominant political force in Egypt, and after they initiated a truly vicious slander campaign against your comrades, menacing their very existence!

Isn't that a day late and a dollar short?

And how supporting the USSR in Afghanistan in the '80s can be seen as anything other than brilliant and farsighted at this point I cannot comprehend. Obviously, Afghanistan was far better off under Soviet occupation than anything that has happened there since.

-M.H.-



As for the Sparts, even a broken clock is right twice a day. If the left in the US with little on the ground connection to workers in Iran couldn't figure out developments as they happened, but then reassessed afterwards, then what's the issue? The Sparts supported US intervention in Haiti which is totally wacky and insane (and talk about "crossing class lines") and then they corrected that.

Making a mistake based on limited information is no big sin - but why do you STILL support the USSR's operations in Afghanistan? Making a mistake and sticking to it decades later - now that's problematic.

So we are right, but the problem with the ISO is that some articles on Obama and the Muslim Brotherhood aren't clear enough for you?

We never claimed it's a worker's revolution, why would you insinuate that we do? As I said in the last post, our view is generally that if you don't have an organized revolutionary vanguard and a revolutionary situation happens, then things aren't looking good for success - the whole book "Revolutionary Rehearsals" drums that point over and over again (it's not my favorite book personally, but it's good for that argument anyway).

But it's happening now and people are organizing, revolutionaries and working class fighters but also people with ideas tied to other classes - that's the nature of any revolution regardless of weather revolutionary working class politics find expression or lead.

[Lucretia]

If nothing else, this thread got me to take another look at Lenin's pamphlet.

Yes, Lenin uses one or two loose formulations towards the end of the pamphlet, one of which you've dragged out. Which contradict both the whole thrust of the pamphlet, and explicitly contradict a whole string of specific quotes I could reproduce here from earlier in the pamphlet. And I will if you insist, though I am not fond of quote-mongering in the classic dogmatic Stalinist fashion.

Why is this? Well, he was writing in the summer of 1917, with a revolution in full blast, and by the last few pages, he was more interested in getting it to the press than 100% precision.

But anyway, what did Lenin really think about coercion to maintain norms of "bourgeois right" in the early stage of communism, when you have the "bourgeois norm" of "to each according to his work," and anti-social behavior generated by capitalist heritage could still be a big problem?

Well, you have "bourgeois norms" like that in every trade union, regulating fairness in claiming preferred shifts etc. etc. How are they enforced? By a "special body of armed men"? Well, in some unions, the Teamsters for example.

But in fact they are usually enforced by community sentiment, just as in the primitive tribal communism that Engels talks about, or in a good family, the example Lenin uses. As Lenin fully explains in the main body of the pamphlet.

Does the single sentence you've picked out contradict this? Well, more or less, though Lenin was really shifting his attention at that point away from future socialism to the more immediate conception of a dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia Right Now. A sloppy formulation on his part which you're taking advantage of.

In fact, there have been lots of societies where the armed community, not cops or troops, enforce social norms. Though armies have always been with us, the very institution of a police force is a fairly recent invention historically speaking. In America, the New York City police force, the first in the country, came into being as late as the 1820s.

Before then, in Puritan Massachusetts it was the community which dealt with evildoers, dragging them to the stocks when they danced on the Sabbath or whatever. And in the South the slaveowners were *required by law* to bear arms on Sunday, so that if there was a slave rebellion on the day of rest, a white community posse could be called out instantly to suppress it.

A world socialist society, the early stage of communism, will look like that from an enforcement perspective, except that our community norms will be a helluvalot different from theirs.

This is something Lenin addresses very explicitly, when he talks about ancient traditional moral norms which everyone understands, which will be enforced by the community not by special bodies of armed men, just like in a good family.

If you think that Lenin's use of the term state in the quote I provided contradicts the whole thrust of his pamphlet, you aren't understanding Lenin's interpretation of the state. For him, the state is a specialized institution of coercion and force used by whoever has power in society to impose its will on those who would undermine their will. Now this specialized institution arises as a result of class antagonisms, whereby one segment of society develops and uses state institutions to enforce its control over society's surplus (there could be no identifiably "state" institutions under primitive communism because the division of labor had not developed to the point of freeing some people to specialize in "state" activities).

But the antagonisms ingrained in capitalist culture do not disappear magically as soon as their material foundations are knocked from under them, which is why there is still the need for a specialized institution of coercion under socialism (specifically to enforce bourgeois norms, but also presumably to handle anti-social or destructive members of society, etc.). So what we literally have is a "bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie" as Lenin says, an institution that still represents those who hold power in society -- except in this case, it's the people as a whole, not a distinct class, that holds power and uses the "state." It is no longer a state in the so-called "proper" sense of the term, but it is still a state. Only with communism are people more or less habituated to abiding by social norms to the point where the state can truly wither away into obsolescence.

There is nothing in this that orthodox Marxists or Leninists would find controversial. That you have managed to try to find fault with it shows just how much learning you have to do about this issue.


Well, you are engaging in confusionist misuse of the terms "workers control" and "workers self-management," which is why I posted the piece.

Seymour explains quite well what people usually mean by them these days, and what people used to mean back when it was a Bolshevik slogan, which is different. You however are making a quite illegitimate substitution of "workers control," a conception which has very particular meanings which in one way or another everyone understands in their different ways, for "control by the producers," which is another matter altogether.

In a capitalist society, "producers" include peasants, independent craftspeople, and a good slice of the petty bourgeoisie. Indeed in early stages of capitalism, most businessmen worked with their hands in their own shops, and were producers too. And some still are. Steve Jobs got his hands dirty cranking out Apples in the first days of the company, I do believe.

In a socialist (as opposed to communist) society, everybody is a producer, if they are mature and healthy, or they don't eat. "To each according to his work."

So by asserting that "workers control" is the essence of Marxism, even though Marx never used the phrase, you are revising Marxism in syndicalist fashion, and also dissolving the working class into the population at large in populist fashion.

Literally in fact. The Populists of the late 19th century did not advocate rule by the workers, but rule by "the producers," by whom they meant first and foremost the peasantry.

Nowadays that production in America has gone out of style and producerism has been replaced by consumerism, the Occupy Wall Street populists, instead of calling for socialism and/or the rule of the working class, want to be the advocates of "the 99 percent." Which I suspect you see as "workers control."There's nothing "confusionist" (whatever the hell that means) about my use of workers' control to mean that workers, through some political mechanism, are to retain ultimate decision-making powers over how the means of production are used. And I am not about to engage in a semantic debate about what the "true" meaning of "workers' control" is, so if your point is just to get me to adopt some other terminology to mean "workers' ultimate authority to make decisions regarding how the means of production are used," then so be it. I'll use "democratic authority over the realm of production and distribution decisions." Doesn't quite roll of the tongue the same way, but it will have to do.

My series of points still stands, whatever phrase you want to use to describe it:

1) The ultimate goal of a socialist revolution -- what would exist in a communist society -- is a state of affairs in which people directly govern and exercise control over whatever "necessary labor" needs to be done at a very local level such as in the workplace.

2) This goal is to be realized as quickly as possible after the revolution through the devolution of power away from centralized state institutions (to the point where the state itself, under communism, will eventually wither away entirely).

3) To the extent that workers cannot directly exercise this authority at a local level, through the workplace, they are to exercise this authority through more centralized political institutions that are nevertheless still accountable to, and have earned the confidence of, the people.

4) To the extent that workers are not able to exercise authority over production, whether directly in the workplace or indirectly through centralized state institutions, the economy in question has nothing to do with socialism, but is rather controlled by a class.

5) If political institutions (the "state") derives its power predominantly from an accountable social group's authority over the means of production, rather than from the trust or support from workers who directly or indirectly govern/control the means of production, that society is a class society.

So what do these points mean in terms of our discussion? Well, it means that the Soviet economy after the late 1920s was not "socialistic" or "transitioning to socialism" because socialism at its very core means workers have ultimate authority over how production decisions are made, which was not at all the case in the Stalinist USSR. You can try to quibble over the exact meaning attributed to "workers' control" by various tendencies and sects over the years, or the form Lenin thought it had to take in very specific historical conditions in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution and civil war. But that doesn't undermine the veracity of any of the above 5 points.


Quoting Lenin on behalf of workers control in the 1921 trade union debate is very strange indeed. If Workers Opposition partisans here, of whom there are many, had noticed, you'd get some serious complaints. What was Lenin's conception of the role of unions, and why they needed to be independent of the state? For workers control over production, like Kollontai wanted? No.You don't see a link between Lenin's support for the formation of independent trade unions, and his desire to give the workers as much direct control over the production as possible?

The point is a simple one, and I've already made it: The goal of communism is a system whereby each worker directly controls production. Only because workers in the 1920s USSR had not achieved a level of consciousness where that kind of "control" or "authority" over production was not possible, resulting in the need for more centralized and bureaucratic means of workers exercising authority over social production decisions, were trade unions necessary. For, as Trotsky pointed out, if the workers' state were without any bureaucracy and was characterized by the most direct form of workers' democracy, there would be no point in having unions. Unions would be redundant. But Lenin's point was that the Soviet Union had to work up to that point, with trade unions checking whatever bureaucratic distortions emerged in the mean time, so that workers could still exercise a degree of authority over work conditions, etc, even as the main production decisions were made by the central organs of the state.

Thus the unions, as you said, were about the workers "defending the workers' material interests against their own state" by fighting for their interests at the point of production.

[Lucretia]

I won't get into your and Cliff's Bukharinism, just note once again Lenin's very critical opinion of Bukharin's theoretical acumen. He didn't think too much of the stuff Bukharin was writing in 1916, called him an "imperial economist" I recall. I did like Bukharin's 1912 pamphlet vs. the "Austrian" bourgeois economists, which Monthly Review published a good while back. The ideal thing to read before arguing with a marginalist.

Wait, so your argument is that because I have a position that is in line with what Bukharin said, I must be wrong? Does that mean you think everything Bukharin said was wrong? That might come as a surprise to Lenin, who credited Bukharin with convincing him of the need to smash the bourgeois state rather than seize control over it.

Bukharin was certainly mistaken on some issues (as was Lenin, as was Cliff, as are you and I), but he was also right on a good number. Donny Gluckstein's The Tragedy of Bukharin provides a fair and generally sympathetic critique of the man's ideas, paying particular focus to their evolution in the 1920s.

[A Marxist Historian]

If you think that Lenin's use of the term state in the quote I provided contradicts the whole thrust of his pamphlet, you aren't understanding Lenin's interpretation of the state. For him, the state is a specialized institution of coercion and force used by whoever has power in society to impose its will on those who would undermine their will. Now this specialized institution arises as a result of class antagonisms, whereby one segment of society develops and uses state institutions to enforce its control over society's surplus (there could be no identifiably "state" institutions under primitive communism because the division of labor had not developed to the point of freeing some people to specialize in "state" activities).

No, it's not used by "whoever has power in society," that is a non-class, anti-Marxist conception. It's an organ, as Lenin says over and over again in the pamphlet, simply echoing Marx and Engels, for the rule of one class in society over other classes.

Marxists analyze society, and the state, in terms of classes. You pretend to but you actually don't, in bureaucratic collectivist fashion, even though you are formally a "state cap." Following I more and more suspect Hal Draper.

But Draper was up front about it, whereas you are not. Draper argued that Lenin was wrong. You try to smuggle your bureaucratic collectivist notions into Leninism, through misreading what Lenin wrote.

You see the state, in the fashion of Hegel, most bourgeois thinkers, and the bureaucratic collectivists, as a body independent of classes and class society. Therefore you can imagine that you would have a state in a socialist, classless society.

I hate quote mongering, but I can do it with the best of 'em, and I could easily toss in dozens of quotes from State and Revolution that explicitly contradict that one line you managed to drag out at the very end of the pamphlet. And I think you know that, but if you insist on the point, I will.


But the antagonisms ingrained in capitalist culture do not disappear magically as soon as their material foundations are knocked from under them, which is why there is still the need for a specialized institution of coercion under socialism (specifically to enforce bourgeois norms, but also presumably to handle anti-social or destructive members of society, etc.). So what we literally have is a "bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie" as Lenin says, an institution that still represents those who hold power in society -- except in this case, it's the people as a whole, not a distinct class, that holds power and uses the "state." It is no longer a state in the so-called "proper" sense of the term, but it is still a state. Only with communism are people more or less habituated to abiding by social norms to the point where the state can truly wither away into obsolescence.

There is nothing in this that orthodox Marxists or Leninists would find controversial. That you have managed to try to find fault with it shows just how much learning you have to do about this issue.

Does Lenin talk about a "bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie" in the pamphlet? He certainly does.

Is he talking about socialism?

No, he isn't. That is his definition of a workers state, which he clearly says is a phenomenon corresponding to the transitional period in between capitalism and socialism.

So what would this state under socialism be? It would be, according to your words, a "people's state." Right?

Well, that is exactly the concept Marx argues against in Critique of the Gotha Programme. So we don't even have to go back to Lenin here.


There's nothing "confusionist" (whatever the hell that means) about my use of workers' control to mean that workers, through some political mechanism, are to retain ultimate decision-making powers over how the means of production are used. And I am not about to engage in a semantic debate about what the "true" meaning of "workers' control" is, so if your point is just to get me to adopt some other terminology to mean "workers' ultimate authority to make decisions regarding how the means of production are used," then so be it. I'll use "democratic authority over the realm of production and distribution decisions." Doesn't quite roll of the tongue the same way, but it will have to do.

My series of points still stands, whatever phrase you want to use to describe it:

1) The ultimate goal of a socialist revolution -- what would exist in a communist society -- is a state of affairs in which people directly govern and exercise control over whatever "necessary labor" needs to be done at a very local level such as in the workplace.

Really? That's your ultimate, be all and end all goal? People getting to run the shops they work in?

My ultimate goal, and Marx's, is freeing the entire human race from oppression and misery.


2) This goal is to be realized as quickly as possible after the revolution through the devolution of power away from centralized state institutions (to the point where the state itself, under communism, will eventually wither away entirely).

3) To the extent that workers cannot directly exercise this authority at a local level, through the workplace, they are to exercise this authority through more centralized political institutions that are nevertheless still accountable to, and have earned the confidence of, the people.

4) To the extent that workers are not able to exercise authority over production, whether directly in the workplace or indirectly through centralized state institutions, the economy in question has nothing to do with socialism, but is rather controlled by a class.

5) If political institutions (the "state") derives its power predominantly from an accountable social group's authority over the means of production, rather than from the trust or support from workers who directly or indirectly govern/control the means of production, that society is a class society.

Well, since the power of the Soviet state ultimately resided in the Soviet workers belief that it was their state acting in their interests, which is why the Soviet state collapsed in 1989 when they stopped believing this, then by your definition the USSR was a workers state.

Q.E.D.


So what do these points mean in terms of our discussion? Well, it means that the Soviet economy after the late 1920s was not "socialistic" or "transitioning to socialism" because socialism at its very core means workers have ultimate authority over how production decisions are made, which was not at all the case in the Stalinist USSR. You can try to quibble over the exact meaning attributed to "workers' control" by various tendencies and sects over the years, or the form Lenin thought it had to take in very specific historical conditions in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution and civil war. But that doesn't undermine the veracity of any of the above 5 points.

Stalin had managed to persuade most Soviet workers that his Five Year Plans and compulsory collectivization were the road to the future, and that the sacrifices they were making for this were necessary. That's why the quite well organized underground work of the Left Opposition had great difficulties until the 1932 famine crisis, which came quite close to collapsing the Soviet system. Stalin had a narrow escape, partially due to a good harvest in 1933 and a lot of those factories being built finally coming on line, and partially due to Hitler's victory in Germany, which led Soviet workers to want to rally behind their state right or wrong.

Doubt began to set in again by the end of the 1930s, despite the considerable increase in standards of living in the mid-'30s, which is why the Great Terror was so extreme. But the defeat of Hitler fascism persuaded the bulk of the working class that The Party knew best.

As doubt started to grow again in the '50s after Stalin died and the "personality cult" lost its effect, you had the Khrushchev reforms.

As their effect dissipated and doubt began to grow again, you had the "goulash communism" of the Brezhnev years, with considerable increases in the standard of living, dirt-cheap caviar and all that, often at the cost of future economic growth, resulting in the USSR increasingly falling behind the capitalist competition.

When that stopped working, the country went into crisis mode again, and two "reformers," first Andropov and then Gorbachev, tried to re-establish the system's credibility in the eyes of the ultimate controllers of the USSR, the working class. And failed. In 1989, with the massive nationwide coal miners' rebellion, that was it for the Soviet bureaucracy, and the whole state simply collapsed abruptly.


You don't see a link between Lenin's support for the formation of independent trade unions, and his desire to give the workers as much direct control over the production as possible?

The point is a simple one, and I've already made it: The goal of communism is a system whereby each worker directly controls production. Only because workers in the 1920s USSR had not achieved a level of consciousness where that kind of "control" or "authority" over production was not possible, resulting in the need for more centralized and bureaucratic means of workers exercising authority over social production decisions, were trade unions necessary. For, as Trotsky pointed out, if the workers' state were without any bureaucracy and was characterized by the most direct form of workers' democracy, there would be no point in having unions. Unions would be redundant. But Lenin's point was that the Soviet Union had to work up to that point, with trade unions checking whatever bureaucratic distortions emerged in the mean time, so that workers could still exercise a degree of authority over work conditions, etc, even as the main production decisions were made by the central organs of the state.

Thus the unions, as you said, were about the workers "defending the workers' material interests against their own state" by fighting for their interests at the point of production.

Trotsky actually argued that his "militarized" methods would give workers more real control over production than just independent trade union bureaucrats like Tomsky with veto rights. He was wrong, but you misunderstand what was being argued about.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Wait, so your argument is that because I have a position that is in line with what Bukharin said, I must be wrong? Does that mean you think everything Bukharin said was wrong? That might come as a surprise to Lenin, who credited Bukharin with convincing him of the need to smash the bourgeois state rather than seize control over it.

Bukharin was certainly mistaken on some issues (as was Lenin, as was Cliff, as are you and I), but he was also right on a good number. Donny Gluckstein's The Tragedy of Bukharin provides a fair and generally sympathetic critique of the man's ideas, paying particular focus to their evolution in the 1920s.

No, Bukharin was certainly right on some thngs, but your theoretical analysis of the concept of "state capitalism" is very much like Bukharin's, which Lenin explicitly distinguished himself from in 1916.

Your sympathy for him is not accidental, as Tony Cliff's analysis of the Five Year Plan and Stalinist industrialization, which is what he sees as the moment in which the Soviet state became a bourgeois state, is very much that of Bukharin, or rather the analysis of those Bukharinists who didn't capitulate to Stalin.

(Historian's note: this meant primarily Riutin with his famous "Riutin platform," that scared the shit out of Stalin and his people. Riutin before going into opposition had been exactly the bureaucrat in Moscow who organized the hounding of the Left Opposition on the ground floor.)

And it is very explicitly counterposed to that of Trotsky, who saw the Bukharinists as the main danger, and was even willing to politically ally with the Stalinists against them, if an honest alliance and not capitulaton were possible, but never vice versa.

-M.H.-

[GoddessCleoLover]

According to Orlando Figes, Lenin wanted to purge Mikhail Tomsky from the party because he was overly prone to cede to the "economistic" concerns of the Soviet trade unions. The larger and more important point is that the poor and backward state of the Soviet economy probably precluded the construction of socialism even had the union been under a leadership more solicitous of the working class, and IMO that would have included Tomsly, Schliapnikov, Trotsky, Bukharin etcetera. Stalin was obsessed with the short-term pace of industrialization, specifically the completion of the first Five Year Plan in four years without regard to the number of lives it cost.

[A Marxist Historian]

According to Orlando Figes, Lenin wanted to purge Mikhail Tomsky from the party because he was overly prone to cede to the "economistic" concerns of the Soviet trade unions. The larger and more important point is that the poor and backward state of the Soviet economy probably precluded the construction of socialism even had the union been under a leadership more solicitous of the working class, and IMO that would have included Tomsly, Schliapnikov, Trotsky, Bukharin etcetera. Stalin was obsessed with the short-term pace of industrialization, specifically the completion of the first Five Year Plan in four years without regard to the number of lives it cost.

Figes is a firstrate researcher and reasonably honest but an utterly, purely anti-Communist bourgeois historian of the purest water, who quite literally hates communism and socialism like poison. So he should be read with caution. E.H. Carr is much more objective and reliable--indeed Carr virtually makes a cult out of pure objectivity.

I seriously doubt Lenin ever had the least notion of purging Tomsky. He did I think (haven't read what Carr wrote on this at all recently) want him transferred out of trade union work for a while to gain perspective, thinking he had given way too much to the syndicalist notions of Kollontai and Shlyapnikov. But only for a while, Tomsky was reinstated as overall head of the Soviet trade unions considerably before Lenin died, and never really left the union field.

Your overall "more important" point is more or less correct, but it telescopes things too much. Quite a bit of water flowed under the bridge between 1921 and 1929, and during most of this period Stalin, Bukharin and Tomsky were close allies.

-M.H.-

[GoddessCleoLover]

Bukharin and Tomsky certain committed the political blunder of the century when they allied themselves with Stalin and paid for it with their lives. I have read that Tomsky had sympathies for the Workers' Opposition and Democratic Centralists/Group of Fifteen before he made his "right turn". Seems to me that his first instinct was the correct one.

[Lucretia]

MH, the critical logical mistake you keep making again and again in this thread is creating these false dichotomies of "either-or" when the reality is "both-and." In this latest incarnation, the fallacy takes the form of you chiding my claim that the state is used by whoever has power in society." In fact, yes, the state is used by whoever has power in society, and there's nothing "unMarxian" about it, as it is perfectly amenable to a class analysis. This brings us back to the fundamental unity between the base and the superstructure which is emergent from that base. Whoever controls the base has class power, which is then exercised through the superstructural form of the state. The glaring hole in the logic of Ortho Trots like you is to posit the existence of a society where the workers have economic power through "proletarian property forms" yet aren't able to exercise this power through the superstructure of the state. This model requires a clean break to be made between the base and superstructure, and you just end up with floating classes that magically acquire power through some other means besides class exploitation.

The other claim of yours that I feel the need to respond to is your laughable lack of comprehension about the Leninist understanding of the state. In response to my statement that there will be a state in socialism -- what Lenin called "a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie," you say:


"Does Lenin talk about a 'bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie' in the pamphlet? He certainly does. Is he talking about socialism? No, he isn't. That is his definition of a workers state, which he clearly says is a phenomenon corresponding to the transitional period in between capitalism and socialism.Yet when we do a simple google search of the phrase "bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie" and click on the first link that comes up -- which just happens to be the pamphlet in question -- we can see:

"It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!

This may sound like a paradox or simply a dialectical conundrum of which Marxism is often accused by people who have not taken the slightest trouble to study its extraordinarily profound content.

But in fact, remnants of the old, surviving in the new, confront us in life at every step, both in nature and in society. And Marx did not arbitrarily insert a scrap of “bourgeois” law into communism, but indicated what is economically and politically inevitable in a society emerging out of the womb of capitalism."


Looks like it's time to brush up a little more on the Marxist classics, and a little less on your Spart talking points.

I'll leave it for readers here to judge whether somebody who can't be trusted to get such a basic point of fact right regarding Lenin's theory of the state can very well be trusted to provide a reliable interpretation of the finer points of Soviet history and disputes within the Bolshevik party. I've already said enough on both those fronts to suffice for the remainder of this thread, and will just point out that you provide no evidence to support your points.

[leon T]

All right, Lev, I've had enough of this shit. This quote from you over in Brospierre's thread is the last straw:

This is your official "put up or shut up" notice. Using cites and quotes from the ISO's published materials - SW, the ISR, or whatever else you can find - defend your statement. I don't wanna see any of this 'implicit' or 'subtle' weaselling you crapped out over in CynicalIdealist's thread, I wanna see solid arguments backed up with hard evidence from the ISO itself that we 'wind up supporting liberal bourgeois politicians'.

If you can't prove, using the ISO's own words, that this is so, knock off the slams. You don't have to agree with our stances or our methods, but at the very least be honest enough to admit you're talking out your ass if you can't prove otherwise, and have the intellectual fortitude to change your ways.

Everyone else: This is not an invitation to start another "ISO did me a dirty" party. If you feel you've got something solid that backs up Lev's assertion, however, you're more than welcome to contribute.
I don't know much about the ISO, other then there a bunch of LIBERAL socialists who worship Cliff like a god. But I do know for a fact, that they expelled a member for standing up to some ALF Cell when they were talking about firebombing a persons house. THE ISO SUPPORTS TERRORISM...PERIOD.

[Olentzero]

That's a new one. Loopier than Toucan Sam's bowel movements, but new nonetheless.

[A Marxist Historian]

That's a new one. Loopier than Toucan Sam's bowel movements, but new nonetheless.

Olentzero, this thread has moved pretty far from your original "callout" to Bronsteinovich. This character you replied to has been banned for a very good reason, as you no doubt have heard, and letting him post here at all is questionable, and dialoging with him a mistake.

But meanwhile, this thread (ignoring "Leon T.") has turned into a different thread altogether, which belongs in the Learning section.

I at first dismissed Lucretia as just a dogmatic text quoter in the "Marxist-Leninist" mode who happened to be an ISO supporter (sort of) rather than a Stalinist, but I have to say he is more than that, he at least is a skilled textologist, who has managed to unearth a Lenin quote to support his peculiar idea, usually associated with Stalinists not Trotskyists, that you will still have a state under socialism.

So I think that the relevant postings should be split off and moved to the Learning section, under a header such as "Is there a state under socialism?" or something. This subject has been discussed there ad infinitum and repetitively, usually in the form of a Stalin vs. Trotsky debate, but Lucretia has managed to add something genuinely new to it, with potentially a genuine value to analyze, at a higher level than usual.

Olentzero, Lucretia, Pastradamus, do you agree?

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

...
The other claim of yours that I feel the need to respond to is your laughable lack of comprehension about the Leninist understanding of the state. In response to my statement that there will be a state in socialism -- what Lenin called "a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie," you say:

Yet when we do a simple google search of the phrase "bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie" and click on the first link that comes up -- which just happens to be the pamphlet in question -- we can see:

"It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!

This may sound like a paradox or simply a dialectical conundrum of which Marxism is often accused by people who have not taken the slightest trouble to study its extraordinarily profound content.

But in fact, remnants of the old, surviving in the new, confront us in life at every step, both in nature and in society. And Marx did not arbitrarily insert a scrap of “bourgeois” law into communism, but indicated what is economically and politically inevitable in a society emerging out of the womb of capitalism."

Looks like it's time to brush up a little more on the Marxist classics, and a little less on your Spart talking points.
...

Looking again over State and Revolution, for the umpteenth time, I discover that ... Lucretia, from a formal textological point of view, is correct.

Why was I confused in this fashion? Because this statement by Lenin actually makes no sense in the context of the whole pamphlet, and in fact in just about everything else Marx and Lenin and Engels wrote on the subject. The reading I assumed to be correct, that Lenin was talking about a workers state when he used the phrase "bourgeois state without the bourgeoise," OTOH makes perfect sense and is quite correct.

Anyone who has ever read State and Revolution seeking to understand it, rather than Googling to find a quote to justify a political position, knows that. Practically the whole pamphlet is devoted to the proposition that the state is a tool by one class, the bourgeoisie in a bourgeois state or the workers in a workers state, to maintain its dominion in a class-divided society.

I could put in innumerable quotes to prove this, but that seems unnecessary it is so obvious, the whole pamphlet is made up out of arguments and quotes from Marx and Engels to prove this point. In fact, instead of quotes, you can even just look at Lenin's chapter subheads, such as "The State--A Product of the Irreconciliability of Class Antagonisms" and "The State--an Instrument for the Exploitation of the Oppressed Class."

So what then is the class nature of this "bourgeois state without a bourgeoisie" in a socialist or communist society, which is classless? Why, none it seems. The state, like any good Hegelian argues, is a phenomenon independent of classes and class society, of the class struggle, in short, of Marxism.

In fact, formally speaking, Lenin would seem to be saying that when the period of transition between capitalism and socialism ends, the workers state turns into ... a bourgeois state?

So what is going on? Clearly, Lenin was using a fuzzy, imprecise formulation here. And he even says so.

Thus, a few pages earlier he says "under capitalism we have the state in the proper sense of the word, that is, a special machine for the suppression of one class by another." So, in the section you quote, he is in fact using "bourgeois state without the bourgeoise" in an improper, unscientific, fuzzy, inexact fashion, for convenience, creating the possible confusion you have leaped on.

The pamphlet is after all unfinished, rushed to press before Lenin could do final work on it. The entire section at the end about the Russian Revolution itself is unwritten. As Lenin put it in the postscript,

"It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of the revolution' than to write about it."

Nor is this the only time in the year 1917 that Lenin used a sloppy formulation on the subject we're arguing about that could be used by opponents of Lenin's ideas by quoting them out of the overall context.

Thus, in his pamphlet on "The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It," which was no ordinary pamphlet, this was in fact the basic Bolshevik program pamphlet during the Revolution, at one point he defines socialism as follows, and I quote:

"socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly."

Now, I don't know if anarchists have used this quote out of context to try to portray Lenin as an advocate of capitalism, but if they haven't, they've missed a trick.

So, text quoter Lucretia, do you then believe that the only difference between "state monopoly capitalism," as in by your lights the USSR under Stalin, and socialism is that Stalin had not learned from Mao that it was necessary to "serve the people"?

But let's get back to the real issue here, and stop quoting texts like Bible scholars. Do you actually need a state under socialism, and if so for what purpose?

According to Lenin, you definitely do not need one to deal with crime and all that, which is the usual reason people think you might need a state under socialism. As he puts it,

"no special machine, no special apparatus of suppression, is needed for this; this will be done by the armed people themselves, as simply and readily as any crowd of civilized people, even in modern society, interferes to put a stop to a scuffle or to prevent a woman from being assaulted."

Instead, he posits this "bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie" as being necessary for what one would think would be a much easier task, namely enforcing "bourgeois norms of distribution," according to which people get a portion of the goods of society not according to whim, but according to their work. This, if you think about it, makes no sense, and I am sure that if Lenin had ever had the time, which he never did, to go over the pamphlet line by line looking for imperfections, he would have changed that.

This misformulation had no practical consequences in the USSR, as far as it always was from actually constructing a socialist society, so was never of any importance, at least until Lucretia discovered it here as a peg to hang his revision of Leninism on.

What has been the actual historical experience of classless societies? Do they in fact have armed bodies of men to enforce equality of distribution?

Probably the best example of a near-contemporary important classless society was the Iroquois, who played a dominant role on the Atlantic side of the North American continent in the early 18th century, holding the balance between the French and English colonists, who were militarily weaker than they were during this period.

They were a genuinely classless society, all major property held communally, highly egalitarian economically. Which in fact was the secret of the military superiority of Iroquois braves over English or French soldiers, plus of course all the guns and ammunition the Iroquois got in trade for furs. Namely, the tremendous social solidarity of Iroquois society.

Did it have laws, indeed even "bourgeois laws" if you want to put it that way, governing distribution of goods, that might have needed enforcement? Of course they did. In fact, they had a remarkably "bourgeois" looking government. According to many historians the constitutional setup of the Five Tribes was the model for the US Constitution, with an upper house, a lower house, autonomy for each tribe with its own separate government, etc. etc.

But was there a state? Well, there was a government, with elected chiefs and sachems and a representative structure similar to that of the USA, but no state in the Leninist sense, not even that "bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie" that he briefly mentions.

Why? Because there were no police, no jails, no courts, and no separate army, the Iroquois army being simply the male Iroquois population. Laws were decided by tradition and voting, and enforced by community consensus. The usual punishment for crime was ostracism from the Iroquois community until penitence and reparations were made. An extremely serious penalty in Iroquois society, to an Iroquois if anything more serious than the death penalty.

So history proves that your contention is wrong, Lucretia, and in fact that Lenin's quote which you like so much was a minor error on his part.

One which nobody before you, as far as I know, has tried to make use of. Even the Stalinists, rather than jumping on this quote to justify the NKVD and the gulags, instead claimed that even under socialism you would have "remnants" of the bourgeoisie, who become more "frenzied," so they are likely to poison the water, spy for Hitler, put ground glass in the workers food, dynamite mine tunnels, so even under socialism the workers needed the NKVD to protect them.

From a standpoint of Marxist precision, they would have done better to use this quote you like so much, but I think too many people in the USSR were clear as to what Lenin really meant for that to work.

-M.H.-

[Lucretia]

Looking again over State and Revolution, for the umpteenth time, I discover that ... Lucretia, from a formal textological point of view, is correct.

Why was I confused in this fashion? Because this statement by Lenin actually makes no sense in the context of the whole pamphlet, and in fact in just about everything else Marx and Lenin and Engels wrote on the subject. The reading I assumed to be correct, that Lenin was talking about a workers state when he used the phrase "bourgeois state without the bourgeoise," OTOH makes perfect sense and is quite correct.

Anyone who has ever read State and Revolution seeking to understand it, rather than Googling to find a quote to justify a political position, knows that. Practically the whole pamphlet is devoted to the proposition that the state is a tool by one class, the bourgeoisie in a bourgeois state or the workers in a workers state, to maintain its dominion in a class-divided society.

If you think I discovered the quote by using google, then I think you are underestimating me. The point I was making with the reference to the search engine was just how easy it would have been for you to fact-check yourself before making a statement that was demonstrably and clearly false. So clearly false that you are now engaging in a kind of mental gymnastics trying to assimilate what to you must have been apparently pathbreaking information about Lenin's understanding of the state.

It's not pathbreaking, it's not "new," as you claim in your post immediately preceding this one (though I am flattered by your suggestion that I am in possession of such specialized knowledge), and it's not unique to Lenin. Indeed, Lenin's view on the state was a Marxist view, and Lenin went to great pains to "quote monger," as you might say, and demonstrate that his understanding of the state was very much rooted in the classical texts.

What is this understanding of the state? Well it was more multi-layered and complex than you're giving Marx-Engels-Lenin credit for. You are right to say that the state in the proper sense of the word is an apparatus of political control, standing above society, used by the exploiters to suppress the exploited. But for Marx-Engels-Lenin, this did not exhaust the state. For them the state was also used in a broader sense to encompass (in the words of Lenin): "organized and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in general," i.e., institutionalized public power necessary for keeping the peace and, as Engels said, discharging the "administrative functions of watching over social interests."

So we have two definitions of the state that we can talk about in abstraction: one which is institutionalized public power, and the other which is alienated institutionalized public power responsible for papering over the irreconcilable class differences between the minority ruling class and the majority exploited classes. In bourgeois society, like all class societies, these dual functions of the state -- its administrative society and its coercive "political" side -- are rolled into a single and therefore contradictory institution: the state in the "proper sense" of the term.

Following the socialist revolution, with the transition from capitalism to socialism, what you have is the aufhebung or positive sublation of the political state, whereby it loses its class/political character in a way that elevates to a higher level its ability to function as a repository of "public power." But you still have the specialized institution assigned to be a repository of public power. This is the point that Engels and Lenin make repeatedly with the talk of "the withering away of democracy" and "withering away of the state" under socialism.

It is worth quoting Lenin at length on this from the final chapter of his pamphlet: "Democracy [U]is a form of the state, it represents, on the one hand, the organized, systematic use of force against persons; but, on the other hand, it signifies the formal recognition of equality of citizens, the equal right of all to determine the structure of, and to administer, the state. This, in turn, results in the fact that, at a certain stage in the development of democracy, it first welds together the class that wages a revolutionary struggle against capitalism--the proletariat, and enables it to crush, smash to atoms, wipe off the face of the earth the bourgeois, even the republican-bourgeois, state machine, the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy and to substitute for them a more democratic state machine, but a state machine nevertheless, in the shape of armed workers who proceed to form a militia involving the entire population.

...

From the moment all members of society, or at least the vast majority, have learned to administer the state themselves, have taken this work into their own hands, have organized control over the insignificant capitalist minority, over the gentry who wish to preserve their capitalist habits and over the workers who have been thoroughly corrupted by capitalism--from this moment the need for government of any kind begins to disappear altogether. The more complete the democracy, the nearer the moment when it becomes unnecessary. The more democratic the “state” which consists of the armed workers, and which is "no longer a state in the proper sense of the word", the more rapidly every form of state begins to wither away.

This is in keeping with a section in the previous chapter, wherein he states: "We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i.e., all organized and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in general. We do not expect the advent of a system of society in which the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed. In striving for socialism, however, we are convinced that it will develop into communism and, therefore, that the need for violence against people in general, for the subordination of one man to another, and of one section of the population to another, will vanish altogether since people will become accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social life without violence and without subordination."

To recap for you, MH, there is a state in the general sense of the word -- the institutionalized "organized, systematic use of force against persons" -- and there is a state of the proper sense of the word, which is where the systematic use of force is dictated by irreconcilable class interests. The socialist revolution immediately does away with the former, but not the latter. The latter withers away under socialism. But it is still there, as it is logically impossible for something to exist in a diminishing state (withering) and not exist at the same time.


I could put in innumerable quotes to prove this, but that seems unnecessary it is so obvious, the whole pamphlet is made up out of arguments and quotes from Marx and Engels to prove this point. In fact, instead of quotes, you can even just look at Lenin's chapter subheads, such as "The State--A Product of the Irreconciliability of Class Antagonisms" and "The State--an Instrument for the Exploitation of the Oppressed Class."I actually find this little chunk of text amusing, since I am the person who first made reference to the "irreconcilability of class antagonisms" subheading earlier in the thread in direct response to your challenging the accuracy of my understanding of the state -- in both senses of the term -- as historically emergent from the development of class society. Now you are trying to pretend that that little exchange never happened, and that I am the person who needs to read and comprehend the very same subheadings that you were unwittingly arguing against earlier in the thread. That's some audacity, MH. Did your Spart friends teach you that little trick?

[pastradamus]

I cannot decide where I want to put this one but im going to put it in Theory. It dosent belong here in P & P.

MOVED

[A Marxist Historian]

I cannot decide where I want to put this one but im going to put it in Theory. It dosent belong here in P & P.

MOVED

I'm attempting to retitle this thread. I hope no one objects?

Reply to the latest from Lucretia shortly.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

This was a highly disappointing post, as most of what is in it was already thoroughly refuted by my previous post. Most of which was disappeared by Lucretia without even three-dotting, apparently because Lucretia couldn't refute what I said so instead prefers to stop his ears, eyes and mouth about it. "Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil." If you pretend it doesn't exist, it doesn't exist.

I could frankly just refute your post by urging readers to read what I wrote already, but let's go over this and see what if anything new you have to say. I will attempt to avoid simply repeating myself as much as possible.


If you think I discovered the quote by using google, then I think you are underestimating me. The point I was making with the reference to the search engine was just how easy it would have been for you to fact-check yourself before making a statement that was demonstrably and clearly false. So clearly false that you are now engaging in a kind of mental gymnastics trying to assimilate what to you must have been apparently pathbreaking information about Lenin's understanding of the state.

Pathbreaking? No, you have not discovered anything whatsoever about Lenin's understanding of the state, you have simply managed to uncover that, towards the end of the pamphlet, he indulged in some loose phraseology inconsistent with the rest of the pamphlet.

Certainly interesting, indeed more interesting than many threads here, but only "pathbreaking" if your understanding of Lenin's writings is similar to that of a Protestant fundamentalist with respect to the Holy Bible. As with you, or your average "orthodox Marxist Leninist" of the Soviet type.

And indeed, your conception of the state is not original to you at all, indeed it was expressed far better, in a far more sophisticated fashion, by bureaucratic collectivist Hal Draper. Hal Draper, unlike you, did not claim to agree with Lenin on the nature of the state, rather he disagreed with Lenin and forthrightly explained why. A vastly better methodology than yours.


It's not pathbreaking, it's not "new," as you claim in your post immediately preceding this one (though I am flattered by your suggestion that I am in possession of such specialized knowledge), and it's not unique to Lenin. Indeed, Lenin's view on the state was a Marxist view, and Lenin went to great pains to "quote monger," as you might say, and demonstrate that his understanding of the state was very much rooted in the classical texts.

What is this understanding of the state? Well it was more multi-layered and complex than you're giving Marx-Engels-Lenin credit for. You are right to say that the state in the proper sense of the word is an apparatus of political control, standing above society, used by the exploiters to suppress the exploited. But for Marx-Engels-Lenin, this did not exhaust the state. For them the state was also used in a broader sense to encompass (in the words of Lenin): "organized and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in general," i.e., institutionalized public power necessary for keeping the peace and, as Engels said, discharging the "administrative functions of watching over social interests."

Engels is describing the function of government, the Lenin quote you drag out of context describes the function of the state. Two very very different things.

Will there be government structures under socialism? Probably, though they likely will wither away as full communism is approached. Will there be "organized and systematic violence ... against people in general"? I should hope not!

That indeed is a thoroughly Stalinist conception of socialism, very well implemented in the USSR in the 1930s in particular.

Thus, when hundreds of thousands of people were rounded up and murdered or thrown into gulags, this was not done because they were allegedly class enemies of the workers, but because they were allegedly "enemies of the people." Your classless conception of state repression under socialism is the perfect theoretical justification for everything Stalin ever did.

Was this what Lenin was up to? Not at all. Quite simply, he was fuzzing slighly over the difference between the D of the P, when repression of the class enemy is necessary (inevitably a much smaller group than the people as a whole, who are the targets for state repression in your model), and socialism. In a loose, inexact, casual comment that if taken literally as you do contradicts everything in the pamphlet before that.




So we have two definitions of the state that we can talk about in abstraction: one which is institutionalized public power, and the other which is alienated institutionalized public power responsible for papering over the irreconcilable class differences between the minority ruling class and the majority exploited classes. In bourgeois society, like all class societies, these dual functions of the state -- its administrative society and its coercive "political" side -- are rolled into a single and therefore contradictory institution: the state in the "proper sense" of the term.

So yes, we have two different definitions of the state. One is the definition employed by Marx, Engels and Lenin, defining the state in class terms, as a phenomenon of class society. The state in the "proper sense," as Lenin puts its.

And one is the improper sense, the usual bourgeois definition, employed by your usual bourgeois sociologists and political scientists. Probably best expressed by Hegel. And by bureaucratic collectivists, bureaucratic collectivism being essentially the smuggling of non-class, anti-Marxist conceptions of the state into Marxism.

Who, like you, want to combine the two and use both at the same time.


Following the socialist revolution, with the transition from capitalism to socialism, what you have is the aufhebung or positive sublation of the political state, whereby it loses its class/political character in a way that elevates to a higher level its ability to function as a repository of "public power." But you still have the specialized institution assigned to be a repository of public power. This is the point that Engels and Lenin make repeatedly with the talk of "the withering away of democracy" and "withering away of the state" under socialism.

So according to your dialectical triad, at first we have a stateless primitive classless society as thesis, then we have the antithesis, a class society with a state, and then we have the synthesis, which has aufgehoben, transcended the previous opposition and reached a higher stage-but it still has a state, a higher form of state, which is a "repository of public power," and has armed bodies of men suppressing the powerless.

That doesn't even work in the abstract Hegelian way you pose it.

Your peculiar interpretation of Engels and Lenin's words is vastly inferior in every way to that of Lenin himself (barring a few sloppy lines in the pamphlet) which is that in the transitional period between capitalism and socialism the state, an armed body of men whose purpose is to suppress the previous ruling classes, will wither away, and cease to exist as a state in the proper sense of the term in a socialist society.

Likely it will leave behind a "public power" which will have "administrative functions of watching over social interests," as Engels put it. Which will further wither away into nothing as we move from a socialist society to a fully communist society.

But it won't have "armed bodies of men" to enforce "bourgeois distribution norms," i.e that people will receive goods according to "their work," as Marx put it. And why would it?

I have already explained at some length, using quotes from Lenin, sheer logic and the actual historical example of the Iroquois, to show why that is not necessary. And, since you can't refute my arguments ... you disappear them.

The only possible meaning that can be attributed to your logic is that you simply do not trust human beings to be able to run their societies, even a socialist society, and believe that some sort of repressive apparatus, a "people's state" as Lassalle put it, is needed to repress the people and keep them in line, even in a socialist society. A thoroughly Stalinist conception, which Marx explicitly rejects in the Gotha Programme.

And I am simply repeating myself here again, and here again you answered my arguments by ... disappearing them.


It is worth quoting Lenin at length on this from the final chapter of his pamphlet: "Democracy [U]is a form of the state, it represents, on the one hand, the organized, systematic use of force against persons; but, on the other hand, it signifies the formal recognition of equality of citizens, the equal right of all to determine the structure of, and to administer, the state. This, in turn, results in the fact that, at a certain stage in the development of democracy, it first welds together the class that wages a revolutionary struggle against capitalism--the proletariat, and enables it to crush, smash to atoms, wipe off the face of the earth the bourgeois, even the republican-bourgeois, state machine, the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy and to substitute for them a more democratic state machine, but a state machine nevertheless, in the shape of armed workers who proceed to form a militia involving the entire population.

Your interpolation, which the unwary might think were Lenin's own words, in fact reverses the meaning of the passage and is dishonest on your part.

In fact he is talking, as should be obvious, about democracy under capitalism.



From the moment all members of society, or at least the vast majority, have learned to administer the state themselves, have taken this work into their own hands, have organized control over the insignificant capitalist minority, over the gentry who wish to preserve their capitalist habits and over the workers who have been thoroughly corrupted by capitalism--from this moment the need for government of any kind begins to disappear altogether. The more complete the democracy, the nearer the moment when it becomes unnecessary. The more democratic the “state” which consists of the armed workers, and which is "no longer a state in the proper sense of the word", the more rapidly [U]every form of state begins to wither away.

Even disregarding your dishonest interpolation, in both of these quotes he is refuting you, not backing you up. He is talking about the dictatorship of the proletariat, which "consists of the armed workers," and which even before you have a classless society with no separate working class, has begun to wither away.

And when it has withered away, when this state, which is no longer a state in the proper sense of the term, has withered away, why then you have socialism.

This in fact is one of those statements, and here we have one towards the end of the pamphlet, that contradicts that loose line even further towards the end that you are playing word games with.

Q.E.D.



This is in keeping with a section in the previous chapter, wherein he states: "We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i.e., all organized and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in general. We do not expect the advent of a system of society in which the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed. In striving for socialism, however, we are convinced that it will develop into communism and, therefore, that the need for violence against people in general, for the subordination of one man to another, and of one section of the population to another, will vanish altogether since people will become accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social life without violence and without subordination."

To recap for you, MH, there is a state in the general sense of the word -- the institutionalized "organized, systematic use of force against persons" -- and there is a state of the proper sense of the word, which is where the systematic use of force is dictated by irreconcilable class interests. The socialist revolution immediately does away with the former, but not the latter. The latter withers away under socialism. But it is still there, as it is logically impossible for something to exist in a diminishing state (withering) and not exist at the same time.

Already refuted, but a grammatical note is not inappropriate here.

What is the opposite of "proper sense of the word"? The "general" sense of the word? If anything, the general sense would be the superior sense, the sense that makes the most, well, sense.

The opposite is the improper, wrong, incorrect sense of the word. Your sense of the word.

What may still exist in a socialist society, and here I repeat myself again, is not the state, but government, a different kettle of fish.

As with the communist Iroquois, with their elaborate governmental forms that may well have been the model for the US Constitution. And no state whatsoever, no separate "armed bodies of men," no cops, no courts, no jails, no army.


I actually find this little chunk of text amusing, since I am the person who first made reference to the "irreconcilability of class antagonisms" subheading earlier in the thread in direct response to your challenging the accuracy of my understanding of the state -- in both senses of the term -- as historically emergent from the development of class society. Now you are trying to pretend that that little exchange never happened, and that I am the person who needs to read and comprehend the very same subheadings that you were unwittingly arguing against earlier in the thread. That's some audacity, MH. Did your Spart friends teach you that little trick?

It isn't my fault that you fail to realize that if the state is based on, as Lenin puts it, the "irreconcilability of class antagonisms," that knocks your entire line of argument into a cocked hat.

Socialism, I beg to remind you, is a classless society, in which class antagonisms--have been reconciled.

In fact you have lost yourself in a cloud of verbiage at this point. At worst, I can be criticized for not having noticed this particular logical inconsistency of yours earlier, though in fact, I suspect if I went over the whole thread I'd find that I had.

Yes, the state in the proper sense of the term emerges from class antagonisms, and therefore no longer has any basis for existence when they cease to exist.

So the state withers away, in the real sense, together with the withering away of class antagonisms, and not afterwards, when a classless society no longer exists. With no class antagonisms to regulate, it's as useless as a vermiform appendix, and needs to be amputated before some sort of Stalinist appendicitis develops.

As for your "general," i.e. bourgeois, sense of the state, i.e. government, in those terms primitive communist societies had "states" or rather governments too, as in the Iroquois example, and I suspect every society in human history. And did not need to evolve class divisions to generate one.

-M.H.-

[Lucretia]

MH,

You can conflating two separate issues here -- what the True definition of the state is and how Lenin defined a state.

I have shown repeatedly that Lenin viewed the state at two separate levels of abstraction -- with a state in the most general sense encompassing the institutions specializing in discharging the functions of government, and in a more specific, so-called "proper" sense being the way that the functions of government are discharged in a class society.

Now you can take up the semantic debate about whether Lenin was justified in calling the more general concept described above as a "state," but Lenin did. (I think he was correct in doing so, for the record.) But there is no disputing that this was Lenin's view. And you have provided no rationale for characterizing such a view as "Stalinist," for all the view indicates is that there will be institutions charged with enforcing democratically arrived at decisions under socialism until such time that people have become socialized and habituated into disciplining themselves into abiding by such norms.


And indeed, your conception of the state is not original to you at all, indeed it was expressed far better, in a far more sophisticated fashion, by bureaucratic collectivist Hal Draper. Hal Draper, unlike you, did not claim to agree with Lenin on the nature of the state, rather he disagreed with Lenin and forthrightly explained why. A vastly better methodology than yours.You keep repeating that what we're talking about is my conception of the state. It's not. It's Lenin's conception, and I have provided quote after quote where Lenin makes reference to a state under socialism. I'll reiterate: take issue with this conception if you will, but be honest here and stop pretending that I've developed this conception on my own.


Engels is describing the function of government, the Lenin quote you drag out of context describes the function of the state. Two very very different things.Two issues here. First, in regards to your "dragging out of context" accusation. If I mangled the quote and altered its meaning by taking it out of context, provide the relevant context I omitted and show how that context undermines the point I was making with the quote. Otherwise, stop insinuating that something nefarious is going on with these rather straightforward quotes.

Second, you talk of Engels describing the function of government and the Lenin quote about the functions of the state as though they are mutually exclusive things. Yet I have shown you that Lenin repeatedly refers to a democratic state under socialism, a state whose purpose is oversee the functions of democratic governance. This is just another example of your failure to think in terms other than the most simplistic binaries, MH. It's not "government or state" -- it's government and state. Only when such time that every individual can be trusted to exercise the functions of governance over themselves will there be no need for a state institution as such.


Will there be government structures under socialism? Probably, though they likely will wither away as full communism is approached. Will there be "organized and systematic violence ... against people in general"? I should hope not!You need to consider carefully what the "systematic violence ... against people in general" passage means. Because the fact that you call it Stalinist betrays a facile and baseless interpretation of the text, as though the passage is referring to arbitrary violence against random people. In fact, Lenin states here that he is talking about organized and systematic violence -- that is, violence which is not arbitrary, but which is carried out with a specific logic in mind.

What logic is Lenin talking about in this passage as being the driving force behind organized and systematic violence? Is it the political security of a cadre of democratically unaccountable bureaucrats of the kind that characterized Stalin's regime? Well, no. And here's a hint, MH: the quoted passage is located under the subheading "Engels on the overcoming of democracy." As Lenin states quite clearly: "In the usual argument about the state, the mistake is constantly made against which Engels warned and which we have in passing indicated above, namely, it is constantly forgotten that the abolition of the state means also the abolition of democracy; that the withering away of the state means the withering away of democracy."

But already I can hear you complaining as you did in your last post: "In fact he is talking, as should be obvious, about democracy under capitalism."

Yet is Lenin in the above quote referring to democracy under capitalism? Well, obviously not. He is talking about the abolition of democracy and the state (happening simultaneously) as communist society transitions from its lower phase to its higher phase.

Again, to quote Lenin at length on this: "For when all have learned to administer and actually to independently administer social production, independently keep accounts and exercise control over the parasites, the sons of the wealthy, the swindlers and other "guardians of capitalist traditions", the escape from this popular accounting and control will inevitably become so incredibly difficult, such a rare exception, and will probably be accompanied by such swift and severe punishment (for the armed workers are practical men and not sentimental intellectuals, and they scarcely allow anyone to trifle with them), that the necessity of observing the simple, fundamental rules of the community will very soon become a habit. Then the door will be thrown wide open for the transition from the first phase of communist society to its higher phase, and with it to the complete withering away of the state."

It is clear from this quote, presented in full context, drawn once more from the section where Lenin is talking about the higher phase of communist society, that Lenin views the state as a necessary evil in the lower phase of communist society for the purpose of imposing and enforcing democratically arrived at decisions against anti-social remnants of pre-socialist ways of thinking and behaving. There will be "organized and systematic violence" deployed by representatives of the great majority of people to prevent the anti-social types from wreaking havoc on socialist society.

Where you might be confused is that Lenin here is outlining in broad brush strokes the evolution of state forms as the content and goals of governance change. There is "democracy" under capitalism, spilling over to revolutionary democracy under a dictatorship of the proletariat using the state to suppress other classes. Then there is a post-revolutionary state presiding over a society where classes have been destroyed, but where there still remain individuals seeking to harm the new socialist state. Thus the use of systematic and organized violence continues under socialism -- functions which presuppose a form of the state. This is all perfectly ascertainable from a careful and clear reading of the text, MH, and it's not Stalinist in any way.


Thus, when hundreds of thousands of people were rounded up and murdered or thrown into gulags, this was not done because they were allegedly class enemies of the workers, but because they were allegedly "enemies of the people." Your classless conception of state repression under socialism is the perfect theoretical justification for everything Stalin ever did.The problem with Stalin wasn't that he and his ilk made a theoretical error about the nature of the state or of its speculated necessity under socialism. Their error was in assuming that the state could be socialist/democratic and also completely outside the control of the vast majority of the people. (Interestingly, it's a similar mistake to the one Ortho-Trots like you make when you describe the Stalinist USSR as "transitioning to socialism" or "socialistic.") Lenin thinks that the state will exist under socialism -- a "bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie," to use his formulation -- but as a democratic state.

And here Lenin clearly does not mean democratic in the odd Stalinist tradition of the elite bureaucratic so-called vanguard "democratically" representing the supposed "interests" of the vast majority of the people against their expressed wishes. What he means is -- to quote form his section on the overcoming of democracy -- "subordination of the minority to the majority." The thing to note here is that it is the majority in charge, not a Stalinist-bureaucratic minority tossing people into work camps so as to terrorize the majority. Another key to note here is "subordination," which implies a degree of coercion. Now this subordination/coercion can be self-imposed where people have been habituated to recognizing democratic norms and practices (as under the higher phase of communism), or it will need to be imposed by an institution representing the clearly expressed wishes of the majority.

To reintroduce a quote of Lenin's that I invoked in a previous post, but which I think bears repeating: "We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i.e., all organized and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in general. We do not expect the advent of a system of society in which the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed. In striving for socialism, however, we are convinced that it will develop into communism and, therefore, that the need for violence against people in general, for the subordination of one man to another, and of one section of the population to another, will vanish altogether since people will become accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social life without violence and without [external] subordination."

But remember: this habituation -- this internalization of "observing the simple, fundamental rules of the community" that enables the state to wither away -- signals not the transition from capitalism to the lower phase of socialism, but (again, to quote Lenin) the throwing of doors "wide open for the transition from the first phase of communist society to its higher phase."

How much clearer can it be spelled out for you, MH? You have the state as an organized instrument by which the majority as a class are subordinated by a minority class, followed by a state used by the majority as a class to subordinate the minority class (the DoP), followed by a state in a classless society, in which individuals (not classes) who have not yet internalized the customs of observing and recognizing democratic-socialist principles are subordinated to the democratically arrived at decisions of the majority.

There is no fuzzing, no sloppiness in any of Lenin's formulations here, and he is consistent across multiple chapters. It is a clearly articulated model that Lenin foresees as paving the bridge between capitalist society and the higher phrase of communist society. You might disagree with this model, and you might dispute the way Lenin interprets Engels -- particularly in section about the overcoming of democracy -- but don't fool yourself into thinking it's not Lenin's model.

[ChrisK]

Jimmie Higgins, the reason we are not understanding each other here is that we are speaking different languages. You say, with indignation, "hey we pulled support when Nader took on too much right-wing baggage." And you argue, you never thought or even suggested he would fight for socialism. Therefore it doesn't bother you that your organization told people to vote for this pro-capitalist politician -- and devoted resources toward that end. Anyone suggesting that would be rightly thrown out of the organizations that I have been involved with. It ain't revolutionary, it ain't Marxism and it ain't Trotskyism. It is reformist/liberal BS. Yes you are to the left of the Democratic Party, BFD. But not that much -- oh, deep in your hearts you are for socialism, you just don't really want to harp on it. Christ. Read Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Cannon and get a clue.

Maybe you don't understand the point of trying to pull people in the right direction. Maybe you live in happyland where workers are all clambering to join the best of all socialist parties. Unfortunately I get to live in the real world. Right now getting people to join a party takes a nonexistent divine intervention. Yes the ISO gave a bit of support to Nader, but it was on the grounds that it could perhaps get people to think about the issues. And yes, the ISO pulled back from Nader when he would no longer have the ability to get people to think about the issues.


My bad. Didn't see that this was six pages long.

[A Marxist Historian]

Hokay, let us get back to fine grained textual analysis, since Lucretia is continuing to maintain that he is simply saying the same thing Lenin says.

Those bored by this can go to the new thread, where we deal with matters more directly rather than treating Lenin's works like the Mormons treat Joseph Smith's effusions.

Previously he only managed to find one quote out of a whole pamphlet arguing in the opposite direction from his interpretation, now he claims to have found a second. So let's look at it. But first...


MH,

....
You need to consider carefully what the "systematic violence ... against people in general" passage means. Because the fact that you call it Stalinist betrays a facile and baseless interpretation of the text, as though the passage is referring to arbitrary violence against random people. In fact, Lenin states here that he is talking about organized and systematic violence -- that is, violence which is not arbitrary, but which is carried out with a specific logic in mind.

What logic is Lenin talking about in this passage as being the driving force behind organized and systematic violence? Is it the political security of a cadre of democratically unaccountable bureaucrats of the kind that characterized Stalin's regime? Well, no. And here's a hint, MH: the quoted passage is located under the subheading "Engels on the overcoming of democracy." As Lenin states quite clearly: "In the usual argument about the state, the mistake is constantly made against which Engels warned and which we have in passing indicated above, namely, it is constantly forgotten that the abolition of the state means also the abolition of democracy; that the withering away of the state means the withering away of democracy."

But already I can hear you complaining as you did in your last post: "In fact he is talking, as should be obvious, about democracy under capitalism."

Yet is Lenin in the above quote referring to democracy under capitalism? Well, obviously not. He is talking about the abolition of democracy and the state (happening simultaneously) as communist society transitions from its lower phase to its higher phase.

Obviously to Lucretia, but not it seems to Lenin. Here is how Lenin defines the word "democracy," in the same section a few sentences later:

"Democracy is a state which recognizes the subordination of the minority to the majority, i.e., an organization for the systematic use of force by one class against another, by one section of the population against another."

In short, democracy is a form of class rule, which disappears in a classless society, such as socialism. Indeed, as long as democracy exists, classes exist, and one has not attained socialism yet.

So much for Lucretia's claim that this section of the work backs him up, Exactly the contrary, just as I have demonstrated with most of the other quotes he has dug out of the pamphlet, with one exception.

But has he found a second? Let's see.


Again, to quote Lenin at length on this: "For when all have learned to administer and actually to independently administer social production, independently keep accounts and exercise control over the parasites, the sons of the wealthy, the swindlers and other "guardians of capitalist traditions", the escape from this popular accounting and control will inevitably become so incredibly difficult, such a rare exception, and will probably be accompanied by such swift and severe punishment (for the armed workers are practical men and not sentimental intellectuals, and they scarcely allow anyone to trifle with them), that the necessity of observing the simple, fundamental rules of the community will very soon become a habit. Then the door will be thrown wide open for the transition from the first phase of communist society to its higher phase, and with it to the complete withering away of the state."

It is clear from this quote, presented in full context, drawn once more from the section where Lenin is talking about the higher phase of communist society, that Lenin views the state as a necessary evil in the lower phase of communist society for the purpose of imposing and enforcing democratically arrived at decisions against anti-social remnants of pre-socialist ways of thinking and behaving. There will be "organized and systematic violence" deployed by representatives of the great majority of people to prevent the anti-social types from wreaking havoc on socialist society....

Indeed this quote is not presented in full context at all, as Lucretia has left out the previous sentence, which clarifies what Lenin means here and refutes Lucretia.

"The more democratic the 'state' which consists of the armed workers, and which is 'no longer a state in the proper sense of the word', the more rapidly every form of state begins to wither away."

Lenin in this section is being metaphorical and imprecise, using the word "state" in its popular rather than its scientific meaning. Like he says, this so called "state," or "bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie," is "no longer a state in the proper sense of the word."

In other words, scientifically speaking it isn't a state at all.

And note that Lenin is talking here about "the armed workers." Well, in socialism, a classless society, there is no separate working class. So obviously he is slopping together the transitional phase between capitalism and socialism, the arena as he and Marx explain of the dictatorship of the proletariat, with socialism a bit.

This is also the same general section Lucretia earlier extracted the "bourgois state without the bourgeoisie" phrase out of, which obviously makes far better sense as a description of the dictatorship of the proletariat than of some sort of "state" in a vague sense in a socialist society.

So we have now cleared up the mystery of Lucretia's other quote as well.

Case closed.

-M.H.-

[Grenzer]

Obviously to Lucretia, but not it seems to Lenin. Here is how Lenin defines the word "democracy," in the same section a few sentences later:

"Democracy is a state which recognizes the subordination of the minority to the majority, i.e., an organization for the systematic use of force by one class against another, by one section of the population against another."

In short, democracy is a form of class rule, which disappears in a classless society, such as socialism. Indeed, as long as democracy exists, classes exist, and one has not attained socialism yet.

Complete rubbish.

Democracy is not explicitly a form of class rule, particularly when one considers that a democratic state has never existed! All bourgeois governments have taken a republican, not democratic form. The actual definition of democracy, according to the dictionary at least, is "rule by the majority," in other words, precisely the opposite of how you define it. Democracy a method to be in employed in decision making processes, so what you seem to be advocating is the inverse of that. Dictatorship, and not in the context of proletarian dictatorship, but dictatorship in its more popular understanding.

This seems to simply be an attempt to justify the elimination of genuine workers' control and the foundation of Stalinism. Except even then, I think even the Stalinists would take issue with your blatantly oligarchic conception of proletarian dictatorship. It could be that this is what Lenin really meant, and in this case it shows that he really was full of shit by this point, but it's hard to say since it's completely out of context. There are numerous ways this can be twisted to serve your purposes, particularly if in fact he meant representative organs by "democracy."

So it looks as though you have just taken an out-of-context quote, and then claim "This is what he REALLY meant." Quite convenient.



Lenin in this section is being metaphorical and imprecise, using the word "state" in its popular rather than its scientific meaning. Like he says, this so called "state," or "bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie," is "no longer a state in the proper sense of the word."

In other words, scientifically speaking it isn't a state at all.

And what exactly is a state by it's "Scientific" meaning? I hate to break it to you, but your opinion is not, in actuality, a science in a meaningful sense. This isn't the first time you've couched your personal opinion and philosophy as "science." This is just a intellectually dishonest tactic and a form of demagoguery to delegitimize those that might disagree with you. We can try to make political theory conform to scientific principles and established theory, but this does not make politics science, and your conception of science seems to be an eternal, objective truth. That is not science, it's religion.

So scientifically speaking, you're full of shit here.



And note that Lenin is talking here about "the armed workers." Well, in socialism, a classless society, there is no separate working class. So obviously he is slopping together the transitional phase between capitalism and socialism, the arena as he and Marx explain of the dictatorship of the proletariat, with socialism a bit.

Which according to you actually isn't democratic. So I'm curious then, how are decisions made? By an unaccountable Bureaucracy? Lenin forbid there might have been a modicum of that terrible, oppressive system of decision making, democracy.

[A Marxist Historian]

Complete rubbish.

Democracy is not explicitly a form of class rule, particularly when one considers that a democratic state has never existed! All bourgeois governments have taken a republican, not democratic form. The actual definition of democracy, according to the dictionary at least, is "rule by the majority," in other words, precisely the opposite of how you define it. Democracy a method to be in employed in decision making processes, so what you seem to be advocating is the inverse of that. Dictatorship, and not in the context of proletarian dictatorship, but dictatorship in its more popular understanding.

I think I'll take Lenin over Webster for a definition of democracy. Have you even read Lenin's pamphlet State and Revolution?

And you are quite wrong that bourgeois democracies are "republics not democracies." If you have universal suffrage, as most modern bourgeois states do, then we have a democracy not just a republic, which means a parliamentary affair with no monarchs or feudal order of nobility or what have you running things, and usually with a property qualification for voting, as the USA had back when the Founding Fathers were saying we needed a republic not a democracy.

The problem is that bourgeois democracy, universal suffrage and all, is the most efficient method for bourgeois dominion over the lower classes, as Lenin explains at some length, you should read what he has to say, and Marx too, Lenin wasn't being an innovator here.


This seems to simply be an attempt to justify the elimination of genuine workers' control and the foundation of Stalinism. Except even then, I think even the Stalinists would take issue with your blatantly oligarchic conception of proletarian dictatorship. It could be that this is what Lenin really meant, and in this case it shows that he really was full of shit by this point, but it's hard to say since it's completely out of context. There are numerous ways this can be twisted to serve your purposes, particularly if in fact he meant representative organs by "democracy."

So it looks as though you have just taken an out-of-context quote, and then claim "This is what he REALLY meant." Quite convenient.

Out of context? I was providing context for Lucretia's out of context quote. It's the sentence that directly precedes his quote, which he artificially lopped out! If you bother to actually read Lenin's pamphlet, you will discover that it reflects the spirit of the pamphlet.

Where you get the notion that I am trying to eliminate workers democracy and provide foundations for Stalinism is beyond me. Just ignorant polemical venom on your part, as if anything you have it backwards. It's Lucretia trying to claim that you'll still have a state under socialism, as the cruder Stalinists like to argue here on Revleft. Not me!




And what exactly is a state by it's "Scientific" meaning? I hate to break it to you, but your opinion is not, in actuality, a science in a meaningful sense. This isn't the first time you've couched your personal opinion and philosophy as "science." This is just a intellectually dishonest tactic and a form of demagoguery to delegitimize those that might disagree with you. We can try to make political theory conform to scientific principles and established theory, but this does not make politics science, and your conception of science seems to be an eternal, objective truth. That is not science, it's religion.

So scientifically speaking, you're full of shit here.

Not my opinion, but that of people like Marx and Lenin, which I'm only echoing here. The whole purpose of Lenin's pamphlet was to argue a scientific Marxist conception of the state. Marxism was intended by Marx to be a science, not just a set of political opinions that happen to be convenient to revolutionary-minded workers.

Truth is not of course eternal, the world changes and things change, that's dialectics. But you are essentially saying all Marxist theory is a bunch of crap, a form of religion. Which is of course exactly what the capitalists say, which is your source of wisdom here.



Which according to you actually isn't democratic. So I'm curious then, how are decisions made? By an unaccountable Bureaucracy? Lenin forbid there might have been a modicum of that terrible, oppressive system of decision making, democracy.

In a proletarian state, the form of rule of the proletariat over other classes, you will have proletarian democracy. In a socialist or communist society, no bureaucracy, no state, no cops, no jails. Of course the decision process would involve voting, but that is not "democracy," which is a form of political rule.

The word comes from ancient Greek. It means rule ("cracy," dictatorship if you will) of the "demos," the (non-slave) lower class in ancient Greek society, over the "aristos," the upper class, whose form of rule is "aristocracy." In fact, in its original meaning, the difference between "democracy" and "proletarian dictatorship" is merely the difference between Latin and Greek.

The US Founding Fathers were all classics scholars and knew that very well, that's why they wanted the USA to be a "republic" not a "democracy." Then slaveowner Jefferson came along with his concept of democracy for white people only, rule by the white people over blacks and Indians, allegedly after the model of the Jacobins in France, whose execution of King Louis and Marie Antoinette he praised, and confused matters dreadfully.

-M.H.-