Issues facing the left

[campesino]

1. organization

problems stemming from the lack of orginaztion

2. ideology
3. lack of goals
4. lack of motivation

symptoms of the problems

1
a.numerous socialist organizations, pursuing their own path
b.lack of socialist, due to lack of socialist evangelism
c.divergent socialist ideologies

2
a.socialism is pushed into the background in favor of causes that are popular among the bourgeois and class unconscious proles.
b.socialism being defined by the capitalist
c.understanding of socialism and class interest at a low
d.most socialist activism is preserving the small gains made by the worker's

3
a.no activism that progresses worker's class interest
b.socialist do not know what they stand for
c.the masses don't know what the socialist stand for

4
a.low levels of socialist activity

please add solutions or list more problems, I want this to initiate a dialogue.

[Agathor]

The lack of decent socialist parties is irritating but it's silly to say that we would be doing any better if we had them.

[Raúl Duke]

lack of socialist, due to lack of socialist evangelism

I don't think more socialist "evangelism" (i.e. recruiting more ideologues/activists) will do much.

[l'Enfermé]

There are as many issues facing the left as there are facing unicorns or centaurs. Neither exists. Perhaps if a worker's movement is ever rebuilt, we could discuss what issues face it, but at this moment all we can discuss is the issues that face the task of rebuilding the worker's movement, most importantly in Europe, America, Japan, and China.

[Prometeo liberado]

We need to be workers who are guided by the idea of socialism. Not socialist guiding workers.
I recken that's half your problem right there. Pretty sure.

[campesino]

We need to be workers who are guided by the idea of socialism. Not socialist guiding workers.
I recken that's half your problem right there. Pretty sure.

we need socialist, and the only way to create them is to spread the message.

if we don't evangelize and spread socialism, we will have a movement composed of the few people who discovered socialism through self-study.

replace the word socialist with class consciousness.
we need a class conscious movement.

socialism without class consciousness is social democracy, and that is not what will lead to proletarian class rule.

[ed miliband]

why should we give a fuck about "issues facing the left"?

surely the issue is "issues facing the working class"? let the left rot.

[campesino]

why should we give a fuck about "issues facing the left"?

surely the issue is "issues facing the working class"? let the left rot.

the working class is a statistical (income level) category, until it becomes an organized force with a goal.

liberals use "working class" when referring to: inequitable tax policies, declining union membership, stagnant wages, unemployment.

these issues matter, but if they are resolved we return to 1950's america except with less blatant racism and discrimination.

the working class won't progress until the left (activist, organizers, change-makers) are organized enough to exercise power.the primary issue for the working class is the disorganization of the left.

[the last donut of the night]

why should we give a fuck about "issues facing the left"?

surely the issue is "issues facing the working class"? let the left rot.

i think an issue facing the left is the left

[ed miliband]

the working class is a statistical (income level) category, until it becomes an organized force with a goal.

liberals use "working class" when referring to: inequitable tax policies, declining union membership, stagnant wages, unemployment.

these issues matter, but if they are resolved we return to 1950's america except with less blatant racism and discrimination.

the working class won't progress until the left (activist, organizers, change-makers) are organized enough to exercise power.the primary issue for the working class is the disorganization of the left.

yeah, class isn't based on income level, and the working class doesn't need the left -- the left needs the working class.

[Raúl Duke]

income is based on one's relationship to the means of production.

To put simply, do you work for a wage and/or salary?
etc.

Even if there was a resurgent left it doesn't exactly equal to more "working class consciousness/power/whatever..." material conditions seem to have more influence on that issue than a bunch of socialist proselytizers.

[Hit The North]

why should we give a fuck about "issues facing the left"?

surely the issue is "issues facing the working class"? let the left rot.

The working class needs to become more socialist and develop a clear idea of its goals. Organisations of existing socialists obviously have a role to play in this (although we shouldn't exaggerate our own importance).

[Positivist]

Ok, come on, enough snarky jabs at the term "the left." It refers to the movement of advocates of proletarian-oriented progress. Is it a perfect conception? No, but you know what he meant.

On the issue of diagnosing the problems of what scraps of the workers movement remains today, I agree that a lack of real organization of workers is the problem. We need to come together as workers to coordinate ventures that we the workers designate to be worthwhile and beneficial. We need to decide where to unite in defense or offense and what to unite around. We need the development of a counter-state who's power is entirely derived from the self organized working-class which serves to arrange mutual aid while we remain confined to capital and simultaneously builds the force necessary to move beyond capital.

[l'Enfermé]

why should we give a fuck about "issues facing the left"?

surely the issue is "issues facing the working class"? let the left rot.
Probably because the working class cannot take any action as a class against the capitalists without constituting itself into a political party(i.e "the left"), as Marx said, though to be fair, Marx's understanding of a political party, to borrow a word from DNZ, was primordial.

[Grenzer]

Probably because the working class cannot take any action as a class against the capitalists without constituting itself into a political party(i.e "the left"), as Marx said, though to be fair, Marx's understanding of a political party, to borrow a word from DNZ, was primordial.

Pretty much this exactly.

We need to "give a fuck about the left" becasue the working class is fundamentally incapable of organizing itself spontaneously. The only way you are going to have a real revolution is for a revolutionary political alternative being available. Spontaneous action doesn't create these; only the active organization of the those sections of the class that are aware of the need for revolution can create this alternative. That doesn't make them the 'vanguard of the class' by default of course; that's something that can only happen organically when the workers attach themselves to that organization.

[the last donut of the night]

Pretty much this exactly.

We need to "give a fuck about the left" becasue the working class is fundamentally incapable of organizing itself spontaneously. The only way you are going to have a real revolution is for a revolutionary political alternative being available. Spontaneous action doesn't create these; only the active organization of the those sections of the class that are aware of the need for revolution can create this alternative. That doesn't make them the 'vanguard of the class' by default of course; that's something that can only happen organically when the workers attach themselves to that organization.

that's the approach y'all been using for the last 100 years and it hasn't really worked out

[Comrade Samuel]

The lack of decent socialist parties is irritating but it's silly to say that we would be doing any better if we had them.

What is the reasoning behind this? Personally I think if we could get the party issue sorted out we would be far better off.

[Ostrinski]

that's the approach y'all been using for the last 100 years and it hasn't really worked outNeither has yours (not that I know what approach you actually uphold, but obviously it's been a failure since we are living in a capitalist world). Seriously, any discussion on political strategy is going to be meaningless if it's reduced to pissing contests like this.

[Nihilist Scud Missile]

The number one issue facing the socialist left has been our colabertaion with the Democrat Party either outright or by playing the "lesser of two evils" card. All of our efforts are CONSUMED by the graveyard that is the Democrat Party.

[Geiseric]

Well if the question is what's the issue with socialists, most of them are more concerned with selling newspapers and recruiting for the organization than actual movement building. Alan Benjamin was involved in organizing workers in New York, instead of recruiting for the party, and he was kicked out of the SWP for that in the 80's. The same issues are reflected in alot of other revolving door college student filled socialist organizations.

At the same time, the Peace and Freedom Party is reflected by Roseanne. How is that not an issue for the left? That party and the green are co-opting machines. They need to be exposed.

The issue with the workers movement is the parasitic bureaucracy that's at the head of the unions, who time and time again allow the movements to die down, because they're in bed with the fucks who are being demonstrated against by those struggling for Education, healthcare, and other transitional demands.

The issue with Marxism overall is that nobody has a clear perspective on how to rebuild the labor movement, and they ignore what has worked in the past. General strikes that crippled the country were centered around unions. It is imperitive for socialists to get jobs that are unionized so we can fight against the masogony and gomperist ideals that currently dominate rank and file workers.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I think the main objective issue facing the revolutionary left has been low levels of working class struggle first and formost. Everything else flows out of that fundamental pronblem IMO. The good news is that it seems like there is an international thaw going on.

If there is more struggle then it is possible to attempt to mend the main subjective issue facing the left which is lack of organic connection between those struggles and independant working class poltics of any sort. Then of course is the issue of how dow we best organize ourselves.

I'm not saying that these things have to come in a specific order of events like checking off a list -- in fact, I think probably all these things will happen rapidly at once or in different ways in different places (at least that's how it's been for the US in the past). Questions of organization and ideology are important, but not actually practical in a large sense until there is a class movement which is organically coming up against questions of how to fight and what for.

[black magick hustla]

Pretty much this exactly.

We need to "give a fuck about the left" becasue the working class is fundamentally incapable of organizing itself spontaneously. The only way you are going to have a real revolution is for a revolutionary political alternative being available. Spontaneous action doesn't create these; only the active organization of the those sections of the class that are aware of the need for revolution can create this alternative. That doesn't make them the 'vanguard of the class' by default of course; that's something that can only happen organically when the workers attach themselves to that organization.

I don't really have much patience for this thinking, but I will bite. I don't think everyone who says "fuck the left" is anti-organizational or "spontaneist" or whatever. I do believe there is space for formal organizations by the simple fact that logistics, support networks, channeling of revolutionary impetus, probably functions better with some sort of centralization. The problem is that I don't believe anything that appears like the left today will form the nucleus of The Party or whatever. Most of what remains from the left today is linked to specific historical periods of the past which have been aborted and therefore reduced to either the activist ghetto, or historic roleplaying clubs, or constitute the left wing of capital. A new theory/praxis of communism will have to emerge somehow from the new movements and new militants that are/will be forged by the next waves of struggle.

[the last donut of the night]

Neither has yours (not that I know what approach you actually uphold, but obviously it's been a failure since we are living in a capitalist world). Seriously, any discussion on political strategy is going to be meaningless if it's reduced to pissing contests like this.

this isn't a pissing contest between ML's and maoists, who to this day still rage on about what version of state capitalism was better. that's a dick-measuring contest. what i'm saying is that it's obvious that leninism and the type of leftism you seem to defend -- in their theoretical bases -- already carry the seeds for counterrevolution

[Geiseric]

this isn't a pissing contest between ML's and maoists, who to this day still rage on about what version of state capitalism was better. that's a dick-measuring contest. what i'm saying is that it's obvious that leninism and the type of leftism you seem to defend -- in their theoretical bases -- already carry the seeds for counterrevolution

So the ideology that has successfully carried out the first workers revolution in history is also the ideology that is against the revolution that it was at the center of? Hard to believe. The purges were necessary to carry out Stalinism, and that required the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

[campesino]

I think the main objective issue facing the revolutionary left has been low levels of working class struggle first and formost. Everything else flows out of that fundamental pronblem IMO. The good news is that it seems like there is an international thaw going on.


what is your definition of class struggle, and how is it to be intensified?

To me the biggest problem is disorganization.

Does anybody else have an issue they see as the biggest roadblock to socialism?

@Broody Guthrie
can you tell me more about Alan Benjamin and what happened to him?

[the last donut of the night]

So the ideology that has successfully carried out the first workers revolution in history is also the ideology that is against the revolution that it was at the center of? Hard to believe. The purges were necessary to carry out Stalinism, and that required the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

it wasn't leninism that led the russian workers to establish the soviets

[Ostrinski]

this isn't a pissing contest between ML's and maoists, who to this day still rage on about what version of state capitalism was better. that's a dick-measuring contest. what i'm saying is that it's obvious that leninism and the type of leftism you seem to defend -- in their theoretical bases -- already carry the seeds for counterrevolutionI'm not a defender of Leninism and neither is Ghost Bebel. In fact, I'm just as critical of Leninism as I am toward the economist strategies. In fact I would even agree that the Leninist methods "carry the seeds of counterrevolution" even if that's a bit vulgar and simplistic.

[Grenzer]

I don't think everyone who says "fuck the left" is anti-organizational or "spontaneist" or whatever.

The people who thanked your post certainly are, and they are primarily who the target of the comment was.



I do believe there is space for formal organizations by the simple fact that logistics, support networks, channeling of revolutionary impetus, probably functions better with some sort of centralization. The problem is that I don't believe anything that appears like the left today will form the nucleus of The Party or whatever. Most of what remains from the left today is linked to specific historical periods of the past which have been aborted and therefore reduced to either the activist ghetto, or historic roleplaying clubs, or constitute the left wing of capital. A new theory/praxis of communism will have to emerge somehow from the new movements and new militants that are/will be forged by the next waves of struggle.

I think you bring up a good point here. Of course there also is the question in regards to the old left is how much of it failed because it was wrong and how much of it failed because of unfavorable conditions. I am not sure whether you are saying that everything from the past must be discarded, but I don't see how something that doesn't build on the experiences of the past can succeed if it's unwilling to see what it got right and what it got wrong.

I'm also curious how this bold new synthesis is going to come out of the next wave of struggles when the genuinely proletarian struggles that are going on now tend to be economic, not political in nature. Economic struggles tend to just produce liberalism as that is the only viable political outlet for that to be expressed in.

Most of the people who complain that people are too attached to 1917 are ironically themselves just repeating even older, even more worn out talking points from 1872; but I feel that what you are saying is different in some sense than the usual Bakuninist schtick.

Still, I sense another problem here as well. What you seem to be suggesting is that the most class conscious workers do nothing; in which case you just get a self-perpetuating cycle where as people become class conscious, they don't do anything. It's difficult for me to believe that things can get accomplished when no one is doing anything because of this ultra-determinist "anti-voluntarism". It's just raw nihilism.

[Grenzer]

it wasn't leninism that led the russian workers to establish the soviets

I don't think anyone who is serious pretends that it was, but at the same time the Soviets would have remained irrelevant in the absence of a party that actually pushed forwards the interests of the working class politically. The actual destruction of the Provisional Government was something that was organized and carried out by the party. It is nothing short of utopian to think that it would have happened spontaneously.

I am not a Leninist because I don't believe that the legitimate vanguard of the proletariat is something that can be artificially constructed by a cabal of activists, but we can create political organizations that can potentially become the nucleus of the mass movement of workers.

Councils and the like are just as much of a proven failure as the idea that you can have substitute the class itself for a small coterie of class conscious workers(or as usually tends to be the case, petit-bourgeois). Councils themselves don't even radically depart from previously existing bourgeois structures.

[MarxSchmarx]

My essential diagnosis of the problem is that the left lacks a vision and a corresponding discourse that is suitable for the 21st century:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=9974

At the present stage of the struggle, expecting the economic struggle to have great successes is just a pipe dream, and the political struggle, understood as somehow controlling state power, is even more a lost cause. But there are some areas, particularly as they concern propaganda, where the left can probably do a decent job given its currently decimated resources.


The people who thanked your post certainly are, and they are primarily who the target of the comment was.

I think you bring up a good point here. Of course there also is the question in regards to the old left is how much of it failed because it was wrong and how much of it failed because of unfavorable conditions. I am not sure whether you are saying that everything from the past must be discarded, but I don't see how something that doesn't build on the experiences of the past can succeed if it's unwilling to see what it got right and what it got wrong.

I'm also curious how this bold new synthesis is going to come out of the next wave of struggles when the genuinely proletarian struggles that are going on now tend to be economic, not political in nature. Economic struggles tend to just produce liberalism as that is the only viable political outlet for that to be expressed in.

Most of the people who complain that people are too attached to 1917 are ironically themselves just repeating even older, even more worn out talking points from 1872; but I feel that what you are saying is different in some sense than the usual Bakuninist schtick.

Still, I sense another problem here as well. What you seem to be suggesting is that the most class conscious workers do nothing; in which case you just get a self-perpetuating cycle where as people become class conscious, they don't do anything. It's difficult for me to believe that things can get accomplished when no one is doing anything because of this ultra-determinist "anti-voluntarism". It's just raw nihilism.

DNZ I think has a spot-on phrase for this: "cargo-cult leninists". Because that's really what you and bmh are identifying. People who basically might as well be re-enacting the battle of Ain Jalut or Antietum in period cosplay or whatever, who expect that by selective adoption of elements of earlier movements they will similarly succeed today. They can be commended for studying history, but learn the wrong lessons.

I agree with your critique of a lot of the "oh well the system must collapse somehow sooner or later" school of certain leftists. But it is important to be constructive and to understand why an organic worker's movement isn't developing, and why leftists continue to take their cue from middle class intellectuals like Chomsky or even Castro and Mao.

[Jimmie Higgins]

what is your definition of class struggle, and how is it to be intensified?Two years ago US strikes were at the lowest level on record. What I mean is strikes as well as social movements that involve workers and class issues.

Without this we can organize ourselves how we like and not really make much of a difference, we can do propaganda but it has limited results for the most part. Our whole idology and most of the tactics and practices of radicals today are built on the lessons from past periods of increased struggle. For example, you can be in the IWW, those comrades do a lot of good steady work, but no matter how hard they try they won't be able to recreate the sucsess of the IWW at it's height in the absense of the context. In the absense of a sizable portion of workers wanting to organize and looking for a way to organize outside of the control of the union officials. The same with my traddition where we look to rank and file organization - where this exists it's small and radicals themselves can't just will the conditions for a more general working class militancy. It's the same for any group looking to build on the revolutionary tradditions of the early Bolsheviks - with no mass reformist party to be the radical alternative to, we end up with that stereotype of a lot of small groups all claiming to be the real revolutionaries.

So I think that we can (and must) do what we can to subjectivly prepare; try and meet people who are already radicalizing, try and get involved in real struggles where they exist and try and convince people of our poltics. However no matter how well we organize or propagandize, it won't matter in the larger sense - at best this is laying the groundwork; ploughing the fields and planting seeds. But ultimately it will take a larger objective change - a rainy season of much more general struggle for the chance that some of those seeds can grow.

Oh terrible metephores.