Communist Statists Historically Persecuting Anarchists [Archive]

bad ideas actualised by alcohol

21st February 2013, 17:39

This is for all the anarchists who argue against states but especially RedSun and MP5 in this thread

Anarchists are also against all kind of repressive states which all the revolutionary proletarian states turned out to be so far...

First, I would like to ask you what you think a state is.
For marxists the state is "a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable".(Lenin)
The state is thus an organ of class rule. However the state takes a different forms depending on which class is the dominating one.
In capitalist society the bourgeoisie is the dominant class and thus they have a state. This bourgeois state is needed because there exist irreconcilable class antagonisms with the proletarian class.
The bourgeois state is ruled by a small portion of society to oppress millions of people. After, or during, a revolution the proletariat seizes state power. However they do that by "abolishing the state as a state"(Engels).
The state that was first ruled by a small portion of society now becomes ruled by the majority of society to oppress a small portion of society (the former ruling class). Thus the state takes a entirely different form and is thus no longer a state in the current sense of the word.

Ok, so you respond the states have so far only ended up as repressive states. True, no one argues that this wasn't the case. But let's look at how they ended up in this way. I shall focus only on the USSR here.
The USSR was in a bloody civil war. Not only were they in war against the White army but also against all the major imperialist powers and the Black army, essentially a reactionary peasant based movement. You can see how, for the revolution to survive, some form of state-power was needed. They survived the civil war. The countries minimal industry was destroyed, the peasantry was hostile towards the Bolsheviks. Basically, the country lay in ruins. During the Civil War the expectation was that the revolution would spread. This didn't happen, the attempts at revolution were crushed. Now the goal became holding out until the revolution did succeed in other countries. However as you know the country lay in ruins, not only that but groups in society were still largely hostile to them. The only way to "hold out" was to centralize the state power and crush hostile elements. Had the revolution spread the state would've taken a form very different from the one it did. You see that states Don't turn into the repressive states just because they were states, but because of the material conditions the countries are in.

Letting rebellions go their own way at such a time would mean sacrificing the revolution. The Bolsheviks' goal was to hold out. Any uprising at such a crucial time serves the counter-revolutionary forces.
This may not be what you want to hear. You of course want to hear that everything was going fine and the state could be abolished and everyone could live in happines. The USSR was in civil war and after that in ruins. The only thing to save the revolution was by "authoritarian" measures. Beautiful ideals of peace and freedom become worthless slogans when a revolution has to succeed. As Engels said: Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough"?
We can not say that they used force excessively. This was a revolutionary time. Decisions needed to be made quickly. Did they make mistakes? Yes, of course they did. Kronstadt could've been solved differently and the force against it could've endangered the Soviet-state as well, however that is easy for us to say. Most talk against the use of force becomes liberal wisdom that don't takes account of the reality.

As for why the state can't be abolished immediately, I like to end with something Engels said on the issue:
"the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap".
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htm

Let's Get Free

21st February 2013, 17:42

So anarchists are against repressing the bourgeoisie?

I'm not interested in the proletariat having it's own state to "repress" and dominate the bourgeois, which is an absurd idea anyway. The only thing Im interested in is abolishing the bourgeois along with the proletariat as classes, as the two can only exist in relation to each other. That is all any revolutionary socialist worth their salt should ever want.

RedSun

21st February 2013, 17:48

So anarchists are against repressing the bourgeoisie?

Where I ever said that?

If the main target of the repression of those state capitalist systems had been the bourgeoisie I would understand your question but the problem is that history has shown to us that it was not the case, on the contrary...

Lokomotive293

21st February 2013, 18:01

Where I ever said that?

If the main target of the repression of those state capitalist systems had been the bourgeoisie I would understand your question but the problem is that history has shown to us that it was not the case, on the contrary...

Not trying to turn this into semantics, but you said you oppose all repressive states.
I actually do believe that the main target of repression in socialist countries was the bourgeoisie, without saying there were no mistakes made. Also, of course, things got really complicated because of the confrontation of systems, and socialist countries didn't only have to fear the bourgeois they'd just overthrown trying to regain power, but also attacks of all kinds from the surrounding Imperialist countries.

Lokomotive293

21st February 2013, 18:06

Let's Get Free

21st February 2013, 18:20

How is it an absurd idea that, during a transitional period, the proletariat needs a state to build socialism and repress the bourgeoisie? Historically, whenever a new class took power, the first thing they had to do was make sure there was no way for the old ruling class to come back, which was often a long and hard struggle. Just think of the French Revolution.

The very existence of the proletariat signifies its existence as an exploited class, an economic category of capitalism. An exploited class must imply an exploiting class and what defines the proletariat is the fact it is the exploited class in capitalism. So a proletarian state is one that represses the bourgeois while still allowing itself to be exploited by the bourgeois. Because that is what is meant by the term proletariat- the class that is exploited by the bourgeois.

Once expropriated of the means of production, the bourgeois will cease to be the bourgeois.

l'EnfermÃ©

21st February 2013, 18:54

OP: Because Communists have never shied away from putting down the opposition. Anarchists have, naturally, always stood in opposition to Communists. Why should Communists spare Anarchists when they have shown no mercy to any other organized opposition? We have our goals, and we are determined to achieve them, and if anyone stands in the way, they better be able to put up a fight because otherwise they are goners, disregarding whether or not they claim to be leftists(newsflash: social-democrats have claimed to be leftists too yet I never see threads that ask why communists have never been nice towards SDs). The same is true for Anarchists. When have Anarchists ever hesitated to step over some Marxist corpses in order to advance their interests?

RedSun

21st February 2013, 19:05

This is for all the anarchists who argue against states but especially RedSun and MP5 in this thread

First, I would like to ask you what you think a state is.

A state is an oppressive organized tool used by the ruling class which is the minority to submit and rule the majority.

For marxists the state is "a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable".(Lenin)
The state is thus an organ of class rule. However the state takes a different forms depending on which class is the dominating one.
In capitalist society the bourgeoisie is the dominant class and thus they have a state. This bourgeois state is needed because there exist irreconcilable class antagonisms with the proletarian class.
The bourgeois state is ruled by a small portion of society to oppress millions of people. After, or during, a revolution the proletariat seizes state power. However they do that by "abolishing the state as a state"(Engels).
The state that was first ruled by a small portion of society now becomes ruled by the majority of society to oppress a small portion of society (the former ruling class). Thus the state takes a entirely different form and is thus no longer a state in the current sense of the word.Yes, it takes a different form indeed. A more repressive one. I only disagree with you in one thing: It's still a minority ruling a majority and isn't certainly ruled by the proletariat.

If the state was actually ruled by the majority then the existence of the state is useless and that is why it must be abolished once the majority put their hands on it.

Ok, so you respond the states have so far only ended up as repressive states. True, no one argues that this wasn't the case. But let's look at how they ended up in this way. I shall focus only on the USSR here.
The USSR was in a bloody civil war. Not only were they in war against the White army but also against all the major imperialist powers and the Black army, essentially a reactionary peasant based movement. You can see how, for the revolution to survive, some form of state-power was needed. What revolution? I wasn't aware of any revolution in Russia at that time but a merely change of the guard. How Lenin put it? "The tsarist bureaucratic machine slightly anointed with soviet oil"...

The state was indeed necessary to assure the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks over the Russian people, including the proletariat.

They survived the civil war. The countries minimal industry was destroyed, the peasantry was hostile towards the Bolsheviks. Basically, the country lay in ruins. During the Civil War the expectation was that the revolution would spread. This didn't happen, the attempts at revolution were crushed. Now the goal became holding out until the revolution did succeed in other countries. However as you know the country lay in ruins, not only that but groups in society were still largely hostile to them. The only way to "hold out" was to centralize the state power and crush hostile elements. Had the revolution spread the state would've taken a form very different from the one it did. You see that states Don't turn into the repressive states just because they were states, but because of the material conditions the countries are in.

Letting rebellions go their own way at such a time would mean sacrificing the revolution. The Bolsheviks' goal was to hold out. Any uprising at such a crucial time serves the counter-revolutionary forces.
This may not be what you want to hear. You of course want to hear that everything was going fine and the state could be abolished and everyone could live in happines. The USSR was in civil war and after that in ruins. The only thing to save the revolution was by "authoritarian" measures. Beautiful ideals of peace and freedom become worthless slogans when a revolution has to succeed. As Engels said: Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough"?

We can not say that they used force excessively. This was a revolutionary time. Decisions needed to be made quickly. Did they make mistakes? Yes, of course they did. Kronstadt could've been solved differently and the force against it could've endangered the Soviet-state as well, however that is easy for us to say. Most talk against the use of force becomes liberal wisdom that don't takes account of the reality.

Once again, what revolution there was to preserve? Only the rule of the Bolsheviks. The proletariat never held the power in Russia so what revolution are you talking about?

The civil war and the material conditions are very piss-pooring justifications for the Bolshevik dictatorship. The soviets were formed in those same material conditions. The Bolsheviks themselves argued "All power to the soviets". Too bad they didn't keep this slogan once they came to power in Russia. The civil war should have been a motive to ally with all the anti-tsarist forces and not to suppress them like the Bolsheviks did.

The soviet repressive machine was set up before the revolution failed to spread.

As far as the Commune goes, as it's obvious it wasn't because of the lack of authoritarianism that the Commune fell but rather because it faced two conventional armies. You could have the most authoritarian state of history and they would have been smashed anyway.

As for why the state can't be abolished immediately, I like to end with something Engels said on the issue:
"the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap".
You quoted Lenin and Engels substantially but both say too little to me.

RedSun

21st February 2013, 19:14

Not trying to turn this into semantics, but you said you oppose all repressive states.
I actually do believe that the main target of repression in socialist countries was the bourgeoisie, without saying there were no mistakes made. Also, of course, things got really complicated because of the confrontation of systems, and socialist countries didn't only have to fear the bourgeois they'd just overthrown trying to regain power, but also attacks of all kinds from the surrounding Imperialist countries.

As I said those states were much more repressive towards the proletariat than the bourgeoisie itself which ceased to exist once they got expropriated of the means of the production. This expropriation is usually taken after the revolution and all those states kept their repressive nature even after that.

Thirsty Crow

21st February 2013, 19:19

You quoted Lenin and Engels substantially but both say too little to me.
The quote of Engels is really simple.

The fact is that the repressive chracter of the state - an armed body of men in the last instance - will be retained once the proletariat organizes itself as the ruling class, which implies the destruction of the bourgeois state apparatus, and that the whole armed working class is the state (other aspects of this "semi-state", "the state which begins to with away immediately" concern the functions of expropriation of the ruling class and organization of production and distribution - which is definitely not modelled on the historical experience of the Five Year plan and Stalinist party-state apparatus).

The unfortunate thing is that counter-revolution probably would not be timid, but rather armed to the teeth, and that repression would be necessary.

What I find really ambiguous in this, honestly, simplistic and reductionist account of the state is whether the tool of class oppression fundamentally changes from one class rule to another. This is the source of the revisionist virus which infected almost the whole of post-Marx Marxism, which understands the state not as a class specific structure of power (there are no states as such, but there are class states, fundamentally different in their structure) but as a neutral tool.

Lokomotive293

21st February 2013, 19:35

As I said those states were much more repressive towards the proletariat than the bourgeoisie itself which ceased to exist once they got expropriated of the means of the production. This expropriation is usually taken after the revolution and all those states kept their repressive nature even after that.

For one, and this goes to Let's Get Free as well, what about the foreign Imperialists, and second, no, unfortunately history has shown that the bourgeois still exist after the revolution (i.e. here: the act of the proletariat taking over political power), as long as their base of power is not destroyed completely, and this can take a long time.

bad ideas actualised by alcohol

21st February 2013, 19:36

The quote of Engels is really simple.

The fact is that the repressive chracter of the state - an armed body of men in the last instance - will be retained once the proletariat organizes itself as the ruling class, which implies the destruction of the bourgeois state apparatus, and that the whole armed working class is the state (other aspects of this "semi-state", "the state which begins to with away immediately" concern the functions of expropriation of the ruling class and organization of production and distribution - which is definitely not modelled on the historical experience of the Five Year plan and Stalinist party-state apparatus).

The unfortunate thing is that counter-revolution probably would not be timid, but rather armed to the teeth, and that repression would be necessary.

What I find really ambiguous in this, honestly, simplistic and reductionist account of the state is whether the tool of class oppression fundamentally changes from one class rule to another. This is the source of the revisionist virus which infected almost the whole of post-Marx Marxism, which understands the state not as a class specific structure of power (there are no states as such, but there are class states, fundamentally different in their structure) but as a neutral tool.

In the same text he does say that the working class can not just work with the same state:
"From the outset the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment".

MP5

21st February 2013, 19:37

Well we all know how well the idea of building a state to repress the bourgeois turned out now don't we? The thing is none of the state Capitalist countries even accomplished dictatorship of the proletariat it more or less became a dictatorship on the proletariat class. The so called Communist parties of these states just became another ruling class which is hardly a improvement really.

A actual workers democratic republic i would have no real problem with. But this is not what the USSR, China, Cuba, etc became. They just became dictatorships. The goal is not to suppress the bourgeois but to abolish the class system entirely. Suppressing them and replacing them with proletarian rule only switches one ruling class for another and the class system remains intact.

So the logical answer to this problem would be to strip the bourgeois of the means of production while destroying there state. Then the bourgeois would not be bourgeois anymore and the proletariat would not be a class either.

bad ideas actualised by alcohol

21st February 2013, 19:43

A actual workers democratic republic i would have no real problem with. But this is not what the USSR, China, Cuba, etc became. They just became dictatorships. The goal is not to suppress the bourgeois but to abolish the class system entirely. Suppressing them and replacing them with proletarian rule only switches one ruling class for another and the class system remains intact.

This is just non-sense. The former ruling class will defend its power, that's why they need to be surpressed. However, they lose their control over production. So, while the former bourgeoisie has no control over production and still want to get it back, there exist no economic relation where the bourgeoisie can keep existing because they have no control over production. So, no the class system does not remain intact.

So the logical answer to this problem would be to strip the bourgeois of the means of production while destroying there state. Then the bourgeois would not be bourgeois anymore and the proletariat would not be a class either.

If only it were that easy.

Thirsty Crow

21st February 2013, 19:46

In the same text he does say that the working class can not just work with the same state:
"From the outset the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment".
I know.

I didn't actually state that Engels is the "source" of this error, but you could actually make an argument in favour of this thesis (though, that is a matter for another thread)

What I intended to communicate is, I guess, a bit controversial, that what passed for orthodox Marxism was actually built upon quicksand, and that quicksand consisted in that dangerous notion of the state as merely a neutral tool of class violence. That's why I said that "almost the whole" of post-Marx Marxism was infected with the virus of revisionism (since this is nothing other than a revision of the basic understanding of political power).

If only it were that easy.
It's not that easy, but what MP5 says is precisely what Marxist criticism and revolutionary workers' practice is all about - expropriation and the destruction of the old state apparatus (which presupposes the formation of new class structure of power, corresponding to the rule of the proletariat)

RedSun

21st February 2013, 19:46

RedSun

21st February 2013, 19:54

For one, and this goes to Let's Get Free as well, what about the foreign Imperialists, and second, no, unfortunately history has shown that the bourgeois still exist after the revolution (i.e. here: the act of the proletariat taking over political power), as long as their base of power is not destroyed completely, and this can take a long time.

You don't need a state to fight foreign imperialists. You have historical examples of Imperialists armies defeated by local militias.

As for the second, the bourgeoisie in that specific country where the revolution took place ceased to exist. The soviet repression machinery was directed toward its own population and not other countries ruled by bourgeoisie.

Thirsty Crow

21st February 2013, 19:58

I said that Engels himself said too little to me and not only his quotes. I understood what he meant just don't agree with it.You do not agree with the self-defense of the revolutionary working class?
Or do you disagree with the conception of the state as a tool, a mechanism of class rule?

So we fight repression with more repression?Armed counter-revolution can't be fought with sit-ins. So, yes, we fight repression with repression of the counter-revolution.

How do you envision this fight against repression?

If socialist revolutions must turn into repressive dictatorships towards their own people in order to survive than it is worthless to fight for.That wouldn't be my claim (that social revolution must turn into repressive dictatorship over the working class), actually.

You don't need a state to fight foreign imperialists. You have historical examples of Imperialists armies defeated by local militias.

Do you really think that in modern warfare it is possible that a local militia wards off the power of first the concentrated means of destruction, technology and logistics, and then of tactical superiority?

I think that people forget all too often that the way war is waged has changed as well.

bad ideas actualised by alcohol

21st February 2013, 19:59

It's not that easy, but what MP5 says is precisely what Marxist criticism and revolutionary workers' practice is all about - expropriation and the destruction of the old state apparatus (which presupposes the formation of new class structure of power, corresponding to the rule of the proletariat)

True, however MP5 doesn't argue destruction of the old apparatus but of all forms of the state. Which is why I said "if only it were that simple", because I don't think everything will work out by just removing the state.

bad ideas actualised by alcohol

21st February 2013, 20:03

You don't need a state to fight foreign imperialists. You have historical examples of Imperialists armies defeated by local militias.

As for the second, the bourgeoisie in that specific country where the revolution took place ceased to exist. The soviet repression machinery was directed toward its own population and not other countries ruled by bourgeoisie.

Well, first of all revolution can not be exported by "repression machinery". The liberation of the working class must be an act of the working class itself. The soviet state wouldn't been able to direct it toward the foreign bourgeoisie during the civil war and after the civil war it was destroyed and oppressing a foreign bourgeoisie would have meant another invasion and being completely destroyed.
However, it did try to help by setting up the Comintern. Actively repressing the foreign bourgeoisie would be impossible though.

RedSun

21st February 2013, 22:34

You do not agree with the self-defense of the revolutionary working class?
Or do you disagree with the conception of the state as a tool, a mechanism of class rule?

I disagree with the conception of the state as a self-defense of the revolutionary working class.

Armed counter-revolution can't be fought with sit-ins. So, yes, we fight repression with repression of the counter-revolution.

How do you envision this fight against repression?

That wouldn't be my claim (that social revolution must turn into repressive dictatorship over the working class), actually.

Let's get this clear here. When I talk about repression I am talking about secret police, labor camps, one party rule, censorship, etc...

If you have the majority behind the revolution as the DOTP supposedly presuppose you don't need to repress your own people. You need repression if you don't have the majority behind you.

Do you really think that in modern warfare it is possible that a local militia wards off the power of first the concentrated means of destruction, technology and logistics, and then of tactical superiority?

I think that people forget all too often that the way war is waged has changed as well.

As I said it already happen not a long time ago when the means of destruction, technology and logistics were already very much developed.

RedSun

21st February 2013, 22:41

Well, first of all revolution can not be exported by "repression machinery". The liberation of the working class must be an act of the working class itself. The soviet state wouldn't been able to direct it toward the foreign bourgeoisie during the civil war and after the civil war it was destroyed and oppressing a foreign bourgeoisie would have meant another invasion and being completely destroyed.
However, it did try to help by setting up the Comintern. Actively repressing the foreign bourgeoisie would be impossible though.

Lokomotive293 was saying that bourgeoisie still exist after the revolution and expropriation and I assumed that he was referring to the bourgeoisie outside the national borders. That's why I said that the soviet repressive machinery was directed toward inside and not outside its borders.

Hence, there is no justification to have a massive repression machinery like USSR was.

Rafiq

21st February 2013, 22:57

The state is an organ of political class dictatorship. The proletarian state will not pick up the crumbs of bourgeois states, it will be entirely different in nature.

Sent from my SPH-D710 using Tapatalk 2

TheRedAnarchist23

21st February 2013, 23:04

Cool another tendency war! I gotta join!

So anarchists are against repressing the bourgeoisie?

Are you sure you are not secretly a fascist?

Well, first of all revolution can not be exported by "repression machinery". The liberation of the working class must be an act of the working class itself. The soviet state wouldn't been able to direct it toward the foreign bourgeoisie during the civil war and after the civil war it was destroyed and oppressing a foreign bourgeoisie would have meant another invasion and being completely destroyed.
However, it did try to help by setting up the Comintern. Actively repressing the foreign bourgeoisie would be impossible though.

Yes, I already know you would love to live under the dictatorship of the communist party, since you always justify their actions, even though they were the greatest traitors to their beliefs the world had seen to date.
So you think the bolsheviks did not go far enough, and killed the true revolutionaries, because of international pressure? That still is no excusse to betray ones beleifs. They had the oportunity to follow through with thier ideals, even if it meant their death.

This is just non-sense. The former ruling class will defend its power

And what is the organ of class rule? That's right, the state. So they will have a state on their side.

However, they lose their control over production. So, while the former bourgeoisie has no control over production and still want to get it back, there exist no economic relation where the bourgeoisie can keep existing because they have no control over production. So, no the class system does not remain intact.

Then why do you need the state? You say the state exists because of classes, and if there are no classes it would disapear. Then why does it not disapear at this point.

The state is an organ of political class dictatorship. The proletarian state will not pick up the crumbs of bourgeois states, it will be entirely different in nature.

Yet the "workers state" in every communist revolution worked exactly like the bourgeois states.

Ostrinski

21st February 2013, 23:25

^^That's because Workers' States are bourgeois states.

TheRedAnarchist23

21st February 2013, 23:53

^^That's because Workers' States are bourgeois states.

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa?

Ostrinski

22nd February 2013, 01:39

"Workers' States" in the sense of how most people that opt to use the term "workers' state," use it.

Lokomotive293

22nd February 2013, 06:41

Lokomotive293 was saying that bourgeoisie still exist after the revolution and expropriation and I assumed that he/she was referring to the bourgeoisie outside the national borders. That's why I said that the soviet repressive machinery was directed toward inside and not outside its borders.

Hence, there is no justification to have a massive repression machinery like USSR was.

Because obviously such things as foreign agents and sabotage don't exist...

BIXX

22nd February 2013, 07:49

For the purpose of this debate are we assuming worldwide revolution or revolution in a single country? Cause I was under the impression that true socialism and true communism and true anarchism are not possible in one country...

Slavoj Zizek's Balls

22nd February 2013, 11:18

I was under the impression that true socialism and true communism and true anarchism are not possible in one country...

You would be correct. Seeing as people have been quoting Engels, I too will throw in my contribution.

He states that "By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others." therefore "It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range."

We cannot keep discussing the Soviet Union and it's legitimacy in this discussion if it's base is flawed. It started off poorly with the Bolsheviks dominating the local soviets, it removed all opposition in order to maintain it's existence and it had ignored the requirements for transforming Capitalism into Socialism (second stage) by forcing, not waiting, until the country had been industrialised. If it's creation was incorrect, the rest must be too. If the Soviet Union had not repressed the peasantry or proletariat, it would not have survived. But by doing such a thing, the Soviet Union no longer became affiliated with the emancipation of the people, and emancipation is the aim of all radical left movements. It relied on repression which generated tension and resistance. Therefore we can argue that it is the means that justifies the end, not that the end justifies the means.

If you can't co-operate with the people, it's because they aren't ready, so don't force them!

At the end of it all, any tendency is viable as long as it does two things in during or very soon after a revolution:

• Remove the Bourgeoisie from power
• Put the people in power

Whether that is by immediately decentralising workers, giving them weapons and maintaining cohesion by re-decorating the media or by putting a vanguard in control doesn't matter. As long as people don't see the radical left as the enemy. That is what matters.

If you get enough people to see through your eyes, you've won.

Back to the thread, there has been evidence of Marxist-Leninists persecuting other tendencies. Again the USSR is evidence of this, both during it's creation and during the Spanish Civil War through manipulating the CNT in order to arrange for the defeat of the Anarchists. What the USSR isn't however, is a good reason for doing such a thing. If you're stopping fellow radical leftists from achieving a revolution elsewhere, there's something wrong no?

Thirsty Crow

22nd February 2013, 11:35

I disagree with the conception of the state as a self-defense of the revolutionary working class.
Then there's no real disagreement, but a semantic one. You wish do define the state in one way, other people propose different ways, and this clouds the common agreement.

Let's get this clear here. When I talk about repression I am talking about secret police, labor camps, one party rule, censorship, etc...

If you have the majority behind the revolution as the DOTP supposedly presuppose you don't need to repress your own people. You need repression if you don't have the majority behind you. Okay, party-state rule is something I oppose wholly, and I don't think anyone should even say that they oppose labor camps (though, some people here support such measures, go figure).

Now, the fact is that the majority of the whole population, who are involved in social revolution, does not and cannot guarantee the non-existence of organized counter-revolution.
For this reason, I think it is perfectly reasonable to allow for the possibility of a kind of a "secret police", but one which, as other organs of proletarian rule, needs to be accountable. I'm not talking GPU or NKVD here.

Also, censorship. I do not support the free political organizing of forces that oppose the rule of the working class. Thus, I don't see anything wrong with suppressing their propaganda. That doesn't mean that if some "average" worker reads that propaganda he should be imprisoned or worse. I'd oppose that wholly. It only means that the center which produces it should be traced out and dispersed.

And just to be clear, I definitely do not think that anyone should stretch this notion of counter-revolution to include anarchists. Sure, if people bomb buildings or do some similar shit, get them. But political persecution, no, I do not support it.

As I said it already happen not a long time ago when the means of destruction, technology and logistics were already very much developed.Well, this is all nice and all, but it is ultimately abstract.

What examples you have in mind?

Because obviously such things as foreign agents and sabotage don't exist...
But the bourgeoisie exist in yet another sense.

Social class is a twofold notion. The first aspect referes to the reproduction of social relations in production, which happens irrespective of the will of individual people. People are born into certain relations of production.

The second aspect is the famous class-for-itself aspect, which highlights the degree of class unity and class consciousness. And it is precisely here that the freshly expropriated bourgeoisie retain their class character, or better, class background, as potential for overthrowing the rule of the working class. The fact that expropriated capitalists have the means of their class position swept underneath their feet doesn't change this identification with the rightful ownership of these. So, figuratively speaking, they are related to the means of production but in their minds, thought.

RedSun

22nd February 2013, 13:21

Okay, party-state rule is something I oppose wholly, and I don't think anyone should even say that they oppose labor camps (though, some people here support such measures, go figure).

Now, the fact is that the majority of the whole population, who are involved in social revolution, does not and cannot guarantee the non-existence of organized counter-revolution.
For this reason, I think it is perfectly reasonable to allow for the possibility of a kind of a "secret police", but one which, as other organs of proletarian rule, needs to be accountable. I'm not talking GPU or NKVD here.

Also, censorship. I do not support the free political organizing of forces that oppose the rule of the working class. Thus, I don't see anything wrong with suppressing their propaganda. That doesn't mean that if some "average" worker reads that propaganda he should be imprisoned or worse. I'd oppose that wholly. It only means that the center which produces it should be traced out and dispersed.

And just to be clear, I definitely do not think that anyone should stretch this notion of counter-revolution to include anarchists. Sure, if people bomb buildings or do some similar shit, get them. But political persecution, no, I do not support it.

Well, I had USSR in mind when I talked about repression. I am not against the repression of the bourgeoisie which happens with the expropriation of their means of production but once this is done I don't see any reason to keep a secret police (I don't know how it would be a secret police in a worker's state so I need to have NKVD model in mind), one party rule, repression of other leftist movements, etc...

Of course that I don't deny the existence of a counter-revolution but just don't see the necessity of a state to fight it. On the contrary, the existence of the state just facilitate it. USSR has shown to us precisely this.

Well, this is all nice and all, but it is ultimately abstract.

What examples you have in mind?

The Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

RedSun

22nd February 2013, 13:29

Because obviously such things as foreign agents and sabotage don't exist...

I know that for ML's there is a foreign agent in every corner but look: despite all the purges and deaths Stalin's legacy was dismissed just 3 years after his death and the revisionists took his place. So what would be your solution? Even more purges and deaths?

Despite having a secret police, censorship and other instruments of repression the USSR fell due to internal causes. So for what it served the KGB or the Gulag?

Thirsty Crow

22nd February 2013, 15:40

Well, I had USSR in mind when I talked about repression. OK, then we're in agreement.

I am not against the repression of the bourgeoisie which happens with the expropriation of their means of production but once this is done I don't see any reason to keep a secret police (I don't know how it would be a secret police in a worker's state so I need to have NKVD model in mind), one party rule, repression of other leftist movements, etc...
The whole point is to understand under which conditions can anyone say that this is truly done.

I would argue that the international revolution, alongside the eventual elimination of armed counter-revolutionary resistance, are valid criteria.

Of course that I don't deny the existence of a counter-revolution but just don't see the necessity of a state to fight it. On the contrary, the existence of the state just facilitate it. USSR has shown to us precisely this. As I said, I think this is partly an issue of method, partly an issue of semantics.

I would argue that armed suppression of counter-revolution necessarily implies the existence of a state - and armed body of men repressing certain class - but this state would be comprised of the entire revolutionary proletariat (and allies), and not of a party bureaucracy commanding a standing army as a body seperate from the class.

You think this is a matter of political advocacy, while I think that armed suppression of counter-revolution already constitutes the state (among other functions), as violent repression is something which will be left to the dustbin of history when communism is established.

I don't even think, not for an instance, to give in to substitutionist politics and even examine the advocacy of the party-state, but I wouldn't mind arguing my position, why I do not think this is the way the working class can constitute itself as the ruling class.

The Mujahideen in Afghanistan.You will need to be more specific. And keep in mind that this war effort was conditioned by imperialist rivalries and consequently, by support provided by one camp. I don't think this is even a possibility, and that the history of military intervention post-October proves this, in case of working class taking political power.

TheRedAnarchist23

22nd February 2013, 16:10

The whole point is to understand under which conditions can anyone say that this is truly done.

I would argue that the international revolution, alongside the eventual elimination of armed counter-revolutionary resistance, are valid criteria.

This does not go against your beleifs, but it goes against mine. How can the same person who wants to live in a communist world, say that the only way to get there is to use the same methods the fascists use.

As I said, I think this is partly an issue of method, partly an issue of semantics.

Actualy it is a theoretical issue. You guys might say you consider a state to be a federation of workers councils, but at the same time you say if needed you will support a dictatorship of the communist party. This is the big incompatibility between anarchists and marxists. Freedom is our doctrine.

I would argue that armed suppression of counter-revolution necessarily implies the existence of a state

Lies! The repression of the bourgeosie is the collectivisation, and to do that we do not need a state.

- and armed body of men repressing certain class - but this state would be comprised of the entire revolutionary proletariat (and allies), and not of a party bureaucracy commanding a standing army as a body seperate from the class.

Yet I have seen 9mm argue that according to material conditions the degree of centralization of this "workers state" would change. It does not matter how decentralized it is, because it is still authoritarian.

You think this is a matter of political advocacy, while I think that armed suppression of counter-revolution already constitutes the state (among other functions), as violent repression is something which will be left to the dustbin of history when communism is established.

Then why is there a communist party? Why did the bolsheviks take control of the nation and murdered any who oposed them, including the anarchists?

RedSun

22nd February 2013, 16:26

The whole point is to understand under which conditions can anyone say that this is truly done.

I would argue that the international revolution, alongside the eventual elimination of armed counter-revolutionary resistance, are valid criteria.

But until the revolution becomes global we retain the repressive machinery within our borders?

As I said, I think this is partly an issue of method, partly an issue of semantics.

I would argue that armed suppression of counter-revolution necessarily implies the existence of a state - and armed body of men repressing certain class - but this state would be comprised of the entire revolutionary proletariat (and allies), and not of a party bureaucracy commanding a standing army as a body seperate from the class.

You think this is a matter of political advocacy, while I think that armed suppression of counter-revolution already constitutes the state (among other functions), as violent repression is something which will be left to the dustbin of history when communism is established.

I don't even think, not for an instance, to give in to substitutionist politics and even examine the advocacy of the party-state, but I wouldn't mind arguing my position, why I do not think this is the way the working class can constitute itself as the ruling class.

You have to bear in mind that I or anyone else don't know how this proletariat state would be since we don't have any historical experience of it. You say that we should keep a secret police but different from the NKVD. How different? And how do you prevent the emergence of a new class of rulers over the proletariat in this new state?

Because in USSR bourgeoisie really disappeared but was replaced by a new bureaucratic elite which ruled the country's proletariat.

You will need to be more specific. And keep in mind that this war effort was conditioned by imperialist rivalries and consequently, by support provided by one camp. I don't think this is even a possibility, and that the history of military intervention post-October proves this, in case of working class taking political power.

Remember that the October Revolution and the subsequent Bolshevik ascension was also only possible due to those imperialist rivalries. The international environment influence always internal disputes and it can be some times favorably for you, other times unfavorably. I don't think that we can say for sure that this will never be a possibility in case of working class taking political power.

Thirsty Crow

22nd February 2013, 17:31

But until the revolution becomes global we retain the repressive machinery within our borders?Well, not quite.

My position rests on these assumptions:

1) the need for self-defense of the first national revolutionary working class - counter-revolution doesn't necessarily come from without the territory (imperialism) exclusively, but also from within (clandestine armed groups, or open civil war); as I said, even when the bourgeoisie is expropriated in one territory, they still retain their class identification, and thus pose a threat

2) the only way that communism can be produced as an entirely new social relation of production is through global revolution

So, the existence of the repressive function rests on 2), since the rallying point for the "ex-bourgeoisie" would actually be the nearest neighbouring territory under the rule of capital at least, but it is perfectly possible that the necessity of this repression will be terminated even if social revolution hasn't taken a literally global scope, but certain functions such as the population being armed would remain necessary - first of all, as a bulwark against the possibility of political degeneration, and secondly, as a bulwark against "foreign" threats

You have to bear in mind that I or anyone else don't know how this proletariat state would be since we don't have any historical experience of it.I can't agree with this. The historical experience of the soviets and their withering away just as the party-state took form is a rich mine for both theory and contemporary practice.

You say that we should keep a secret police but different from the NKVD. How different? And how do you prevent the emergence of a new class of rulers over the proletariat in this new state?
First of all, discretionary powers (the power to execute decisions which is not conditioned by the organs of class power; the early incarnations of the secret police in the Union were formed as de facto semi-autonomous) definitely need to be curtailed, through strict accountability and recall mechanisms (the covert work of this body is not disabled in this way).

Remember that the October Revolution and the subsequent Bolshevik ascension was also only possible due to those imperialist rivalries.This is irrelevant for my contention, which is clear: the example oj the Mujahideen is faulty since it disregards the important fact that an imperialist camp actively aided their struggle. No such thing is to be expected from imperialism in relation to workers' rule.

I don't think that we can say for sure that this will never be a possibility in case of working class taking political power.I say we can, and support this argument by reference to the military intervention in case of the young Soviet Republic. Or to word it in a better way, as we can't discount the mere possibility of a happening, we should not pay much attention to it since, historically, it has been shown that it is far more likely not to happen as indicated in this way.

This does not go against your beleifs, but it goes against mine. How can the same person who wants to live in a communist world, say that the only way to get there is to use the same methods the fascists use.
Your beliefs are nothing more than a self-defeating moralism.

Actualy it is a theoretical issue. You guys might say you consider a state to be a federation of workers councils, but at the same time you say if needed you will support a dictatorship of the communist party. Show me where I said any such thing.

Lies! The repression of the bourgeosie is the collectivisation, and to do that we do not need a state.Calm your moralist, self-righteous self down.

Yet I have seen 9mm argue that according to material conditions the degree of centralization of this "workers state" would change. It does not matter how decentralized it is, because it is still authoritarian.
And I should care about what 9mm says...why?

T
hen why is there a communist party? Why did the bolsheviks take control of the nation and murdered any who oposed them, including the anarchists? Because the party constitutes the layer of the class which actively advocate for the political rule of the class and propose concrete measures and policies to the class wide organs of workers' rule.

Any way imagineable, you can't escape this necessity of a part of the class forming a political organization to present and discuss ideas and courses of action within the class. Anarchists, when not acting like blind idealists, do exactly that as well.

As for why the Bolsheviks took control, I can go into that later but actully would rather not to, since I presume that no rational argument (which definitely doesn't presuppose an unconditional reverence and defense of whatever was done) can penetrate this thick crust of idealism (in a nutshell, the stance that reality needs to be changed to fit in with beliefs and ideals - and thus this unbelievable pacifism, for instance) which you carefully nurture.

RedSun

22nd February 2013, 19:21

Well, not quite.

My position rests on these assumptions:

1) the need for self-defense of the first national revolutionary working class - counter-revolution doesn't necessarily come from without the territory (imperialism) exclusively, but also from within (clandestine armed groups, or open civil war); as I said, even when the bourgeoisie is expropriated in one territory, they still retain their class identification, and thus pose a threat

As I said before you don't need the state as a self-defense mechanism. People can be organized in popular militias without the need of a central political organ and fight counter-revolution.

2) the only way that communism can be produced as an entirely new social relation of production is through global revolution

Disagree with this. Catalonia revolutionaries didn't need the revolution to become global to establish a communist system within their controlled territory.

I can't agree with this. The historical experience of the soviets and their withering away just as the party-state took form is a rich mine for both theory and contemporary practice.

As a left communist in this forum put it in the other day the soviets never had real power in Russia despite the Bolshevik propaganda so it isn't a valid example.

First of all, discretionary powers (the power to execute decisions which is not conditioned by the organs of class power; the early incarnations of the secret police in the Union were formed as de facto semi-autonomous) definitely need to be curtailed, through strict accountability and recall mechanisms (the covert work of this body is not disabled in this way).

And how you can prevent this secret police from becoming an autonomous body above the working class since it's not conditioned by the organs of class power?

This is irrelevant for my contention, which is clear: the example oj the Mujahideen is faulty since it disregards the important fact that an imperialist camp actively aided their struggle. No such thing is to be expected from imperialism in relation to workers' rule.

And I say it is valid because it is plausible that in the midst of a imperialist rivalry a rebel local militia get support from one of the camps.

I say we can, and support this argument by reference to the military intervention in case of the young Soviet Republic. Or to word it in a better way, as we can't discount the mere possibility of a happening, we should not pay much attention to it since, historically, it has been shown that it is far more likely not to happen as indicated in this way.

You are basing your claim on something that happened almost one hundread years ago. Many things changed since then, specially the means of communication.

Thirsty Crow

22nd February 2013, 19:42

As I said before you don't need the state as a self-defense mechanism. People can be organized in popular militias without the need of a central political organ and fight counter-revolution.
You simply refuse to understand me.

Popular militias are the state, or rather, one significant aspect of the "state" (feel free to interject here with neologisms - "semi-state", "no-longer-a-state", "non-state", whatever). I'm basing this claim on the existence of organized, legitimate repression and violence. As long as the dominant social relations necessitate this, one can't talk about statelessness

This clearly implies that the differences between us here are semantic

But the differences are also some other than merely semantic ones:

Disagree with this. Catalonia revolutionaries didn't need the revolution to become global to establish a communist system within their controlled territory.
Communism was never established in that one region (!!). I simply can't understand how this myth is promulgated throughout the anarchist millieu. For fuck's sake, the so called anti-fascist bourgeoisie, loyal to the Popular Front government, wasn't even expropriated (and expropriation is only the first necessary step in the creation of communist relations of production, and it doesn't constitute communism in its own right). The Catalonian Generalidad, the regional form of the bourgeois state, was left intact and the situation can be best described as one of potential, and in some places actual, dual power situation made complicated by an intra-bourgeois fight, and ensuing civil war. It's clear as day that this didn't last long.

As a left communist in this forum put it in the other day the soviets never had real power in Russia despite the Bolshevik propaganda so it isn't a valid example.

You do not understand what does constitute a historical example one can learn from.

The very fact that, in practice, the soviets almost never had real power in Russia is such a chance to learn by a careful historical and materialist analysis of the dynamic of one historical period in a given country.

And how you can prevent this secret police from becoming an autonomous body above the working class since it's not conditioned by the organs of class power?
Are you deliberately misrepresenting what I say? Do you have a problem with my writing style? Is it not clear enough?

How to prevent, you ask. By binding, by making that body conditioned by the organs of class power in the first place.

"semi-autonomous" = not conditioned by the organs of class power

And I say it is valid because it is plausible that in the midst of a imperialist rivalry a rebel local militia get support from one of the camps.Are you really comapring the Mujahideen to the insurgent working class?

This isn't some anti-whichever-state "rebel" force. It is the bane of all of the national ruling classes. I don't think you actually understand the implications of your argument, as you imply that a capitalist, imperialist state would support a force which claims right from the start that it aims for the destruction of all bourgeois states and expropriation of all capitalists, and which clearly states that it will actively aid the working class of that same country where this state is actually in place!

If only the ruling class were so dumb.

You are basing your claim on something that happened almost one hundread years ago. Many things changed since then, specially the means of communication.What didn't change, and what I'm implicitly referring to, is the fundamental, global anatagonism between capital and wage labour. I simply can't see how the means of communication would factor in here. Not one imperialist camp wins in the situation of the growing power of the working class.

RedSun

22nd February 2013, 21:34

Communism was never established in that one region (!!). I simply can't understand how this myth is promulgated throughout the anarchist millieu. For fuck's sake, the so called anti-fascist bourgeoisie, loyal to the Popular Front government, wasn't even expropriated (and expropriation is only the first necessary step in the creation of communist relations of production, and it doesn't constitute communism in its own right). The Catalonian Generalidad, the regional form of the bourgeois state, was left intact and the situation can be best described as one of potential, and in some places actual, dual power situation made complicated by an intra-bourgeois fight, and ensuing civil war. It's clear as day that this didn't last long.

So the Revolutionary Catalonia is a myth? Because I have reliable sources like "The Spanish Civil War: revolution and counterrevolution" by Bolloten, Burnett (1991) or the documentary "Living Utopia" pointing to the fact that even the money was abolished and substituted by vouchers in many locals controlled by anarchists.

The anarchists didn't control all the republican territory so it would have been hard to expropriate and implement a communist system within all the republican area, but in those were they effectively controlled they did it as you can verify yourself not only in those sources which I provide you above.

You do not understand what does constitute a historical example one can learn from.

The very fact that, in practice, the soviets almost never had real power in Russia is such a chance to learn by a careful historical and materialist analysis of the dynamic of one historical period in a given country.

I said that we never had a proletariat state with a different nature of the bourgeoisie one. You talked about the soviets as an example of it and I responded that they never had real power which you agreed upon. Now you say that I don't understand what does constitute a historical example one can learn from. When I say that we never had a historical experience of a proletariat state I am talking about a proletariat state in facto and not something that was meant to be and never was.

Are you deliberately misrepresenting what I say? Do you have a problem with my writing style? Is it not clear enough?

How to prevent, you ask. By binding, by making that body conditioned by the organs of class power in the first place.

"semi-autonomous" = not conditioned by the organs of class power

It's just that your idealistic way of thinking that you can have a secret police democratically controlled by the organs of class power (which is an ambiguous and unrealistic thing BTW) really confuses me. Of course you can't control a secret police like that, otherwise you aren't talking about a secret police.

Are you really comapring the Mujahideen to the insurgent working class?

I am comparing as far as the warfare is concerned only.

This isn't some anti-whichever-state "rebel" force. It is the bane of all of the national ruling classes. I don't think you actually understand the implications of your argument, as you imply that a capitalist, imperialist state would support a force which claims right from the start that it aims for the destruction of all bourgeois states and expropriation of all capitalists, and which clearly states that it will actively aid the working class of that same country where this state is actually in place!

This false premise comes from the fact that you assume that the revolution will be worldwide which is wrong because you will never have a global revolution.

What didn't change, and what I'm implicitly referring to, is the fundamental, global anatagonism between capital and wage labour. I simply can't see how the means of communication would factor in here. Not one imperialist camp wins in the situation of the growing power of the working class.

It would be a factor because such massacres as the ones which liquidated some socialist revolutions in the past won't be possible today with no consequences and the actual development of the means of communication as the internet for instance will work favorably towards the working class struggle.

Do you think that the Commune of Paris massacre would be possible today? I don't believe that could really happened. But if it happen would draw a major support for the revolution cause.

I refer the means of communication as one example of how the world changed.

Ostrinski

22nd February 2013, 23:44

A secret police isn't necessarily desirable, I don't think anyone really thinks that (actually, there probably are people that do) but I think that the democratically accountable workers' militia can and have carried out functions that we would conventionally ascribe to secret police forces. The Red Guards in the revolution in Russia for instance were part of a lot of what we could consider authoritarian acts, such as executions, imprisonment, even torture. If an entity such as this can be democratic and accountable to the masses then so can any other armed force.

Something like the Cheka, or the necessity of something like it, is not indicative of a healthy proletarian dictatorship, and the longer it is kept around the greater the dangers of an impossible recovery become. But it's not like we can expect the displaced ruling classes and counter-revolutionaries to grow beards, throw on some patchouli, and rock the dashiki and come reconcile with the revolution, and so the decision is taken out of the revolution's hands by that fact.

Ostrinski

22nd February 2013, 23:45

Disagree with this. Catalonia revolutionaries didn't need the revolution to become global to establish a communist system within their controlled territory. Anarcho-Stalinism alive and well on revleft.

RedSun

23rd February 2013, 11:43

Anarcho-Stalinism alive and well on revleft.

That's because you deliberately misunderstood what I said. I defend a world revolution and the abolition of any kind of frontiers among the people. However, I am realistic enough to understand that is impossible to have a worldwide revolution within a short period and the idea that you can't establish a communist system until a revolution becomes global is false and the anarchists in Catalonia proved so.

If someone is defending a secret police and other instruments of repression here it's not me for sure...

Thirsty Crow

23rd February 2013, 12:06

That's because you deliberately misunderstood what I said. I defend a world revolution and the abolition of any kind of frontiers among the people. However, I am realistic enough to understand that is impossible to have a worldwide revolution within a short period and the idea that you can't establish a communist system until a revolution becomes global is false and the anarchists in Catalonia proved so.You do not defend a world revolution. It's quite explicitly out there, that internationalism, the advocacy of world revolution and active aid for the working class within other borders is a false premise for you (arising from the disastrously erroneous notion of a "communist system" in isolated localities scattered accross a country).

And it is quite self-contradictory to claim at one and the same time that you defend the world revolution and that you think it will never happen. How principled would you be in your defense of something you know will never happen? And of course, that's a source of stalinism to be sure, and it would be naive to assume that well meant, principled anarchists would be capable of evading the very same pitfalls, if not worst (localism, regionalism).

And of course that these anarchists proved nothing. The issue doesn't boil down to an ad hoc voucher scheme in isolated places. If that's the fundamental aspect of communism for you, then you actually have no idea what you're talking about. What's next, the abolition of classes and money in one neighbourhood? And if you'd want to be consistent, then you'd have to conclude that war communism in Russia represented a "communist system" on a much larger scale. But somehow, I doubt you'd be ready to accept that.

If someone is defending a secret police and other instruments of repression here it's not me for sure...Yeah, tell me that the Spanish anarchists didn't make use of a political police.

It's just that your idealistic way of thinking that you can have a secret police democratically controlled by the organs of class power (which is an ambiguous and unrealistic thing BTW) really confuses me. Of course you can't control a secret police like that, otherwise you aren't talking about a secret police.

That's precious. Being accused of "idealistic thinking" by someone who thinks that it is possible that a revolutionary working class will be aided by another bourgeois state, of course, to uphold the ridiculous analogy between the Mujahideen and the revolutionary workers.

How is it ambiguous? The words are clear, the point is clear. Control, oversight. Appointing officials, recall possible at any moment. Force them to report on their actions to these political organs of the working class. This is nothing that can't be done and it depends on continued zeal coming from the overseers, unless you think that such bodies are inherently gifted with a demonic essence which turns them into baby eating, undemocratic, unaccountable demigods. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that you do hold some kind of an idealist viewpoint along these lines.

And so what if I'm not talking about a "secret police"? Does almost everything with you anarchos have to become a semantic shouting contest? If that's not what a secret police is to you, then feel free to rebrand the body I'm talking about. I don't care either way.

RedSun

23rd February 2013, 12:36

You do not defend a world revolution. It's quite explicitly out there, that internationalism, the advocacy of world revolution and active aid for the working class within other borders is a false premise for you (arising from the disastrously erroneous notion of a "communist system" in isolated localities scattered accross a country).

And it is quite self-contradictory to claim at one and the same time that you defend the world revolution and that you think it will never happen. How principled would you be in your defense of something you know will never happen? And of course, that's a source of stalinism to be sure, and it would be naive to assume that well meant, principled anarchists would be capable of evading the very same pitfalls, if not worst (localism, regionalism).

Perhaps I was not clear enough for you. When I said that a worldwide revolution was impossible I was referring to a world revolution within a short period of time. I don't say that is impossible to have a worldwide communist system in a long term but just that is impossible to implement it globally at the same time.

And of course that these anarchists proved nothing. The issue doesn't boil down to an ad hoc voucher scheme in isolated places. If that's the fundamental aspect of communism for you, then you actually have no idea what you're talking about. What's next, the abolition of classes and money in one neighbourhood? And if you'd want to be consistent, then you'd have to conclude that war communism in Russia represented a "communist system" on a much larger scale. But somehow, I doubt you'd be ready to accept that.

At least you now recognize that it was implemented. Of course that you have to depreciate it like saying "ad hoc voucher scheme"...

As I said the anarchists weren't in control of all the republican territory.

Yeah, tell me that the Spanish anarchists didn't make use of a political police.

Do you have sources to back your claim?

Thirsty Crow

23rd February 2013, 12:59

At least you now recognize that it was implemented.

Communism isn't something that is "implemented" like a policy. It arises from the revolutionary dynamic itself, and depends on its global extension, and this dynamic cannot be taken as to constitute a "communist system" when the situation is not only fluid, but actually one of dual power, the first prerequisite, that of the destruction of the bourgeois state, not being fulfilled. A new mode of production can only take hold once the vestiges of the old one are eradicated (and this is not to be taken to constitute a claim for a "regional communist system"; when examining the dynamic of such isolated communities, it is perfectly clear that there were to options: 1) debilitating autarkic, or quasi-autarkic development - communism as poverty and toil for all - , and 2) swift military bloodbath; one is the path of the Soviet bureaucracy, the other that of anarchists blind to the nature of the Popular Front, historically)

Of course that you have to depreciate it like saying "ad hoc voucher scheme"...I'm not actually depreciating the historical experience. If I'm asked, Russia and Spain are the two most important historical episodes of class struggle in the 20th century. What I'm definitely depreciating, as you say, is your notion of an established "communist system" which can only be understood as a potentially dangerous lapse into regionalism.

And of course the labour voucher schemes were ad hoc. Pretty much everything is in that kind of situation.

As I said the anarchists weren't in control of all the republican territory.
The anarchists have proven themselves to be just as capable of disastrous mistakes as the Bolsheviks. The issue is not the control of the territory, but that of the anarchist recognition of the Popular Front not as a mortal enemy for the working class, but as a medium of action. So, the two episoded I mentioned have shown, in their own ways, the historical bankruptcy of "offiial" anarchism and communism (Bolshevism, Marxism, take your pick of terms). It is not surprising, or shouldn't be, that for every two dozen of official anarchists and communists, there were only one Durrutti and Miasnikov. The tragic fact is that such people were left in a tiny minority, and that their comrades of yestereday turned out as enemies today.

Do you have sources to back your claim?Yes. It's in Croatian and currently not in my possession, so I'll have to get it from the library and translate the relevant bits (can't really remember the title of the book, honestly), but I can dig up some articles online as well, but don't have the time right now.

And one other thing. I never even said that it is possible that the revolution will go global, in hosts of countries, simultaneously. But my conception of being realistic boils down to this: push for international revolution by all means possible or face counter-revolution, not least of all from within the organization which has only recently fought for the power of the working class.

RedSun

23rd February 2013, 13:05

That's precious. Being accused of "idealistic thinking" by someone who thinks that it is possible that a revolutionary working class will be aided by another bourgeois state, of course, to uphold the ridiculous analogy between the Mujahideen and the revolutionary workers.

And you must be a fucking idiot to not understand my comparison between the Mujahideen and the revolutionary workers. I was comparing it as far as the warfare is concerned and that only as I already said before.

How is it ambiguous? The words are clear, the point is clear. Control, oversight. Appointing officials, recall possible at any moment. Force them to report on their actions to these political organs of the working class. This is nothing that can't be done and it depends on continued zeal coming from the overseers, unless you think that such bodies are inherently gifted with a demonic essence which turns them into baby eating, undemocratic, unaccountable demigods. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that you do hold some kind of an idealist viewpoint along these lines.

And so what if I'm not talking about a "secret police"? Does almost everything with you anarchos have to become a semantic shouting contest? If that's not what a secret police is to you, then feel free to rebrand the body I'm talking about. I don't care either way.

You certainly are not talking about a secret police. Otherwise you wouldn't say the bullshit that you are saying.

And the Red Guard is more an example of what I was defending (an armed militia to protect the revolution and fight counter-revolution) than the crap that what you are trying to forge here.

Thirsty Crow

23rd February 2013, 13:13

And you must be a fucking idiot to not understand my comparison between the Mujahideen and the revolutionary workers. I was comparing it as far as the warfare is concerned and that only as I already said before.
Warfare which is directly conditioned by support of one imperialist camp. You're not a fool, you recognize this, but you want to stick with your shallow analogy and proceed to ramble about the possibility of a bourgeois state supporting the insurgent working class just as one specific state supported the Mujahideen.

You can try to twist it any way you want, but your point clearly does not hold.

You certainly are not talking about a secret police. Otherwise you wouldn't say the bullshit that you are saying.

Okay, from now on I'll let you be my instructor on the use of terms. Though, to be sure, the functions performed by the secret police would remain. Infiltration of "domestic" counter-revolutionary groups being a prime example.

And the Red Guard is more an example of what I was defending (an armed militia to protect the revolution and fight counter-revolution) than the crap that what you are trying to forge here.Whatever. I'm not obssessing over names and terms. Functions are what is relevant here. If it makes you feel better, the function described briefly above can be performed by a specific wing of the Red Guard. Does that connect?

Art Vandelay

23rd February 2013, 21:13

MarxArchist

23rd February 2013, 22:19

I always love how disingenuous anarchists are when it comes to the historical persecution of their movement at the hands of communists: "poor us we've been suppressed by these evil commie bastards." As if they wouldn't of violently opposed any worker's state, perhaps even more intensely, then any bourgeois state. Don't be upset it happened, be upset that you didn't act first or with enough force.
Well, the Russian Bolshivik way of dealing with things was rather backwards. Wasn't just limited to anarchists and this mind frame splintered or spider webbed out into most attempts at 'socialism' globally. I for one would like to see the history of post 1917 'communism' be regarded as how NOT to operate but I'd also like anarchists to admit abolishing global capital without the state apparatus (a monopoly on force) is a rather unlikely scenario. Heck, the way things are looking right now a socialist revolution, in America at least, is an extremely unlikley scenerio.

If, lets say, tomorrow, France had an anarchist revolution which abolished the state and immediately tried to implement worker control under dirrect democracy how would workers in France defend themselves from the onslaught of attacks from united capitalist military and intelligence groups? It would simply be a matter of time before France would be economically isolated with all manner of subversive and outright proxy war being waged on the socialist/communist/anarchist threat.

Basically, how do you fight the policy of 'containment' while somehow trying to implement anarchist/communist society isolated in one country with attacks being waged by capital from all sides? Being able to just jump right into communism, to me, is rather naive. Kropotkins writings surrounding the issue in Conquest Of bread chapter 4 are lacking in my opinion and imply socialism in one country is possible. What does hold weight is the argument the transitional phase should be as democratic as humanly possible which is a tough proposition when you're threatening the global capitalist order.

The Russian Bolshevik persecution of everyone any anyone deemed a threat to the revolution was ugly business which set the foundation for the way Russian society operated expanding out into other attempts at socialism across the globe. What I don't understand about many Marxists is the championing of this path/strategy as a preferable route to ending capitalism - not only the authoritarian nature of the various regimes but the overall plan of attack centering around spreading rather undeveloped socialist states to compete with advanced capitalist nations.

Pretty much until the workers in the western world begin to accept communism as a viable alternative(USA, Britain, France, Germany), pretty much the westermn bloc during the cold war, we're not going anywhere but if and when we do I see no reason for Bolshevik terror.

Rafiq

25th February 2013, 20:47

Yet the "workers state" in every communist revolution worked exactly like the bourgeois states.

Which workers states? With one exception, the proletarian dictatorships which... Essentially were forced to assume the role of the bourgeoisie and knock down the remnants of feudalism, in doing so actually creating a proletariat? Point being, that there was no proletariat, there was no working class for a workers state to exist, with the exception of Russia, and at this point I shouldn't have to explain to you in that regards.

It's extensively intruging, the dynamics of 20th century communist states. Ideologically systemized "anti-capitalism" is by default liberalist in nature, in the sense that instead of proletarian chauvinism we had this universal, "people's anti capitalism", an attack on a process of which occurs as a result of very real social relations. Instead of assuming the interests of the actually-existing class, of which's false consciousness sustains the capitalist mode of production, a part of these social relations, the Communist states were forced to provide ideological back doors through this "anti capitalism", of which actually sustained the rule of capital. If there is something to learn (mind you, the failure of 20th century communism was not a result of a "choice" to do this but conditions which necessiated these choices), it is that instead of attempting to form society as we see fit, to actually attempt to "destroy capitalism", any genuine communist movement will have to exert the interests of the proletariat and destroy the class enemy, and it is only through this process that capitalism is done away with, not this direct, political anti capitalism in the sense that the capitalist mode of production is literally dismantled as a decision on state-level.

RedMaterialist

25th February 2013, 21:30

I would like to know why communist statists worldwide have violently persecuted anarchists.

Anarchists would destroy the proletarian state before capitalism could be destroyed. Anarchists inadvertently want to turn society back over to the capitalists.

RaÃºl Duke

25th February 2013, 22:09

I would like to know why communist statists worldwide have violently persecuted anarchists.

It depends, in Russia it's due to opposition of the state (whether because it is "a state," silly classical anarchists, or whether because the state while claiming to be a worker state was not controlled by workers but rather a "worker's vanguard" which slowly become a new elite of sorts and were no longer workers anymore, if they ever were in the first place, due to their new class position in their classist society that they created to replace the old.)

In Spain, both sides co-operated (than again, there was some initial co-operation in Russia too) but the Soviet-backed Leninists stabbed the back of the Anarchists (and Trotskyists) basically aiding the fascists in winning. (So basically, the accusation that redshifted has thrown to anarchists also applies to them, the Leninists; perhaps even more so since most of their "socialist projects" were reverted to capitalism, only difference is the manner, time, and complicity).

In the modern context, it's hard to say whether we should or we shouldn't trust Leninists. I for one, wouldn't trust most if not all of the Leninist parties I've heard of here on this forum. Do I mistrust individual Leninists? Mostly not, I've met some here and they're nice people (although some are whack-jobs, but than even among anarchists some here are idiots).

The problem the question poses has been considered deeply by some anarchist groups, controversially RAAN's idea is to consider the Leninists as enemies from day 1. From some replies coming from the Leninists, it looks like some see the matter quite similarly.

I'm not going to say it's impossible to "work together," it's not depending on context/etc, but "left-unity" viewed in its general, misconceived, naive terms is basically a pipe dream.
Some collaboration could be had say pre and during revolution, but in the post-revolutionary context I imagine we will see generally a "battle of ideologies" (in the realm of ideas, that is discussions and such; but also it can be physical as it were historically, although not exactly necessary per se) as anarchist ideas and Leninist ideas of how the "revolutionary society that will lead us to communism" should work will come in conflict.

MP5

26th February 2013, 04:30

This is just non-sense. The former ruling class will defend its power, that's why they need to be surpressed. However, they lose their control over production. So, while the former bourgeoisie has no control over production and still want to get it back, there exist no economic relation where the bourgeoisie can keep existing because they have no control over production. So, no the class system does not remain intact.

Yes and the bourgeois reaction can be suppressed with the very same methods which we would have to use to kick them out in the first place. Which would take the form of non hierarchical decentralized militias of volunteers who would act as the physical force of the communist revolution. Atleast a state in the sense that we know now would not exist. If one does not need a state to oust them from power one does not need a state to keep them from regaining their power. Once they loose their power they will wither away and cease to become a class. Smashing the state and the bourgeois class system goes hand in hand.

If we as proletarians start to think of ourselves as somehow being immune to the corrupting force of power then we are not only engaging in romanticism but we are doomed from the start. If we have learned nothing from the past at all is that revolutionaries seldom if ever stay revolutionaries after gaining control of the state. It is when the revolution does not expand, turns inward on itself and thus stagnates that it ceases to be a revolution built upon Socialist principles and instead turns into just another dictatorship. If a revolutionary party needs to use the state as a machine to suppress not only the bourgeois but also to keep the proletarians that get out of line in check it is no longer revolutionary much less Communist and the fight will have been for nothing.

If only it were that easy. If actual revolution was easy it would not be called revolution now would it? But keeping the state the very machine that gave rise to bourgeois power will only succeed in creating another ruling class as history has proven. However if we smash the state which is the very foundation of Capitalism, bourgeois society and their class system then the goal of a classless and stateless society could actually be realized as opposed to a very far off down the road goal that never becomes reality.

ILikeRevolution

2nd March 2013, 04:58

bad ideas actualised by alcohol

4th March 2013, 18:27

If actual revolution was easy it would not be called revolution now would it? But keeping the state the very machine that gave rise to bourgeois power will only succeed in creating another ruling class as history has proven. However if we smash the state which is the very foundation of Capitalism, bourgeois society and their class system then the goal of a classless and stateless society could actually be realized as opposed to a very far off down the road goal that never becomes reality.

The state did not give rise to bourgeois power. The state is not a neutral thing.
I have never said that we should keep the state at all. The bourgeois state should be abolished and replaced with a proletarian state.
Your view of the state as a neutral force is only repeating one of the major flaws of anarchism.

Geiseric

9th March 2013, 01:29

If you've seen Dr. Zhivago, it partially puts the politics into perspective. Obviously people are going to oppose violence used, arguably sometimes necessarily, by the bolsheviks, especially during campaigns which showed signs of bureaucratic, oppressive degeneration such as the invasion of Georgia and Poland. Kronstadt was however unrelated to both of those events, and was reactionary since it happened as a result of grain seizures. The oppression towards the whites was a reaction to them starting the war. Makhno was also a peasant leader, who would of opposed collectivization.

MarxArchist

15th March 2013, 23:50

I'm not interested in the proletariat having it's own state to "repress" and dominate the bourgeois, which is an absurd idea anyway. The only thing Im interested in is abolishing the bourgeois along with the proletariat as classes, as the two can only exist in relation to each other. That is all any revolutionary socialist worth their salt should ever want.
^Bourgeoisie = noun. Bourgeois= adjective.

Anyway, Lets say Canada is full of millions of anarchists and they attempt expropriation. Just straight out take over production/distribution/resource extraction and are successful by their sheer numbers (we see a microcosm of this in the documentary "The Take" when they interview the capitalist factory owner at the end of the film and ask him how he feels about the take over of 'his' property- he laughs and says 'I will get my property back', and he did). Lets say you somehow 'abolish' the state (explain that process please) and then facilitate expropriation. What can you do to keep global capital and their various states from intervening along side the capitalists and their supporters within Canada? There's not just one state to abolish. The main one is the USA. What would you do to fight the US and overall western bloc policy of containment? Even if the US and EU nations (NATO/containment) didn't exist and Canada was the only nation on earth, the only state to abolish, in this hypothetical scenario how would you abolish capital without the repression of the capitalist class? This is basically a giant a rhetorical question but I understand your position as an old (x) anarchist. I'd personally want to see anarchist principles (democratic decentralization) be applied to the take over of the state (with the goal of facilitating expropriation).

Starship Stormtrooper

16th March 2013, 04:47

. Makhno was also a peasant leader, who would of opposed collectivization.

Opposed collectivisation? I've heard quite the opposite, i.e. that he was instrumental in the establishment of many communes in the Ukrainian Free Territory, including one named for Rosa Luxemburg (that was ironically later destroyed by the Bolsheviks). If by collectivisation, you mean the nationalization of the land by a "workers" state then of course he would have opposed it, anarchists are against states. But as for socialization of the land under actual peasant's self management, I would have to assert that Makhno has a clear record of support.

Geiseric

17th March 2013, 03:19

Opposed collectivisation? I've heard quite the opposite, i.e. that he was instrumental in the establishment of many communes in the Ukrainian Free Territory, including one named for Rosa Luxemburg (that was ironically later destroyed by the Bolsheviks). If by collectivisation, you mean the nationalization of the land by a "workers" state then of course he would have opposed it, anarchists are against states. But as for socialization of the land under actual peasant's self management, I would have to assert that Makhno has a clear record of support.

Self management is great for the peasantry but awful for the working class, seeing as trade still needs to happen between the cities and country, the later of which is where the food is from.

Brutus

17th March 2013, 10:08

How does having no state prohibit trade between peasants and city? The peasants want commodities that can only be made in the factories, so will trade food for it.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

17th March 2013, 10:57

The relationship of the anarchist movement to the Russian Revolution was a complex one - it has nothing to do with the caricature (communist statists persecuting anarchists) that some anarchist groups with an axe to grind against Leninism promote. Comrades, the vast majority of the proletarian section of the anarchists supported the Bolsheviks. Those that glorify the Makhnovshchina should remember that one of the armies that opposed the peasant anarchists was led by A. Zheleznyak, himself an anarchist (the same Zhelezynak that disbanded the sacred Constituent Assembly).

And those groups that the anarchist critics of the Russian Revolution hold dearest to their hearts, and in whose name they preach the "Third Russian Revolution", the Socialists-Revolutionaries, and the various Green and Blue armies, they were greater "statists" than the Bolsheviks - Bolsheviks were Marxists and recognised the need to smash the bourgeois state apparatus and the provisional nature of the proletarian state. But the Esers were utopians that wanted to reconstitute the state on the basis of the peasant mir.

The proletarian section of the Russian anarchists supported the Bolsheviks in most cases - the peasant section, like all peasant parties, alternately supported the Bolsheviks and fought grain requisition and the extraordinary measures, objectively assisting the Whites and the Entente.

Starship Stormtrooper

17th March 2013, 15:59

kasama-rl

17th March 2013, 22:52

I would like to know why communist statists worldwide have violently persecuted anarchists.

This is a misconception.

The main thing that has happened during communist revolutions is that communsts have won over, and recruited the anarchists (when they were a significant and sincere revolutionary force).

This was true in the Bolshevik revolution, when large numbers of anarchsts came over to the communists. (There are many well-known examples... Trotsky's bodyguard was, for example, a former anarchist).

Mao started political life as an anarchist (as many of us did), and became a communist under the influence of the Russian revolution.

There are a few cases of violent clashes (Kronstadt, Machno, Spain) which deserve to be handled in the particulars (i.e. it is wrong to say in some blanket way that communists suppress anarchists in general...)

MP5

18th March 2013, 20:00

The countries you listed -- Cuba, China, USSR -- oppress capitalists to defend socialism. They also oppress anarchists to defend socialism. This is because anarchism is unsustainable and anarchists use impractical means of dismantling capitalism and preserving socialism.

We can consider their methods (propaganda of the deed, decentralization, etc.) as impractical because they have hardly ever succeeded in overthrowing capitalism, save about 3 times in history. We can consider their system itself as unsustainable because in the 3 places they actually achieved anarchism, they usually lasted a few months to a few years. Two months in Paris in 1871, ten months in Spain, c.1936?, and 4 years in southeast Ukraine from 1917-1921.

If revolutionaries want socialism that will actually last and not be crushed by imperialists immediately after the revolution, they will combat the elements that have proven to be very vulnerable to this. The Marxist-Leninists of Cuba, China, and the USSR wanted socialism that lasted, and compared to anarchist tenures, they all got exactly that.

Yes oppressing Capitalists to defend Socialism from counterrevolution was the idea but as history has shown time and time again The Dictatorship of the Proletariat eventually becomes a dictatorship ON the proletarian so it just ends up as another dictatorship. Neither of these countries even achieved Socialism much less Communism so really what was the accomplishment here besides using State Capitalism under the guise of Socialism to drag Russia, China and other countries into the industrial revolution and the 20th century?

The state exists to pander to the ruling class and the ruling class and as long as a class system remains in place so will the bourgeois they will just have a different name and call themselves Socialists which is a utter disgrace! The state get's it's power from the bourgeois and although not one and the same they do have the same interests more or less. The state is not neutral it corrupts all and makes bureaucrats of revolutionaries.

The USSR, Cina, Cuba, Albania, etc did not get Socialism that lasted they got what started out as experiments in Socialism and ended up with state Capitalist nations as bureaucratic, inept and corrupt as most western countries. They didn't protect Socialism they just protected the power of the parties and as is with the case of the former Soviet Union, China, Cuba, etc just ended up with long ruling non democratic state capitalist countries.

As it stands the only time Communism has been achieved at all where under those very short lived Anarchist revolutions.

Orange Juche

18th March 2013, 20:26

Marxist-Leninists, once having power consolidated into their hands, have always persecuted anarchists. It happened in Russia, Ukraine, Spain, China, and Cuba. That's how Leninists are. They're nice to you now, but they'll persecute you after the revolution.

Isn't it fun to know at least half the people on these forums would have you shot or hanged were socialism to replace capitalism?

Brutus

18th March 2013, 20:44

Anarchists would destroy the proletarian state before capitalism could be destroyed. Anarchists inadvertently want to turn society back over to the capitalists.

So expropriating the capitalists, placing the modes of production in the hands of the people, and destroying the state is giving capitalists society back?
I have never seen it that way before.

MP5

18th March 2013, 22:16

Isn't it fun to know at least half the people on these forums would have you shot or hanged were socialism to replace capitalism?

Lol well it is nice to know us Anarchist style Communists are hated by so many people on here. The fact that we piss off people for not towing the Soviet line or loving Maoism, Trotskyism, Hoxhaism or the Juche butchering of Socialism means we must be doing something right :) . If everyone agrees with you chances are you just pandering to people.

To everyone who makes the claim that people believe in Anarchist Communism do so in their idealistic youth well i am a exception to this stereotype. I was a Marxist-Leninist before i became a Anarchist Communist (i hate labels but that's the closest that i fit) and i am alot older now.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

18th March 2013, 22:23

Isn't it fun to know at least half the people on these forums would have you shot or hanged were socialism to replace capitalism?

Isn't it fun to imagine things that just happen to cast your opponents in a bad light? Or are you saying that Let's Get Free is a Whiteguard or a wrecker?

Orange Juche

18th March 2013, 22:28

Isn't it fun to imagine things that just happen to cast your opponents in a bad light? Or are you saying that Let's Get Free is a Whiteguard or a wrecker?

I'm only saying Leninists will repeat Leninist modes of action. Particularly with a complete lack of a trial, followed by the death penalty (which is barbaric, at best).

Art Vandelay

18th March 2013, 22:30

Yes, in many cases there was support and alliances between the anarchists and the Bolsheviks against the Whites and the Nationalists. However, that did not stop the Bolsheviks from betraying the Black army (multiple times!), exercising a brutal control over the Free Territory while Makhno's army was away, sending assassins after Makhno, (Trotsky) ordering the execution of Voline, or later purging many anarchists.

That's because the Bolsheviks were a genuinely proletarian force and by extension a revolutionary force, meanwhile Mankho and his black army were a peasant based movement. The Bolsheviks were, and rightly so, amoralists. The only moral action was one which took one more step to the final overthrow of capitalism, of which crushing the reactionary peasant based Mankhoist movement was a necessary step.

However so long as the code remains unacceptable as a rule of conduct by all the oppressors and oppressed, the warring classes will seek to gain victory by every means, while petty-bourgeois moralists will continue as heretofore to wander in confusion between the two camps. Subjectively, they sympathize with the oppressed - no one doubts that. Objectively, they remain captives of the morality of the ruling class and seek to impose it upon the oppressed instead of helping them elaborate the morality of insurrection. - Leon Trotsky; Their Morals and Ours.

Art Vandelay

18th March 2013, 22:32

I'm only saying Leninists will repeat Leninist modes of action. Particularly with a complete lack of a trial, followed by the death penalty (which is barbaric, at best).

And anarchists will continue to repeat anarchists actions, ie: to wish and attempt to strip the revolution of its ability to defend itself, to take away its strength.

Brutus

18th March 2013, 22:43

And anarchists will continue to repeat anarchists actions, ie: to wish and attempt to strip the revolution of its ability to defend itself, to take away its strength.

And how are anarchists taking away the ability of the revolution to defend itself?
The state is not required for defence, as seen in Catalonia.
The anarchists only failed in Spain due to Stalinist (authoritarian) repression.
Not to mention the fact Stalin was more bothered with killing anti Stalinists than fascists. This is no way a dig at you comrade, but we have seen Leninist repression of anarchists.
We saw how Kronstadt was ran- a soviet democracy, with no state! We saw how the citizens of Kronstadt picked up arms against the Bolshevik invaders.
We can see the people of kronstadt were willing to die for their liberty, their equality.

Art Vandelay

18th March 2013, 22:58

And how are anarchists taking away the ability of the revolution to defend itself?

By upholding the liberal fantasy that power corrupts; that the state is some mythical entity which has the ability to turn on those who posses it. By advancing moralist claims, without understanding that morality is constantly in flux and is class based. By taking the tactic of decentralization and forming it into a principle.

The state is not required for defence, as seen in Catalonia.

A state existed in Catalonia regardless of whether or not anarchists want to believe it didn't. The state isn't something that can just disappear at a moments notice, it arises from very specific material conditions; it is a by product of class society. So unless you posit that classes (as well as the state) had been abolished in Catalonia (in which case you'd be a supporter of and odd version of socialism in one country) then that claim can't possibly be true.

The anarchists only failed in Spain due to Stalinist (authoritarian) repression. Not to mention the fact Stalin was more bothered with killing anti Stalinists than fascists.

Then blame the anarchists for aligning themselves with the Stalinists! The actions of the anarchists in Spain were disgusting. Aligning themselves not only with the Stalinist USSR, but also entering into a bourgeois government and paving the way for fascism. That's the type of class collaboration I'd only expect from Maoists.

But perhaps the most lamentable role is that played by the anarchists. If Stalinism and Trotskyism are one and the same, as they affirm in every sentence, then why do the Spanish anarchists assist the Stalinists in revenging themselves upon the Trotskyists and at the same time upon the revolutionary anarchists? The more frank anarchist theoreticians respond: this is payment for armaments. In other words: the end justifies the means. But what is their end? Anarchism? Socialism? No, merely the salvaging of this very same bourgeois democracy which prepared fascism’s success. To base ends correspond base means. - Leon Trotsky

This is no way a dig at you comrade, but we have seen Leninist repression of anarchists.

No worries, I'm capable of keeping on friendly terms with people who I have political disagreements with. I respect people more who can vehemently disagree with one another, but not have it affect a personal relationship.

We saw how Kronstadt was ran- a soviet democracy, with no state!

At this point, you're not only proposing some odd form of socialism in one country, but now apparently socialism in one barracks as well? Can I have socialism in my house, or what about socialism in your bedroom comrade? That isn't how things work.

We saw how the citizens of Kronstadt picked up arms against the Bolshevik invaders. We can see the people of kronstadt were willing to die for their liberty, their equality.

The suppression of Kronstadt, while unfortunate, was entirely justified.

Brutus

18th March 2013, 23:21

The Spanish anarchists were allying with Stalin against fascism, just as Trotsky had pushed for the KPD and SPD to ally against hitler- so don't just expect it from Maoists. I'm using these examples as proof that anarchism has worked, not pushing for anarcho-Stalinism!

By your logic comrade, we should blame kamenev for being purged! We are all aware in this forum that the revolution must spread to survive, or it will revert back to capitalism (at least I hope we all are).

Brutus

18th March 2013, 23:23

And how was Kronstadt justified?

Orange Juche

18th March 2013, 23:27

And anarchists will continue to repeat anarchists actions, ie: to wish and attempt to strip the revolution of its ability to defend itself, to take away its strength.

How does that have anything to do with what I said, and how does it justify the criticisms I made (no trial, executions)?

Art Vandelay

18th March 2013, 23:29

The Spanish anarchists were allying with Stalin against fascism,

Which dug the grave of any revolutionary potential that Spain had, while simultaneously paving the way for this fascism that they were allying with the Stalinists and republicans to defeat.

I'm using these examples as proof that anarchism has worked

Except it hasn't, any anarchist movement which has existed has summarily been crushed, by those who don't cling to inferior organizational structures due to liberal notions running through their subconscious.

not pushing for anarcho-Stalinism!

This doesn't really address what I said. You claimed that these areas were stateless; I showed that this was impossible, unless you believed socialism (anarchy) to have existed in these areas. For your sake I really hope you don't believe that.

By your logic comrade, we should blame kamenev for being purged!

We should blame Kamenev for capitulating himself to Stalin yes, did he deserve to die? Of course not, but that's not the point. Were also not talking about individual politicians in the USSR, but the orientation that the anarchists took during the Spanish Civil War. One which you seem to support, despite the fact that this orientation was tangibly anti-working class.

Art Vandelay

18th March 2013, 23:33

How does that have anything to do with what I said, and how does it justify the criticisms I made (no trial, executions)?

In a situation like the one that the Bolsheviks found themselves in following October, an organization like the Cheka was entirely justified and necessary. The gains of the Russian revolution would not have lasted nearly as long as they did, if not for the red terror.

We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. - Karl Marx; Neue Rheinsiche Zeitung.

Art Vandelay

18th March 2013, 23:40

And how was Kronstadt justified?

Just look at their demands from the Petropavlosk resolution:

#2: Freedom of speech and of the press for workers and peasants, for the Anarchists, and for the Left Socialist parties.

#3: The organisation, at the latest on 10 March 1921, of a Conference of non-Party workers, soldiers and sailors of Petrograd, Kronstadt and the Petrograd District.

#5: The liberation of all political prisoners of the Socialist parties, and of all imprisoned workers and peasants, soldiers and sailors belonging to working class and peasant organisations.

These three here are openly calling for freedom of assembly and freedom of the press for counter-revolutionary organizations and the freeing of counter-revolutionary prisoners.

#8: The immediate abolition of the militia detachments set up between towns and countryside.

Yeah great idea in the middle of a civil war.

#11: The granting to the peasants of freedom of action on their own soil, and of the right to own cattle, provided they look after them themselves and do not employ hired labour.

In the middle of a civil war, you cannot wait around for people to hum and ha and decide whether or not to give out their resources. Resources are needed at the front, now. This also, if implemented, would of hindered collectivization.

All in all, the sailors of Kronsdat were not putting forth a resolution which derived from proletarian class interests (interests which lead to the overthrow of capitalism) and were thus counter-revolutionary.

Brutus

18th March 2013, 23:42

It failed because it did not spread, as I said.
I must leave now as I am tired, and frankly can not formulate a response in this state- or maybe you have just bested me.
I shall be back tomorrow

Brutus

19th March 2013, 00:03

I've had some coffee. Time to get my ass kicked.
What was demanded was freedom of speech, assembly and for those who fight for the interests of the working classes- not counter revolutionaries.
As for the red terror, it was necessary, but had excesses which led to revolutionaries being executed. By 1921, the civil war was in its last stages. Sure, there were scraps of whites around, Makhno and some dissenting socialists. And the 11th point was introduced in the NEP soon after the suppression of Kronstadt, but allowed peasants to hire labour.

TheRedAnarchist23

19th March 2013, 00:14

All in all, the sailors of Kronsdat were not putting forth a resolution which derived from proletarian class interests (interests which lead to the overthrow of capitalism) and were thus counter-revolutionary.

Now this is something I do not understand. How were the not putting forth a resolution which derived from proletarian class interest?

First of all I need to know what the class interests of the proletariat are:
The proletariat is the class that offers its work power in exchange for salary, therefore it is possible to conclude that it works to live. If the proletarian works to live, is it not logical that his goal is well being?
Then we can conclude that the class interest of the proletariat is well-being.
In order for there to be well-being the individual must have: abundant access to food and water, a decent house, freedom to do as he pleases, and security.

Now we need to analyse the resolution presented by the krondstadt:
The first points ask for more freedom for the working class, so it is asking for well-being for the worker, and therefore it is in accordance with the class interests of the proletariat.

Now we need to analyse the actions of the bolsheviks:
They have taken full control of the territory by abolishing all other political parties, outlawing associations with politics that were not in accordance with those of the party, creation of political police to pursue, arrest, and execute those who show any small bit of oposition towards the party, taking control of the armed forces, confiscating the food from those who produce it, confiscating food from workers, conscripting workers, censoring press, etc.
All of the things refered above do not create well-being, in fact they do the exact oposite. It is possible to conclude then, that it is in fact the bolsheviks who acted against the interests of the proletariat, which therefore makes them enemies of the proletariat, and therefore not true socialist revolutionaries.

Maybe I am seeing this wrong, maybe the workers have different class interests. The only problem is that in order for the party to be acting in accordance to the interests of the proletariat, those class interests would have to be: death, repression, and opression. I do not know of any class, or in fact any person, who would wish for death, repression, and opression.

Art Vandelay

19th March 2013, 00:26

I've had some coffee. Time to get my ass kicked.

I think I'm going to have some too, since I know tra will be testing my patience below.

What was demanded was freedom of speech, assembly and for those who fight for the interests of the working classes- not counter revolutionaries.

Except that isn't what they demanded. The demanded freedom of speech and assembly for not only the Mankho movement (which was a peasant based movement; a generally reactionary class) and for the Left Socialists (the other 'socialists' in Russia were garbage and supporters of the provisional government). That is explicitly calling for freedom for those who do not represent proletarian class interests. As a Marxist I don't fetishize 'freedom,' like a liberal, but rather class rule.

As for the red terror, it was necessary, but had excesses which led to revolutionaries being executed.

Undoubtably there were excesses, this is unfortunate and to be avoided as much as possible, but it was a revolution. They're not neat and tidy affairs, but bloody. To those who condemn the red terror, I would paraphrase Zizek: ' you want a revolution, without a revolution.'

And the 11th point was introduced in the NEP soon after the suppression of Kronstadt, but allowed peasants to hire labour.

Those were under different circumstances. As the old saying goes: dissent is treason in a besieged fortress.

Art Vandelay

19th March 2013, 00:36

Now this is something I do not understand. How were the not putting forth a resolution which derived from proletarian class interest?

Because their resolution would have taken a step back in the revolutionary process, not forward; the class interests of the proletariat is the overthrow of the system which gives birth to it.

First of all I need to know what the class interests of the proletariat are:
The proletariat is the class that offers its work power in exchange for salary, therefore it is possible to conclude that it works to live. If the proletarian works to live, is it not logical that his goal is well being?
Then we can conclude that the class interest of the proletariat is well-being.
In order for there to be well-being the individual must have: abundant access to food and water, a decent house, freedom to do as he pleases, and security.

Just no. You should really read some Marx, plenty of anarchists take from him, without abandoning their anti-authoritarian convictions. This is honestly pretty elementary stuff. That part in bold is what all human beings strive for, it is the underlying function of human existence. Before we can worry about religion, government, etc..we must first be able to feed, clothe, shelter ourselves, etc...this is known as economics and is why the development of the productive forces is the yardstick for the development of societies.

Now we need to analyse the resolution presented by the krondstadt:
The first points ask for more freedom for the working class, so it is asking for well-being for the worker, and therefore it is in accordance with the class interests of the proletariat.

No. Just because a person is a member of the working class, does not mean that they advance working class interests. Fascists are generally proletarian, doesn't stop them from upholding anti-working class convictions. False consciousness is a real thing, you know.

Now we need to analyse the actions of the bolsheviks:
They have taken full control of the territory by abolishing all other political parties, outlawing associations with politics that were not in accordance with those of the party, creation of political police to pursue, arrest, and execute those who show any small bit of oposition towards the party, taking control of the armed forces, confiscating the food from those who produce it, confiscating food from workers, conscripting workers, censoring press, etc.
All of the things refered above do not create well-being, in fact they do the exact oposite. It is possible to conclude then, that it is in fact the bolsheviks who acted against the interests of the proletariat, which therefore makes them enemies of the proletariat, and therefore not true socialist revolutionaries.

What sterling logic you've just presented. How I would ever pick through such an in depth analysis such as that is beyond me.

Maybe I am seeing this wrong, maybe the workers have different class interests. The only problem is that in order for the party to be acting in accordance to the interests of the proletariat, those class interests would have to be: death, repression, and opression. I do not know of any class, or in fact any person, who would wish for death, repression, and opression.

If you can't debate in anything other then rehashed rhetoric then I see no reason to discuss with you.

Brutus

19th March 2013, 00:42

Just no. You should really read some Marx, plenty of anarchists take from him, without abandoning their anti-authoritarian convictions. This is honestly pretty elementary stuff. That part in bold is what all human beings strive for, it is the underlying function of human existence. Before we can worry about religion, government, etc..we must first be able to feed, clothe, shelter ourselves, etc...this is known as economics and is why the development of the productive forces is the yardstick for the development of societies.

Is this not what TRA said?

RaÃºl Duke

19th March 2013, 01:29

By upholding the liberal fantasy that power corrupts; that the state is some mythical entity which has the ability to turn on those who posses it.I take issue with this. While it may be the case as what they thought back then (the left seemed quite more idealist back then, especially anarchists but no less the Leninists).

Contemporary anarchists today, at least some (or at least I do, if other anarchists don't then maybe I should be calling myself a left-com or some other), view the issue thusly:

When the Leninists, in their vanguard party, took over the state their class position has changed or begun to change from that of the rest of the proletariat (their material conditions changed). Since they were no longer workers, if they ever was (but assuming they were), their interests stopped aligning with that of the proletariat per se once themselves as a vanguard minority centralized political and economic power to itself in the name of the proletariat on the ideals that the "vanguard of the working class" should lead the revolutionary process (which, looking at the history of the social experiment known as the USSR, utterly failed; I don't know why people want to bother repeating a formula that failed which root problem started from the inception not because of Stalin, as according to Trotsky, or after Stalin because revisionists as according to Stalinists). Having the means of production centralized to the vanguard fraction of the working class is not a strictly speaking a communist/Marxist revolution; the whole class must seize and control it.

Art Vandelay

19th March 2013, 02:03

Is this not what TRA said?

No, he was claiming this is somehow the class interests of the proletariat; a statement which leads me to believe he doesn't really understand class interests.

Art Vandelay

19th March 2013, 02:06

I take issue with this. While it may be the case as what they thought back then (the left seemed quite more idealist back then, especially anarchists but no less the Leninists).

Contemporary anarchists today, at least some (or at least I do, if other anarchists don't then maybe I should be calling myself a left-com or some other), view the issue thusly:

When the Leninists, in their vanguard party, took over the state their class position has changed or begun to change from that of the rest of the proletariat (their material conditions changed). Since they were no longer workers, if they ever was (but assuming they were), their interests stopped aligning with that of the proletariat per se once themselves as a vanguard minority centralized political and economic power to itself in the name of the proletariat on the ideals that the "vanguard of the working class" should lead the revolutionary process (which, looking at the history of the social experiment known as the USSR, utterly failed; I don't know why people want to bother repeating a formula that failed which root problem started from the inception not because of Stalin, as according to Trotsky, or after Stalin because revisionists as according to Stalinists). Having the means of production centralized to the vanguard fraction of the working class is not a strictly speaking a communist/Marxist revolution; the whole class must seize and control it.

The idea is to have a party, comprised of a majority of the class, seize state power. There would be as much autonomy and decentralization as possible, given the material conditions, but in times of civil war (as in the case of the USSR) centralization is a must.

You also always have struck me somewhat as a Marxist waving a black flag, similar to Virgin Molotov Cocktail (who puts forth a similar argument to the one you just did).

Captain Ahab

19th March 2013, 02:16

I'll debunk 9mm bullshit "middle of a civil war" argument.
http://www.infoshop.org/page/AnarchistFAQAppendix42

The lack of foreign intervention during the Kronstadt revolt suggests more than just the fact that the revolt was not a "White conspiracy." It also suggests that the White forces were in no position to take advantage of the rebellion or even support it.

This is significant simply because the Bolsheviks and their supporters argue that the revolt had to be repressed simply because the Soviet State was in danger of White and/or foreign intervention. How much danger was there? According to John Rees, a substantial amount:

"The Whites, even though their armies had been beaten in the field, were still not finished -- as the emigre response to the Kronstadt rising shows . . . They had predicted a rising at Kronstadt and the White National Centre abroad raised a total of nearly 1 million French Francs, 2 million Finnish marks, £5000, $25,000 and 900 tons of flour in just two weeks; Indeed, the National Centre was already making plans for the forces of the French navy and those of General Wrangel, who still commanded 70,000 men in Turkey, to land in Kronstadt if the revolt were to succeed." [Op. Cit., pp. 63-4]
To back up his argument, Rees references Paul Avrich's book. We, in turn, will consult that work to evaluate his argument.

Firstly, the Kronstadt revolt broke out months after the end of the Civil War in Western Russia. Wrangel had fled from the Crimea in November 1920. The Bolsheviks were so afraid of White invasion that by early 1921 they demobilised half the Red Army (some 2,500,000 men). [Paul Avrich, Op. Cit., p. 13]

Secondly, the Russian emigres "remained as divided and ineffectual as before, with no prospect of co-operation in sight." [Avrich, Op. Cit., p. 219]

Thirdly, as far as Wrangel, the last of the White Generals, goes, his forces were in no state to re-invade Russia. His troops were "dispersed and their moral sagging" and it would have taken "months . . . merely to mobilise his men and transport them from the Mediterranean to the Baltic." A second front in the south "would have meant almost certain disaster." Indeed, in a call issued by the Petrograd Defence Committee on March 5th, they asked the rebels: "Haven't you heard what happened to Wrangel's men, who are dying like flies, in their thousands of hunger and disease?" The call goes on to add "[t]his is the fate that awaits you, unless you surrender within 24 hours." [Avrich, Op. Cit., p. 219, p. 146 and p. 105]
Never mind the fact that the civil war ended the next year.

All in all, the sailors of Kronsdat were not putting forth a resolution which derived from proletarian class interests (interests which lead to the overthrow of capitalism) and were thus counter-revolutionary.
I find it shocking that Rosario would consider democracy not in the interests of the proletariat.
I think the only counterrevolutionary here is you.

Art Vandelay

19th March 2013, 02:41

I'll debunk 9mm bullshit "middle of a civil war" argument.
http://www.infoshop.org/page/AnarchistFAQAppendix42

Never mind the fact that the civil war ended the next year.

The Russian Civil War lasted from the 7th of November 1917 to October of 1922; the Kronsdat rebellion lasted from the 7th to the 17th of March 1921. So yes it was during the Russian Civil war; regardless of whether or not the fighting was happening in a different part of the country. That also wasn't my main point anyways, my main point was that they weren't representative of proletarian class interests. I also never stated it was a 'white conspiracy.'

I find it shocking that Rosario

This has already been dealt with, but whatever, you can call me whatever you'd like.

would consider democracy not in the interests of the proletariat. I think the only counterrevolutionary here is you.

Marxists are anti-democratic.

Let's Get Free

19th March 2013, 03:01

In a situation like the one that the Bolsheviks found themselves in following October, an organization like the Cheka was entirely justified and necessary. The gains of the Russian revolution would not have lasted nearly as long as they did, if not for the red terror.

We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. - Karl Marx; Neue Rheinsiche Zeitung.

If anything, the Red Terror further accelerated the degeneration of the revolution. You cannot bring about a free society with means that are counter to this. The Cheka was officially tasked with combating anyone viewed as "counter-revolutionary" and was under the direct control of the Bolshevik Central Committee. Under Bolshevik rule, however, the term counter-revolutionary took on an ominously broad definition and included revolutionaries such as, anarchists, socialists, and workers and peasants who disagreed with the decrees of the Party. The goal of the terror was simply to silence any and all opposition to the Bolshevik party – including killing thousands of workers, peasants and revolutionaries. Lenin made it very clear that any real opposition would not be tolerated when he said that the Party reserves “state power for ourselves, and for ourselves alone”. Should I mention the Cheka also grew to be thoroughly hated by most of the population?

Fourth Internationalist

19th March 2013, 03:02

Marxists are anti-democratic.

Umm, how are we 'anti-democratic'?

Art Vandelay

19th March 2013, 03:04

Umm, how are we 'anti-democratic'?

http://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1922/democratic-principle.htm

Art Vandelay

19th March 2013, 03:10

If anything, the Red Terror further accelerated the degeneration of the revolution. You cannot bring about a free society with means that are counter to this.

I don't think that is the case at all, in fact I see no reason why anyone would adopt such a stance. A revolution is one of the most authoritarian acts possible, yet the end goal is a 'libertarian' society, if you will. Through violence, we create a society of peace. Through the actions of one class, a classless society is created. Through the use of the state, states are abolished. There is a Plekhanov quote that I'm trying to think of, that deals precisely with this, but I can't remember where I read it, so for now, my musings will have to do.

Captain Ahab

19th March 2013, 03:31

The Russian Civil War lasted from the 7th of November 1917 to October of 1922; the Kronsdat rebellion lasted from the 7th to the 17th of March 1921. So yes it was during the Russian Civil war; regardless of whether or not the fighting was happening in a different part of the country.

I didn't deny that it was during the Civil War. What you fail to realize is that the whites as a fighting force were clearly destroyed and victory was nearing. These demands could have been answered once the last white got a bullet in his head. The sailors were perfectly willing to negotiate.

That also wasn't my main point anyways, my main point was that they weren't representative of proletarian class interests. I also never stated it was a 'white conspiracy.'
Why is workers democracy against proletarian interests? Why is not repressing anarchists against proletarian interests? Why did proletarians support the sailors and their demands?

Marxists are anti-democratic
Bordiga's opinions on democracy represent Marxism no more than Kautsky's pro-WW1 Germany stance does.

Let's Get Free

19th March 2013, 03:32

I don't think that is the case at all, in fact I see no reason why anyone would adopt such a stance. A revolution is one of the most authoritarian acts possible, yet the end goal is a 'libertarian' society, if you will. Through violence, we create a society of peace. Through the actions of one class, a classless society is created. Through the use of the state, states are abolished. There is a Plekhanov quote that I'm trying to think of, that deals precisely with this, but I can't remember where I read it, so for now, my musings will have to do.

The means and the ends are one and the same, inseparable. It is impossible to create a 'libertarian' society using 'authoritarian' methods. "Authoritarian" in this context means power concentrated into the hands of a few with unquestioning obedience to that power.

Freedom isn't just some noble end to be achieved in the distant future, but rather it is a necessary part of the process of creating socialism. I and other anarchists may be accused of being "utopian" for believing this. Beliefs are utopian if subjective ideas are not grounded in objective reality. To believe that revolution is possible without freedom, to believe those in power can, through their best and genuine intentions, impose socialism from above, as the Bolsheviks tried to, is indeed utopian.

MP5

19th March 2013, 04:47

And anarchists will continue to repeat anarchists actions, ie: to wish and attempt to strip the revolution of its ability to defend itself, to take away its strength.

And yet Leninist's repeat the same mistake over and over again which is dooming themselves from the start by somehow being delusional enough to think that they and they alone are above the corrupting effects of power. The take power in the name of giving power to the proletarians while in reality they exercise a dictatorship over both the bourgeois and the proletariat to some degree. Since the old rulers never want to give up any power they keep hoping for any excuse not to relinquish it all in the name of stopping the counterrevolution. The revolution becomes a power struggle essentially just within the party or parties in power, turns inward and stops being anything resembling revolutionary.

What you are referring to as your strength is the very thing that has undone so many revolutions of the past and is in fact your weakness. Anarchists have nothing against defending the revolution and nothing against strength. I fully endorse the use of violence when need be and i think it is certainly a legitimate tool for revolutionary purposes. I would have no problem killing every fascist on the planet if that meant stopping them for good. But i don't see what centralizing and creating a hierarchy of authority is going to do really except create a new ruling class with a different name. I just don't see the point in fighting for a cause that is just going to end up with the same old system at the end just with different names given to those with positions in power.

Art Vandelay

19th March 2013, 05:11

I didn't deny that it was during the Civil War. What you fail to realize is that the whites as a fighting force were clearly destroyed and victory was nearing. These demands could have been answered once the last white got a bullet in his head. The sailors were perfectly willing to negotiate.

And the Bolsheviks weren't willing to negotiate with a group who wanted to give freedom of assembly and press to groups who not only supported the provisional government, but also attempted an uprising in the middle of the civil war, all in the name of some fetishization of 'liberty.'

Why is workers democracy against proletarian interests?

It isn't, however given the material conditions, a certain amount of centralization must be exerted by the revolutionary vanguard.

Why is not repressing anarchists against proletarian interests?

Because for the most part anarchism is a cover for liberalism, except draped in a black flag. I can think of about 2, maybe 3, anarchists on this site who uphold a proper materialist analysis. Not to mention that in the historical context that we are discussing, the anarchists were leading a reactionary peasant based movement.

Bordiga's opinions on democracy represent Marxism no more than Kautsky's pro-WW1 Germany stance does.

I didn't see anyone supporting Kautsky's pro-WWI stance in this thread, but nice job bringing up irrelevant shit.

Art Vandelay

19th March 2013, 05:15

The means and the ends are one and the same, inseparable. It is impossible to create a 'libertarian' society using 'authoritarian' methods. "Authoritarian" in this context means power concentrated into the hands of a few with unquestioning obedience to that power.

We finally agree on something, unfortunately though, you're not making the point you want to. No one, certainly not I, posit that the party is some detached entity from the rest of the class. The party is the tool, used by the working class, to exert its hegemony. Which is why I am a supporter of a mass party of the proletariat, which encompasses a majority of the class and is used by the proletariat to exert their class interests. This leaders of this party would be elected the same way you're workers councils would be, ie: from the bottom up. The only difference being this party would have membership restrictions to ensure that no backwards elements of the class could gain sway.

Freedom isn't just some noble end to be achieved in the distant future, but rather it is a necessary part of the process of creating socialism. I and other anarchists may be accused of being "utopian" for believing this. Beliefs are utopian if subjective ideas are not grounded in objective reality. To believe that revolution is possible without freedom, to believe those in power can, through their best and genuine intentions, impose socialism from above, as the Bolsheviks tried to, is indeed utopian.

Good thing this couldn't be further from the truth. Lenin was not a Blanquist. There are valid criticisms to be made of Lenin and co. however this is not one of them and leads me to believe you don't really know much of Leninist theory and the history of the Russian Revolution.

Art Vandelay

19th March 2013, 05:16

And yet Leninist's repeat the same mistake over and over again which is dooming themselves from the start by somehow being delusional enough to think that they and they alone are above the corrupting effects of power. The take power in the name of giving power to the proletarians while in reality they exercise a dictatorship over both the bourgeois and the proletariat to some degree. Since the old rulers never want to give up any power they keep hoping for any excuse not to relinquish it all in the name of stopping the counterrevolution. The revolution becomes a power struggle essentially just within the party or parties in power, turns inward and stops being anything resembling revolutionary.

What you are referring to as your strength is the very thing that has undone so many revolutions of the past and is in fact your weakness. Anarchists have nothing against defending the revolution and nothing against strength. I fully endorse the use of violence when need be and i think it is certainly a legitimate tool for revolutionary purposes. I would have no problem killing every fascist on the planet if that meant stopping them for good. But i don't see what centralizing and creating a hierarchy of authority is going to do really except create a new ruling class with a different name. I just don't see the point in fighting for a cause that is just going to end up with the same old system at the end just with different names given to those with positions in power.

I'm not even going to finish reading after that sentence. Power does not corrupt; end of discussion.

MP5

19th March 2013, 07:28

I'm not even going to finish reading after that sentence. Power does not corrupt; end of discussion.

That just shows your complete unwillingness to even think of the possibility that power may be a corrupting influence plus your way of completely dodging the rest of what i said in a attempt to make it sound not even worthy of your precious time just shows that you don't actually have a good answer for it. There would be far fewer examples of power not being a corrupting influence then it being a corrupting influence. When it is centralized and it becomes monopolized then it is not only something that will corrupt you but also something that will lull you into such false and idealistic notions that you will be of such pure heart and without sin as to give it up all in the name of achieving Communism.

Really now that is idealistic to say the very least given the track record of such approaches in the past. You almost paint yourself as a religious saint of some sort.

o well this is ok I guess

19th March 2013, 08:15

Because for the most part anarchism is a cover for liberalism, except draped in a black flag. I can think of about 2, maybe 3, anarchists on this site who uphold a proper materialist analysis. so, what, the condition for being a revolutionary is materialism?
Cmon man who thinks that everyone who's fought on the side of reds spent their off hours in the trenches reading Feuerbach?

Jimmie Higgins

19th March 2013, 09:30

That just shows your complete unwillingness to even think of the possibility that power may be a corrupting influence plus your way of completely dodging the rest of what i said in a attempt to make it sound not even worthy of your precious time just shows that you don't actually have a good answer for it. There would be far fewer examples of power not being a corrupting influence then it being a corrupting influence. When it is centralized and it becomes monopolized then it is not only something that will corrupt you but also something that will lull you into such false and idealistic notions that you will be of such pure heart and without sin as to give it up all in the name of achieving Communism.

Really now that is idealistic to say the very least given the track record of such approaches in the past. You almost paint yourself as a religious saint of some sort.

If power inherently corrupts then there's no point in being a revolutionary who wants the self-emancipation of the working class because this can only come through mass-power of workers struggling for their collective interests.

"Power" is not a thing in of itself: does the existance of prisons cause repression, or are prisons created by the ruling class in order to aid in repression? Are imperialist militaries the cause of imperial conflicts, or are imperialist rivalries and the need to dominate other markets and populations the reason for military power?

Does "Power" corrupt capitalism, or is the inherently exploitative system ruled by a few the reason that capitalists build up their power?

Does capitalist power corrupt capitalism or hurt the ruling class? Or is it part of what enables this class to rule? What would it mean for worker's power to corrupt: democratic worker's power increasing itself... is that "corrupt"?

Do capitalists centralize to get more power, or is the concentration of capital (and the power that it creates) because capitalism is a system that seeks to maximize profits and centralizing capital and production allow for greater explploitation and profits?

Is decentralized capital of small shops less corrupt than centralized capitalist power? Or is it the same system that's inherently exploitative and robs workers of economic and social power, just a different arrangement?

One of the main failings of the CNT in Spain was that the vanguard, the anarchist revolutionaries "did not take power because we couldn't but because we didn't wish to". This eventually led them to supporting a different power, Republican power run by the counter-revolutionary CP who then dismantled the power that had been built up through the radical unions, through pesant self-collectivization, through worker-run and managed liberated businesses and trains and so on. By rejecting "worker's power" they ended up helping "privite property power" regain a foothold and then disillusion the population to the point where there really wasn't a good reason to resist Franco just to have a Popular Front maintain capitalist relations.

Incidentially, those rural revolutionaries "collectivized" the estates they had worked for... they "centralized" and organized their power. The de-centralized alternative to this is not un-corrupting, it's small farmer capitalism where the estates are divided up among autonomous producers in family units!

so, what, the condition for being a revolutionary is materialism?
Cmon man who thinks that everyone who's fought on the side of reds spent their off hours in the trenches reading Feuerbach?Reading philosophy is the condition for being a materialist? IMO materialism is only a condition for being an effective revolutionary. Otherwise you end up just fighting the symptoms of capitalism and abstract concepts in this society rather than fighting the fundamental mechanisms.

Captain Ahab

19th March 2013, 12:57

And the Bolsheviks weren't willing to negotiate with a group who wanted to give freedom of assembly and press to groups who not only supported the provisional government, but also attempted an uprising in the middle of the civil war, all in the name of some fetishization of 'liberty.'

The Kronstadt uprising was peaceful and bullets first left Bolshevik guns. Anarchists(or at least a good deal of anarchists) and Left SRs did not support the provisional government.

It isn't, however given the material conditions, a certain amount of centralization must be exerted by the revolutionary vanguard.
Why? Allowing groups just as opposed to the Whites as you are greater representation only endangers party dictatorship.

Because for the most part anarchism is a cover for liberalism, except draped in a black flag. I can think of about 2, maybe 3, anarchists on this site who uphold a proper materialist analysis.
I never realized how much positive connotation there was to being liberal. I think I'll proudly call myself a liberal socialist from now on. You can be a conservative socialist.

Not to mention that in the historical context that we are discussing, the anarchists were leading a reactionary peasant based movement.
Not every anarchist was a Makhnovist or leading peasants and the Makhnovists didn't just enjoy support from peasants.

I didn't see anyone supporting Kautsky's pro-WWI stance in this thread, but nice job bringing up irrelevant shit.
You cite the opinion of one Marxists to support a general claim about Marxism. You can apply your method to make Marxism be supportive of whatever you want.

TheRedAnarchist23

19th March 2013, 13:35

Because their resolution would have taken a step back in the revolutionary process, not forward; the class interests of the proletariat is the overthrow of the system which gives birth to it.

So you consider that death, repression, and opression, are a step forward in the revolutionary process?

Just no. You should really read some Marx, plenty of anarchists take from him, without abandoning their anti-authoritarian convictions. This is honestly pretty elementary stuff. That part in bold is what all human beings strive for, it is the underlying function of human existence. Before we can worry about religion, government, etc..we must first be able to feed, clothe, shelter ourselves, etc...this is known as economics and is why the development of the productive forces is the yardstick for the development of societies.

Then if those are the interests of all human beings, does it not stand to reason that taking those things away from someone is not only going against the class interests of the proletariat, but also going against the interests of every human being?

No. Just because a person is a member of the working class, does not mean that they advance working class interests. Fascists are generally proletarian, doesn't stop them from upholding anti-working class convictions. False consciousness is a real thing, you know.

I don't see what you are trying to get at. First you say well-being is in the interest of all humanity, then you say that wanting to give well-being to the workers is going against their class interests.

What sterling logic you've just presented. How I would ever pick through such an in depth analysis such as that is beyond me.

You are excusing your lack of logic with the lack of quality of my analysis. This does not change the fact that your logic is flawed.

TheRedAnarchist23

19th March 2013, 13:38

Because for the most part anarchism is a cover for liberalism, except draped in a black flag. I can think of about 2, maybe 3, anarchists on this site who uphold a proper materialist analysis.

This is new.
The next thing you might say is that anarchism was an ideology invented by the bourgeosie to stop the workers from achieving communism.
I still do not see how materialism is the oposite of liberalism. It should already be clear to you that anarchists are left-wing libertarians, and if you consider that libertarianism is the same as liberalism, then I guess we truly are all liberals under the black flag.

Sheepy

19th March 2013, 16:00

Because for the most part anarchism is a cover for liberalism, except draped in a black flag. I can think of about 2, maybe 3, anarchists on this site who uphold a proper materialist analysis. Not to mention that in the historical context that we are discussing, the anarchists were leading a reactionary peasant based movement.

I didn't see anyone supporting Kautsky's pro-WWI stance in this thread, but nice job bringing up irrelevant shit.

Oh yes, you got it all written down, you got eggs on our face, you absolutely put a nail in that coffin, let me tell you 9mm! We wacky Anarchists have always been libs in disguise with our talks of classless, moneyless, stateless workers democracies with the exact fucking opposite!

Wow! You're totally not an idiot! You caught us RED HANDED, gyuck-gyuck! Congratulations! You win!

But no really, you have no grounds to walk on to even think about such a ridiculous conclusion. I mean, it's not us that came up with the fucking NEP, so if there's anyone who should be called "liberals" here, it's not us. Remind me again on how much of a wonderful workers paradise it was living under surveillance 24/7 while special snowflakes in the Communist Party continued to get a good pampering via Nomenklatura? Huh, and you wanna talk about liberalism? Give me a fucking break.

Brutus

19th March 2013, 16:17

The state has always been a tool of A privileged (or exploitative, as the comrade below pointed out) minority to oppress and keep in check the majority. Marxists claim this new state will be that of the majority, used to oppress the minority. This will revert back to a privileged minority in power who oppress the majority.

This happened in Russia. Admittedly, Lenin did not claim Russia was a DotP, but they attempted to replace the bourgeois state with a proletarian one. In Russia, they forgot what Marx said: "But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes."
Lenin acknowledged this, saying they inherited the bureaucracy of the tsarist state. In this approach, Lenin listened to kautsky, not Marx.

Jimmie Higgins

19th March 2013, 18:19

The state has always been a tool of A privileged minority to oppress and keep in check the majority.it's not privilege IMO, but an exploiting group and it is because these societies produced what they needed in an exploitative way that it was necessary for the exploiters to justify their order as natural or unchanging and divinely mandated on the one hand and have the capacity to repress people who opposed or threatened this order on the other. This is what a state is and if workers organize a militia to stop fascists or take control of production then it's a state no matter how centralized or decentralized or otherwise organized.

Marxists claim this new state will be that of the majority, used to oppress the minority. This will revert back to a privileged minority in power who oppress the majority. what is the material reason and mechanism for this inherent reversion?

This happened in Russia. Admittedly, Lenin did not claim Russia was a DotP, but they attempted to replace the bourgeois state with a proletarian one. In Russia, they forgot what Marx said: "But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes."well no, i dont think this was the case... If they had done this then they would have tried winning seats in the existing government and tried to use the existing Russian military and so on. Soviets and so on we're potentially worker-state machinery, but they were not "ready made" state machinery of feudal or bourgeois states.

Rusty Shackleford

19th March 2013, 18:29

Please avoid tendency baiting. There have been multiple instances of generalized statements against an entire tendency "you anarchos" "anarchism is a cover for liberalism" that has resulted in obvious counterattacks of the same quality. Equating 'statists' with 'fascists' or a particular person being a 'fucking idiot.'

Keep the discussion civil. Critiques are fine, slander and flame/tendency baiting are not. Any violations beyond this point may result in action.

This is a very good thread. Why ruin it?

MEGAMANTROTSKY

19th March 2013, 18:39

http://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1922/democratic-principle.htm
I don't think you read this very carefully. Your position conflates "democracy" with "bourgeois democracy", something which Bordiga does not seem to do here:

The Marxist critique of the postulates of bourgeois democracy is in fact based on the definition of the class character of modern society. It demonstrates the theoretical inconsistency and the practical deception of a system which pretends to reconcile political equality with the division of society into social classes determined by the nature of the mode of production.
Furthermore, Bordiga does not seem to reject "democracy" in its entirety; instead he is pushing for the abandonment of the term, because for him "democracy" cannot be anything but a piece of demagogy for the bourgeoisie to exploit. He instead advocates the use of a different term:

The democratic criterion has been for us so far a material and incidental factor in the construction of our internal organization and the formulation of our party statutes; it is not an indispensable platform for them. Therefore we will not raise the organizational formula known as "democratic centralism" to the level of a principle. Democracy cannot be a principle for us. Centralism is indisputably one, since the essential characteristics of party organization must be unity of structure and action. The term centralism is sufficient to express the continuity of party structure in space; in order to introduce the essential idea of continuity in time, the historical continuity of the struggle which, surmounting successive obstacles, always advances towards the same goal, and in order to combine these two essential ideas of unity in the same formula, we would propose that the communist party base its organization on "organic centralism". While preserving as much of the incidental democratic mechanism that can be used, we will eliminate the use of the term "democracy", which is dear to the worst demagogues but tainted with irony for the exploited, oppressed and cheated, abandoning it to the exclusive usage of the bourgeoisie and the champions of liberalism in their diverse guises and sometimes extremist poses.
This is not to say that I necessarily agree with Bordiga's logic. But the point is that he doesn't seem to advocate your assertion that Marxists are "anti-democratic", at least not in the way you seem to be expressing it. "Anti-the-word-democratic" seems more accurate.

o well this is ok I guess

19th March 2013, 19:55

Reading philosophy is the condition for being a materialist? IMO materialism is only a condition for being an effective revolutionary. Otherwise you end up just fighting the symptoms of capitalism and abstract concepts in this society rather than fighting the fundamental mechanisms. One must necessarily have a clear idea of what materialism is before one makes a "proper materialist analysis". What better place to start than Feuerbach?
I'm just saiyan, imagine how many national guardsman the commune would have had if it put up "must make a proper materialist analysis" as a condition for joining.

Art Vandelay

19th March 2013, 20:51

I don't think you read this very carefully. Your position conflates "democracy" with "bourgeois democracy", something which Bordiga does not seem to do here:

Furthermore, Bordiga does not seem to reject "democracy" in its entirety; instead he is pushing for the abandonment of the term, because for him "democracy" cannot be anything but a piece of demagogy for the bourgeoisie to exploit. He instead advocates the use of a different term:

This is not to say that I necessarily agree with Bordiga's logic. But the point is that he doesn't seem to advocate your assertion that Marxists are "anti-democratic", at least not in the way you seem to be expressing it. "Anti-the-word-democratic" seems more accurate.

In the sense that communism is in the interests of the vast majority, yes communists are democrats. Obviously the word 'democracy' carries with it some connotations, in this day and age and doesn't really correspond the actual original meaning of the term; for all intents and purposes, democracy has become synonymous with liberal bourgeois democracy. Bordiga proudly declared himself anti-democratic; something I agree with him on. The point is to not elevate the concept of democracy to a pedestal. As communists we are primarily concerned with class rule and the surpassing of the capitalist mode of production.

Art Vandelay

19th March 2013, 20:53

so, what, the condition for being a revolutionary is materialism?
Cmon man who thinks that everyone who's fought on the side of reds spent their off hours in the trenches reading Feuerbach?

The conditions for being a revolutionary are either having a proper materialist and Marxist analysis, or having revolution innately hardwired into your objective class interests.

Art Vandelay

19th March 2013, 20:56

Art Vandelay

19th March 2013, 21:01

The state has always been a tool of A privileged (or exploitative, as the comrade below pointed out) minority to oppress and keep in check the majority.

This simply isn't true and a state isn't necessarily held by a minority. A state is simply the institution through which the dominant class in society exerts its hegemony. It arose with the development of classes and will find its demise with the destruction of classes; not before, not after.

Marxists claim this new state will be that of the majority, used to oppress the minority. This will revert back to a privileged minority in power who oppress the majority.

How? Surely you can put forth concrete reasons as to specifically why and how this transition will take place.

This happened in Russia. Admittedly, Lenin did not claim Russia was a DotP, but they attempted to replace the bourgeois state with a proletarian one. In Russia, they forgot what Marx said: "But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes." Lenin acknowledged this, saying they inherited the bureaucracy of the tsarist state. In this approach, Lenin listened to kautsky, not Marx.

I've had my suspicions lately, but you just gave yourself away. ;)

MEGAMANTROTSKY

19th March 2013, 21:36

o well this is ok I guess

19th March 2013, 22:03

The conditions for being a revolutionary are either having a proper materialist and Marxist analysis, or having revolution innately hardwired into your objective class interests. The assertions here are a) the act of making revolution is meaningless if it is done by a body (individual or collective) without "a proper materialist and marxist analysis", unless under the latter condition and b) revolution is not in the class interests of the anarchist.

B is obviously wrong. There's no need to delve into such. It's almost tendency baiting. All the former amounts to is a justification of radical sectarianism. I mean, if it was a question of condition 1 OR condition 2, there would be no need for this discussion; you'd have to accept workers of the latter, even if they lacked your ideology. So what is it that you want to prove here? That anarchists are actually bougie kids? That it's ok to be bougie if you're a marxist? That revolution really is impossible?

I was just wondering, what's the materialistic basis for catechism?

Art Vandelay

19th March 2013, 22:04

I agree with the notion that democracy should not be fetishized. And certainly, you can make the argument that democracy is currently synonymous with the bourgeois liberal use of that term. But to abandon the term entirely? I don't think that's a wise choice. In this case, "demoracy" is likely to be immediately familiar to the average worker, who probably does not have much familiarity with the history of the communist movement except the Cold War narrative. If we are serious about winning workers to socialism, we must find common ground with them, otherwise it will look like we are being condescending. Just because the term "democracy" may inspire bourgeois illusions doesn't mean that we should reject those illusions out of hand. The best way to fight bourgeois ideology is on its own terms. In my opinion, rejecting aspects of bourgeois culture right and left will not lead us to socialist class consciousness any quicker. It will ultimately not win us workers, but middle-class students.

Well when discussing theoretical concepts with fellow radicals, I tend to adopt the term anti-democratic, since I usually assume they are familiar with the concept. However when talking with people, unfamiliar with Marxism, I of course stress the anti-democratic nature of capitalist society (the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) and discuss the fact that only true democracy is capable in a classless, stateless society. I get what you're saying though.

Art Vandelay

19th March 2013, 22:21

The assertions here are a) the act of making revolution is meaningless if it is done by a body (individual or collective) without "a proper materialist and marxist analysis", unless under the latter condition

Well the premise here is faulty. The only revolution, if we are to use that term in a proper sense, is one which will be 'under the latter condition.' The proletariat is the only revolutionary class, in capitalist society, due to their collective relationship to the means of production.

and b) revolution is not in the class interests of the anarchist.

I never said that. Anarchism as a body of thought, is proletarian in origin, having arose in the same organization (1st international) which gave birth to Marxism. My whole point is that, as a body of thought, it hasn't made a proper break with liberalism.

B is obviously wrong. There's no need to delve into such. It's almost tendency baiting.

But I never made that claim.

All the former amounts to is a justification of radical sectarianism.

I'm certainly no 'pan-leftist.'

I mean, if it was a question of condition 1 OR condition 2, there would be no need for this discussion; you'd have to accept workers of the latter, even if they lacked your ideology. So what is it that you want to prove here? That anarchists are actually bougie kids?

On this site, there is a huge problem with liberalism; there are indeed posters who are nothing more than liberals waving black flags. When I originally made that statement, I was more making a generalization about the anarchists on this board; which was unfair and I should have been more specific. There are plenty of great anarchist comrades in real life (and on this board for that matter) and many have made fantastic contributions to the movement.

That it's ok to be bougie if you're a marxist?

To a certain extent. I personally wouldn't be able to deal with the moral ramifications of being a Marxist if I owned means of production and hired labor power. That being said Engels certainly didn't have an issue with it and without Engels we wouldn't have Marx. Ultimately if a member of the bourgeoisie adopts a Marxist paradigm, they will successfully become class traitors come time for revolution. While I personally couldn't do it, getting angry at someone for being a member of the bourgeoisie would be a useless display of moralism and advocacy of lifestyleism.

That revolution really is impossible?

Not sure where you think I've implied this.

Lucretia

20th March 2013, 04:46

If power inherently corrupts then there's no point in being a revolutionary who wants the self-emancipation of the working class because this can only come through mass-power of workers struggling for their collective interests.

"Power" is not a thing in of itself: does the existance of prisons cause repression, or are prisons created by the ruling class in order to aid in repression? Are imperialist militaries the cause of imperial conflicts, or are imperialist rivalries and the need to dominate other markets and populations the reason for military power?

Does "Power" corrupt capitalism, or is the inherently exploitative system ruled by a few the reason that capitalists build up their power?

Does capitalist power corrupt capitalism or hurt the ruling class? Or is it part of what enables this class to rule? What would it mean for worker's power to corrupt: democratic worker's power increasing itself... is that "corrupt"?

Do capitalists centralize to get more power, or is the concentration of capital (and the power that it creates) because capitalism is a system that seeks to maximize profits and centralizing capital and production allow for greater explploitation and profits?

Is decentralized capital of small shops less corrupt than centralized capitalist power? Or is it the same system that's inherently exploitative and robs workers of economic and social power, just a different arrangement?

One of the main failings of the CNT in Spain was that the vanguard, the anarchist revolutionaries "did not take power because we couldn't but because we didn't wish to". This eventually led them to supporting a different power, Republican power run by the counter-revolutionary CP who then dismantled the power that had been built up through the radical unions, through pesant self-collectivization, through worker-run and managed liberated businesses and trains and so on. By rejecting "worker's power" they ended up helping "privite property power" regain a foothold and then disillusion the population to the point where there really wasn't a good reason to resist Franco just to have a Popular Front maintain capitalist relations.

Incidentially, those rural revolutionaries "collectivized" the estates they had worked for... they "centralized" and organized their power. The de-centralized alternative to this is not un-corrupting, it's small farmer capitalism where the estates are divided up among autonomous producers in family units!

Reading philosophy is the condition for being a materialist? IMO materialism is only a condition for being an effective revolutionary. Otherwise you end up just fighting the symptoms of capitalism and abstract concepts in this society rather than fighting the fundamental mechanisms.

Ding Ding Ding! We have a winner! The problem with the adage "power corrupts..." is that it relies on a bad abstraction. What kind of power? Derived from what process or set of affairs? Wielded for what purpose? Leave it to the anarchists, who can't distinguish between a workers' state and a bourgeois state, to fall flat on their faces with more mindless homilies about the wickedness of of some vague thing called "power."

conmharÃ¡in

20th March 2013, 06:02

I'm only saying Leninists will repeat Leninist modes of action. Particularly with a complete lack of a trial, followed by the death penalty (which is barbaric, at best).

As far as any evil can be necessary, I think I prefer mine to fall toward the barbaric end of the spectrum rather than the sophisticated end. A barbaric evil is easily recognizable as an evil, necessary or not; whatever its use, the impulse is to put it right as soon as possible. Barbarism persists in humanity, but more as an animal tendency toward violence in a broad sense. Sophisticated evils, on the other hand, are constructed deliberately to elude detection as evil, and this strikes me as much more sinister. For its broad manifestations, barbarism is often limited in scope for the fact that it's repulsive to the sensibilities of modern civilization. It's the difference in methodologies between, say, the dystopian societies of Orwell and Huxley. Oceania is ruled with an iron fist, but London in the Twenty-Sixth Century is drugged into complacency.

Synthesis-

20th March 2013, 08:51

This is a good debate and I think it captures the current of the fundamental problems of the left and sectarianism, im not going to say sectarianism is bad because its akin to cutting the grass to expose the snakes whatever that may mean to some people.

It seems the main problem that anarchists (im no expert, not very knowledgable on anarchist philosophy) have with marxists is the nature of power and the process of centralisation of power that exist within marxist thought, the OP criticizes the various country's that have undertaken socialist revolutions but it seems they can only do this after the fact, what i mean is it seems anarchists agree in principle with some marxist doctrine but yet they reject the actions needed for a revolution so it seems that its circular logic.

But maybe im misunderstanding the anarhist position, but i seem to see this debate alot and it seems like one of the few debates that matter to me. I would ask the anarchists how they intend to accomplish revolution, what is it that they prescribe for revolutions.

Jimmie Higgins

20th March 2013, 09:43

One must necessarily have a clear idea of what materialism is before one makes a "proper materialist analysis". What better place to start than Feuerbach?
I'm just saiyan, imagine how many national guardsman the commune would have had if it put up "must make a proper materialist analysis" as a condition for joining.

No not really. I've never read any philosophy. Materialism is pretty graspable when argued in concrete terms and people make materialist arguments all the time. It's not automatic mostly because we are swamped from above by idealist explainations for the world constantly. People are told "work hard and you will suceede" but if you scratch that widespread idea a bit, for most workers, they either already realize that's bullshit or they can fairly easily be convinced otherwise once you poke some holes into the argument. Neither view is more "natural" or automatic, it's just that modern capitalist societies have idealist explainations for things and these ideas also tend to be upheld by the petite bourgoise because their labor power tends to be in "ideas" and "lifestyle and aestetic choices".

In revolutionary situations, materialism to a certain extent becomes self-evident. When workers are taking power into their own hands, idealism becomes rather irrelevant to the actual struggle.

Jimmie Higgins

20th March 2013, 09:47

What kind of power? Derived from what process or set of affairs? Wielded for what purpose?Could it be... SATAN!

Sinister Cultural Marxist

20th March 2013, 17:03

In the sense that communism is in the interests of the vast majority, yes communists are democrats. Obviously the word 'democracy' carries with it some connotations, in this day and age and doesn't really correspond the actual original meaning of the term; for all intents and purposes, democracy has become synonymous with liberal bourgeois democracy. Bordiga proudly declared himself anti-democratic; something I agree with him on. The point is to not elevate the concept of democracy to a pedestal. As communists we are primarily concerned with class rule and the surpassing of the capitalist mode of production.

I agree with this, though interestingly one of the things which communism brings and which capitalism lacks is a sort of democracy of the workplace. The fact that I am alienated from the means of production means I have no authority over it and with the appropriation of the means of production the other workers and myself take the authority from the bourgeoisie and share it amongst ourselves.

If power corrupts, why hasn't it ever corrupted the bourgeois? Surely given their lengthy hold on 'power' it would have corrupted their judgement and lead them to betray their class interests, no?

There are no anarchists here so i will do some devil's advocate -
One potentially interesting counterexample which anarchists might use is that of self-regulation. Businesses are told to do something which, generally speaking, is good for business if they all do it. However, as an individual banking institution, they actually have an incentive to not self regulate on an individual level. Thus, they break the rule which is good for the bourgeoisie in general because they have the power to do so. Their collective rule-breaking (as in various financial crises) ends up causing severe damage to the financial sector in the long run. In these kinds of situations, you often get a pioneering group of unethical businesses that do it, and some group of "moral" businesses that tries to play clean. That second group is either often driven out of business, forced to adopt the same practices in the short term or has their management replaced by management more willing to make the same kind of risks.

Another might be the case of golden parachutes. We have a case where executives at a bank were given authority to improve the financial affairs at the bank. It turns out that many of these bankers, against the interests of the banks, were focusing more on protecting their own individual future than the future of the financial institution for which they worked. There were golden parachutes and performance pay which correlated not to the person's actual ability to bring wealth to the firm, but their power and authority within that firm.

The funny thing with Capitalism is the way the system itself rewards behavior that can be incredibly destructive to the overall stability of the system.

Ding Ding Ding! We have a winner! The problem with the adage "power corrupts..." is that it relies on a bad abstraction. What kind of power? Derived from what process or set of affairs? Wielded for what purpose? Leave it to the anarchists, who can't distinguish between a workers' state and a bourgeois state, to fall flat on their faces with more mindless homilies about the wickedness of of some vague thing called "power."

So the problem isn't with the notion of power in and of itself, but power relative to certain material conditions and social roles. Could power corrupt insofar as I am given a particular privilege or authority by a community with a particular objective in mind, yet I am in no way accountable to that community? So I'm a Soviet bureaucrat in the 70s - I'm not really accountable to anyone yet supposedly my task is some idealist goal of "furthering the revolution". However, there is no one to make sure I do not use my position to smuggle in Cognac for Nomenklatura and corrupt military officials. That lack of accountability mixed with political authority is the kind of material condition which we could say is "power" and "corrupts" the figure in question.

Perhaps we should think of things in terms of alienation and not power alone? Or do the anarchist critics merely think of power in idealist terms and we should think of power in terms of material conditions?

No not really. I've never read any philosophy. Materialism is pretty graspable when argued in concrete terms and people make materialist arguments all the time. It's not automatic mostly because we are swamped from above by idealist explainations for the world constantly. People are told "work hard and you will suceede" but if you scratch that widespread idea a bit, for most workers, they either already realize that's bullshit or they can fairly easily be convinced otherwise once you poke some holes into the argument. Neither view is more "natural" or automatic, it's just that modern capitalist societies have idealist explainations for things and these ideas also tend to be upheld by the petite bourgoise because their labor power tends to be in "ideas" and "lifestyle and aestetic choices".

In revolutionary situations, materialism to a certain extent becomes self-evident. When workers are taking power into their own hands, idealism becomes rather irrelevant to the actual struggle.

I think you need to do a lot of philosophy to fully grasp the distinction between materialism and idealism. Particularly, what is idealism and where do the problems in it lie, and what is the real advantage of materialism? What assumptions, intuitions or immediate needs makes idealist appealing to idealists? Otherwise we are just constructing a straw man out of the idealists (which is a group that all Marxists love to just beat up).

I see nothing contradictory with the idea of idealists actively participating in a revolution as long as they can respond properly to material circumstance (and those two are not necessarily contradictory).

Fourth Internationalist

20th March 2013, 19:40

If power corrupts, why hasn't it ever corrupted the bourgeois? Surely given their lengthy hold on 'power' it would have corrupted their judgement and lead them to betray their class interests, no?

It has. When people say power corrupts, it does not mean it changes their mind for the better but for the worse, which is their own capitalist interests. The more power they get, the more they are interested in their capitalist interest. That is the corruption because of power.

conmharÃ¡in

20th March 2013, 20:37

Comrade Dracula

20th March 2013, 20:45

It has. When people say power corrupts, it does not mean it changes their mind for the better but for the worse, which is their own capitalist interests. The more power they get, the more they are interested in their capitalist interest. That is the corruption because of power.

Just a few passing comments:
So, if bourgeoise that struggles for its interest is a corrupt one, what is a "pure" bourgeoise? One that does not? Inversely then, is a proletariat that struggles for its interests corrupt as well?
I highly doubt you'd claim such a thing, as it reeks of the fascistic ideals of "class reconciliation" and whatnot.

So, then, we are left with a conundrum. Why is a proletariat that struggles for its interest not corrupt, and yet, the bourgeoise that does the same is? Why the dual standard? This implies some form of "universal morality" that transcends all classes and material conditions. Given that you are a self-proclaimed Marxist, I needn't say more.

It would be better, if for nothing else, then for the sake of theoretical integrity, if we recognized this for what it is: Neither the bourgeoise nor the proletariat are "corrupt" for struggling for their interests. To do otherwise would be rather odd, not to say against the nature of the class system as a whole.
It's all, then, a matter of perspective. Bourgeoise struggling for their interests goes against our interests as proles, ergo we deem this behavior "bad", "immoral", etc.
Inversely, us proles struggling for our interests goes against the interests of the bourgeoise, ergo they deem it "irresponsible", "parasitical", and so on.

Furthermore, what reason would a bourgeois ever have to not struggle for her own interests? As history has consistently shown, the only time the bourgeois class has ever done anything to "help" the proletariat was when doing otherwise threatened their interests.

To finalize, you speak of following:

The more power they get, the more they are interested in their capitalist interest.
I have to question this on several levels.

Firstly: How can the bourgeoise gain more power? They have excercised their class dictatorship for a few centuries now on a local level, and nearly as long globally. The only thing that could perhaps qualify as "gaining more power" is a further, greater excercise of their cultural hegemony.

If this is what you mean, then secondly: How is this cycle of furthering their interests (i.e. furthering their hegemony) a "corruption?" It is a continuation of previous acts, not a change from such.

Furthermore, it must be noted that the establishment of their hegemony over the superstructure was not a product of chance, the exposure to which made them go "oh hey, this is kinda good" and ergo "corrupt", but rather a logical outcome of class struggle that exists under capitalism.

To summarize, your corruption hypothesis isn't making much sense to me. To put it mildly, anyway.

Jimmie Higgins

21st March 2013, 21:04

I think you need to do a lot of philosophy to fully grasp the distinction between materialism and idealism. Particularly, what is idealism and where do the problems in it lie, and what is the real advantage of materialism? What assumptions, intuitions or immediate needs makes idealist appealing to idealists? Otherwise we are just constructing a straw man out of the idealists (which is a group that all Marxists love to just beat up).
The thing about these ideas in my opinion, basic marxist and revolutionary concepts from a material perspective is that they are not fundamentally "difficult to grasp". What makes them difficult is that capitalist relations are hidden and on top of that all of bourgeois society is telling people the opposite - usually in the form of some idealist argument. But the material experiences of workers also cuts against this and class struggle can expose some of the hidden aspects of the system in a pretty concrete way.

I see nothing contradictory with the idea of idealists actively participating in a revolution as long as they can respond properly to material circumstance (and those two are not necessarily contradictory).Well they can be contradictory and yet still exist in induviudals or even movements. But people's ideas and actions are often contradictory. So of course people can do this, but it's not a case then of people using idealist concepts about the world and struggle, it's a case of people's actions being ahead of their conscious understanding - something that happens all the time. They would be, in this case, acting materially despite their idealist conceptions. It's like saying that someone having sexist views might not necessarily stop them from wanting female workers to support and aid a picket-line he is on out of necessity. It's someone acting out of material necessity that contradicts their assumptions - and in the long run that contradiction would have to be solved in that the sexist sees how female workers are not the enemy, or at some point that sexism will become a stumbling block once the practical necessity for solidarity has lessened.

Materially capitalists will try and suck more value out of us, and of course for workers trying to survive, at some points they will necessarily want or need to fight-back to counteract the suck-fest. People will do this despite having maybe idealist concepts of workers as free induviduals coming to a fair deal with free individual entrepreneurs, despite having illusions in being able to get a fair deal through reasoning with the boss, despite having illusions in the ability of the political system to ensure a "fair" social situation. But in struggling, the curtain can be pulled back and it becomes easier (not automatic) to see workings of the system more clearly.

This is why in radical times or even just times of increased struggle, radical ideas can spread more quickly and broadly than in times of passivity where these contradictions and antagonisms are more hidden behind "social peace".

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

21st March 2013, 21:41

Art Vandelay

21st March 2013, 21:44

It has. When people say power corrupts, it does not mean it changes their mind for the better but for the worse, which is their own capitalist interests.

This doesn't make any sense. If it has 'corrupted them' then surely it has lead them to betray their class interests? You posit the opposite has occurred, it has made them more vigorously pursue their class interests. If this is the type of 'corruption' we are talking about then I must say I welcome it to happen to the proletariat. Not only that, but your premise presupposes some sort of 'morality' of which Marxists should not waste their time on.

The more power they get, the more they are interested in their capitalist interest. That is the corruption because of power.

Then it isn't a corruption at all, can you not see that? It is innate, due to collective relationships to the means of production, for groups of people in capitalist society to strive for their 'class interests,' you say that this mythical entity 'power' has lead to the bourgeois becoming more interested in their 'capitalist interest.' As a Marxist and a materialist I must say that this 'analysis' is rather lacking.

Lucretia

21st March 2013, 21:56

So the problem isn't with the notion of power in and of itself, but power relative to certain material conditions and social roles. Could power corrupt insofar as I am given a particular privilege or authority by a community with a particular objective in mind, yet I am in no way accountable to that community? So I'm a Soviet bureaucrat in the 70s - I'm not really accountable to anyone yet supposedly my task is some idealist goal of "furthering the revolution". However, there is no one to make sure I do not use my position to smuggle in Cognac for Nomenklatura and corrupt military officials. That lack of accountability mixed with political authority is the kind of material condition which we could say is "power" and "corrupts" the figure in question.

This is really an incoherent and idealist formulation. How could somebody be "given a particular privilege or authority by a community with a particular objective in mind, yet ... in no way [be] accountable to that community"? Power is not some discrete material object that can be passed from person to person like a joint at a frat party.

If a community of some kind has power to bestow on an individual, then that person's power is and continues to be underpinned by the community who grants him or her that power, which means that the person can be held accountable if the community so chooses. The delegation of power doesn't magically create an independent source of power detached from themselves, which can then be turned back upon themselves by the delegate. For that kind of breaking away to occur, the individual would have to find another source of power that trumps the original source in strength. Which is precisely the process you see occurring in the fifteen to twenty years following the October Revolution, facilitated in large part by the decimation of the working-class that was originally wielding and delegating power in the first place.

The problem with anarchism is that it wants to collapse this history, and teleologically posit that the creation of the independent source of power was inevitable from the very moment there was any delegation of authority. But as explained above, this a highly idealist and non-sensical way to talk about power.

Fourth Internationalist

21st March 2013, 22:58

So, if bourgeoise that struggles for its interest is a corrupt one, what is a "pure" bourgeoise?

There is not pure capitalist. Capitalism is naturally a power-hungry system for the capitalists.

Inversely then, is a proletariat that struggles for its interests corrupt as well?

No, because the interests are, for the capitalists, selfish and exploitative, and the proletariat's is liberating.

It would be better, if for nothing else, then for the sake of theoretical integrity, if we recognized this for what it is: Neither the bourgeoise nor the proletariat are "corrupt" for struggling for their interests. To do otherwise would be rather odd, not to say against the nature of the class system as a whole.

Unless we say capitalism is always corrupt and about more power and money, which I hope any anti-capitalist would agree.

It's all, then, a matter of perspective. Bourgeoise struggling for their interests goes against our interests as proles, ergo we deem this behavior "bad", "immoral", etc. Inversely, us proles struggling for our interests goes against the interests of the bourgeoise, ergo they deem it "irresponsible", "parasitical", and so on.

I don't view it that way. Our interests are for the good of humanity, there's are not. I am not a communist simply because I'm a proletarian it's my class interest, but because I view it as the best system for everyone everywhere.

How can the bourgeoise gain more power? They have excercised their class dictatorship for a few centuries now on a local level, and nearly as long globally. The only thing that could perhaps qualify as "gaining more power" is a further, greater excercise of their cultural hegemony.

They can become more and more conservative. Liberal society is less oppressive for workers than a liberal society, thus they can gain more power by going more and more conservative.

Comrade Dracula

22nd March 2013, 12:06

They can become more and more conservative. Liberal society is less oppressive for workers than a liberal society, thus they can gain more power by going more and more conservative.

I, again, have to question this. Is modern social-liberalism (and whatever variants of thereof you wish to list as liberal) truly less oppressive than conservative one?
Actually, let's push this question further: If the ruling ideas of each epoch are those of the epoch's ruling class, then what is the logic of liberalism and conservatism within today's societies?

I think it would be easy to make the mistake and label conservatism (especially in modern american sense) capitalism's "true form", ergo the most powerful and "corrupt" one. Let's examine this.

Everyone remembers the Great Depression of the thirties, right? During the Depression, the previous trend of the decreasing union membership reversed. The ever-growing number of unemployed rebelled increasingly over the years. In 1934, a million and a half workers took part in over two thousand strikes. Internationally, the same situation led to the rise of Fascism, the most open form of the bourgeois class dictatorship.

In America, however, the ruling class had other ideas. You've certainly heard of the New Deal, often described as a social-liberal program, correct? It came in opposition to the previous conservative policies of Herbert Hoover. It ultimately alleviated the conditions proletariat was suffering and quite possibly prevented the trend of increasingly open class struggle from continuing.

Why am I giving you a history lesson about something you probably know more than I do? Because it quite eloquently demonstrates the role of the "less oppressive" liberal societies.

The modern social-liberal ideology was born out of open class struggle. Were it not that the bourgeoisie implemented it in the USA during the crisis, things could've gotten rather nasty for them, as a hungry, poor worker is also an angry worker.

In that sense, social-liberalism and fascism ultimately serve the same purpose: Keeping the bourgeoisie in power.
Fascism does it through various declassing rhetoric (appealing to national unity, to class reconciliation, etc.) and brute force, providing a false, "safer" revolution to that of the "utopian" communists and "chaotic" anarchists.
Liberals, in their various iterations, also use declassing rhetoric ("We're all in this mess together, so we better cooperate") while attempting to alleviate the symptoms of the proletariat's oppression.

Of course, I am not equating liberals to fascists (only a fool would do this), but as Marxists, we must recognize that both present forms of a class dictatorship, one of the bourgeoisie.

I suppose, then, it comes down to this: Do you consider a poison that tastes sweet to be better than one that's rather bitter?

In a sense, I'd say no. After all, it's easier to make someone drink a sweet-tasting poison, whereas you better come up with some damningly good methods to make someone swallow the bitter one.

To summarize my point so far: All bourgeois ideologies/modes of class dictatorship are ultimately effective in some conditions. Neither present an increase nor decrease in class control over the society.

But let us carry on and examine the rest of your post.

There is not pure capitalist. Capitalism is naturally a power-hungry system for the capitalists.

No, because the interests are, for the capitalists, selfish and exploitative, and the proletariat's is liberating.

Unless we say capitalism is always corrupt and about more power and money, which I hope any anti-capitalist would agree.

I don't view it that way. Our interests are for the good of humanity, there's are not. I am not a communist simply because I'm a proletarian it's my class interest, but because I view it as the best system for everyone everywhere.

So it is this bitter old wind that's howling again.

First of all, how can a system be "power-hungry?" This implies at least some form of agency, that it, being a sum of socio-economic relationships, rather than an individual, simply cannot provide. Capitalism, lacking any form of awareness, cannot have desires as implied by some "power-hunger."
It, on the other hand, can have a variety of laws of operation (law of the falling rate of profit, for example), and internal dynamics (class struggle).

Secondly, "for capitalists"... Well, this is not entirely wrong, as the present state of things came about by the bourgeoisie as a class asserting their socio-economic dominance, but I find the wording somewhat odd.

To move on: Proletariat's interests are liberating... For the proletariat. I doubt your average bourgeois or petty-bourgeois would agree. I mean, I wouldn't exactly call being stripped of power "liberating." That's without going into the fact that there are still other non-proletarian classes in the so-called third world.

Now: Capitalism is neither about money nor power per se.
Capitalism is the economic system that was developed due to the productive forces of humankind reaching certain level of development. This lead to the creation of the two classes we are very much so familiar with and this ultimately lead to the conflict between the forces of production (capitalism-worthy, in bourgeois interest) and the relations of production (still feudal, in aristocracy's interest).
This resulted in the bourgeois revolutions (class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy) and the establishment of the capitalist mode of production. This lead to the further development of the productive forces, to today's level.
This, in turn, again lead to the conflict between the forces of production (communism-worthy, in proletariat's interest) and the relations of production (still capitalist, in bourgeoisie's interests).
Power (aka class rule) is something that theoretically in interest of any and all classes due to economic interests. Of course, some have revolutionary potential due to their relations to the means of production, whereas others do not. So yeah, communism (as the real movement that abolishes the present state of things, not a mode of production) in a way is equally about power as capitalism. It's just the fact that the proletariat is in a rather unique position of being capable of abolishing all classes, whereas the bourgeoisie back in the day was not.
Money, on the other hand, is merely a means of exchange that commands certain amount of labor. It is not in bourgeoisie's interest to possess an arbitrarily large number of these papers, as they are in themselves useless, but rather to accumulate more and more capital, which is expressed only in money that's constantly circulating (aka the famous Money-Commodity-Money cycle).

And, now for the finale.
First of all, I have to ask: What is this humanity you speak of, and how is it homogenous enough to have common class interests? Or are we, perhaps, going to go about this in a proper materialist way and recognize that humanity is still divided among the class lines and that proletariat's interests are not necessarily in the interest of other classes? After all, we discussed this before, the bourgeoisie have a rather keen interest in keeping their class independance, as does the petty-bourgeoisie and quite possibly a few class remnants. After all, the proletariat makes up only about 45% of the global population, unless I'm rather mistaken.

Secondly, let's address this:

There is not pure capitalist.

But pray tell, how can there be "corrupt" capitalists, then? If property A doesn't exist, how can the lack of property A exist? If there is no light, how can there be darkness? How can the process of corruption take place if there is nothing to corrupt?

The only way I see this being possible is if they are alien to some moral system of yours, and given that you claim to represent the interests of some abstract "humanity" I am going to guess this system is universal, too.

Ergo, it transcends all classes and therefore material conditions. Ergo, it transcends reality itself. Ergo, it is idealist as hell.

Sinister Cultural Marxist

22nd March 2013, 17:18

The thing about these ideas in my opinion, basic marxist and revolutionary concepts from a material perspective is that they are not fundamentally "difficult to grasp". What makes them difficult is that capitalist relations are hidden and on top of that all of bourgeois society is telling people the opposite - usually in the form of some idealist argument. But the material experiences of workers also cuts against this and class struggle can expose some of the hidden aspects of the system in a pretty concrete way.

Actually the concepts can be hard. For instance, explaining the distinction between surplus value and profit is not exactly easy, and something which Marxists themselves seem to confuse. The implications can also be difficult - for instance, as far as overproduction is concerned, the Randian is going to have the intuition that an enterprise will only build as much as a firm needs to fulfill its rational self interest, no more, no less. It's hard to explain that firms will end up overproducing in abstract terms - it's usually just easier to point to historical cases of overproduction and show how Marxist theory explains it.

Some of the implications are much more difficult to understand, and can be easily misinterpreted. This is especially true of the metaphysical arguments. Marxist materialism can lead to a real vulgar form of materialism when not properly oriented.

Well they can be contradictory and yet still exist in induviudals or even movements. But people's ideas and actions are often contradictory. So of course people can do this, but it's not a case then of people using idealist concepts about the world and struggle, it's a case of people's actions being ahead of their conscious understanding - something that happens all the time. They would be, in this case, acting materially despite their idealist conceptions. It's like saying that someone having sexist views might not necessarily stop them from wanting female workers to support and aid a picket-line he is on out of necessity. It's someone acting out of material necessity that contradicts their assumptions - and in the long run that contradiction would have to be solved in that the sexist sees how female workers are not the enemy, or at some point that sexism will become a stumbling block once the practical necessity for solidarity has lessened.

Materially capitalists will try and suck more value out of us, and of course for workers trying to survive, at some points they will necessarily want or need to fight-back to counteract the suck-fest. People will do this despite having maybe idealist concepts of workers as free induviduals coming to a fair deal with free individual entrepreneurs, despite having illusions in being able to get a fair deal through reasoning with the boss, despite having illusions in the ability of the political system to ensure a "fair" social situation. But in struggling, the curtain can be pulled back and it becomes easier (not automatic) to see workings of the system more clearly.

This is why in radical times or even just times of increased struggle, radical ideas can spread more quickly and broadly than in times of passivity where these contradictions and antagonisms are more hidden behind "social peace".

Better examples would be liberation theology and utopian socialism - these are clearly idealist philosophies but they can be responsive to the material conditions and followers could easily become members of a Leftist movement. It really doesn't matter if you think you're liberating the proletariat or bringing the proletariat into the kingdom of heaven as long as one's response to the material conditions is similarly pragmatic.

Marx's point is that material conditions causes and conditions ideas, and that is his critique of idealism. Idealists could still have accurate ideas about the world and material conditions. So I could have the idealist concept that solidarity is a god-given virtue, and that could lead me to recommend certain strategies that enhance the solidarity within the working class. These strategies work, no matter how idealist the perspective which led me to articulate them (this should be a warning to all the Marxists on this forum who just use idealism as some stupid ad hominem attack)

This is really an incoherent and idealist formulation. How could somebody be "given a particular privilege or authority by a community with a particular objective in mind, yet ... in no way [be] accountable to that community"? Power is not some discrete material object that can be passed from person to person like a joint at a frat party.

If a community of some kind has power to bestow on an individual, then that person's power is and continues to be underpinned by the community who grants him or her that power, which means that the person can be held accountable if the community so chooses. The delegation of power doesn't magically create an independent source of power detached from themselves, which can then be turned back upon themselves by the delegate. For that kind of breaking away to occur, the individual would have to find another source of power that trumps the original source in strength. Which is precisely the process you see occurring in the fifteen to twenty years following the October Revolution, facilitated in large part by the decimation of the working-class that was originally wielding and delegating power in the first place.

It's not incoherent and idealist at all (and hey, I'm doing my best to be the apologist for the anarchists here, despite not being one :cool:). Of course there's a historical process to the separation between the delegation of authority and his independence from that authority. That goes without saying. The issue for the anarchists is how the working class will retain its ability to hold those empowered within institutions accountable in perpetuity. Yes, at the moment of the delegation of power it would be ridiculous to think that the person is somehow not accountable, or to ignore the historical process whereby that accountability is negated. However, as those delegated power participate in the building of institutions they become alienated from whatever body gave them that authority.

The question for the anarchist is, how can the accountability be retained over time? It doesn't matter that the delegation of authority implies accountability because that implication is not historically inert.

The problem with anarchism is that it wants to collapse this history, and teleologically posit that the creation of the independent source of power was inevitable from the very moment there was any delegation of authority. But as explained above, this a highly idealist and non-sensical way to talk about power.

I think the anarchist has a good inductive argument to make that the delegation of power often leads to the institutionalization of that power over time, and that institutionalization makes accountability impossible. It doesn't matter that political power does not necessarily cause a lack of accountability. What matters is that numerous revolutionaries said "I can take power, but don't worry, I will remain accountable to the working/revolutionary classes" only to see that break down. What reason does the anarchist have to believe that the next revolution will be different? How will the next statist revolution be any different from the various Leninist revolutions?

It's not that I necessarily disagree with you but I think you're being unfair to the anarchist position.

Fourth Internationalist

22nd March 2013, 20:06

I, again, have to question this. Is modern social-liberalism (and whatever variants of thereof you wish to list as liberal) truly less oppressive than conservative one?

Yes.

Actually, let's push this question further: If the ruling ideas of each epoch are those of the epoch's ruling class, then what is the logic of liberalism and conservatism within today's societies?

Some people believe the system is broken but needs to be reformed to make it better, others think it works fine or should be even less reformed.

I suppose, then, it comes down to this: Do you consider a poison that tastes sweet to be better than one that's rather bitter?

I think a better analogy would be would I rather have a hand cut of or an arm. Liberalism and fascism do not create the same society.

First of all, how can a system be "power-hungry?"

Capitalism is designed so the rich can get richer ie more power.

To move on: Proletariat's interests are liberating... For the proletariat. I doubt your average bourgeois or petty-bourgeois would agree. I mean, I wouldn't exactly call being stripped of power "liberating."
...
First of all, I have to ask: What is this humanity you speak of, and how is it homogenous enough to have common class interests? Or are we, perhaps, going to go about this in a proper materialist way and recognize that humanity is still divided among the class lines and that proletariat's interests are not necessarily in the interest of other classes? After all, we discussed this before, the bourgeoisie have a rather keen interest in keeping their class independance, as does the petty-bourgeoisie and quite possibly a few class remnants. After all, the proletariat makes up only about 45% of the global population, unless I'm rather mistaken.

I disagree. The proletariat's interests are in the best interest of everyone, except for those with excess wealth (big capitalists). They do not "lose" in the same way we would if their interests were fulfilled. If ours our, they are still free.

But pray tell, how can there be "corrupt" capitalists, then? If property A doesn't exist, how can the lack of property A exist? If there is no light, how can there be darkness? How can the process of corruption take place if there is nothing to corrupt?

Capitalism itself is corrupt. It's get the rich richer (the powerful more powerful).

Comrade Dracula

23rd March 2013, 10:21

Yes.

No. Nein. Nyet. Ne. Nyi. Five noes against one yes. Victory is mine!

Though really, reasserting your previous assertion is no argument.

Some people believe the system is broken but needs to be reformed to make it better, others think it works fine or should be even less reformed.

I doubt anyone here is questioning that. As materialists, however, the point is to question why they believe what they believe. Such is what I've done in my previous post (in regards to our illustrious ruling class, anyway).

I think a better analogy would be would I rather have a hand cut of or an arm.

I think they're both equally good, as long as we factor in that in the Republic of Analogia, bandages are quite hard to come by and rather expensive as well.

So, how would you prefer to bleed out? Slowly or fast?

Liberalism and fascism do not create the same society.

Yes and no. The basis for each of the two societies is capitalism, but the superstructure (state, culture, etc.) is quite different.

However, I wasn't arguing such a thing, quite the opposite - I asserted that anyone saying that is a fool. Instead of rephrasing, I'll quote the relevant parts of my previous post.

The modern social-liberal ideology was born out of open class struggle. Were it not that the bourgeoisie implemented it in the USA during the crisis, things could've gotten rather nasty for them, as a hungry, poor worker is also an angry worker.

In that sense, social-liberalism and fascism ultimately serve the same purpose: Keeping the bourgeoisie in power.

Of course, I am not equating liberals to fascists (only a fool would do this), but as Marxists, we must recognize that both present forms of a class dictatorship, one of the bourgeoisie.

To summarize my point so far: All bourgeois ideologies/modes of class dictatorship are ultimately effective in some conditions. Neither present an increase nor decrease in class control over the society.

But break's over, let us get back to it.

Capitalism is designed so the rich can get richer ie more power.

I must again take issue with your wording.
"Designed?" - It's not as if like, on the day of the French Revolution, the French bourgeoisie sat down and discussed what they wanted to have once they overthrew the aristocracy. Capitalism, as is the case with all systems, evolved organically in light of material conditions that it found itself in.

Furthermore, this is behavior encouraged by the conditions within the system, not some power-hunger of an abstract personification. Huge difference there. Be mindful of your wording.

Speaking of which, another gripe with your wording. Wonderful, ain't it?
The mechanisms of capitalism are not such that a certain wealth-based caste can advance further in the grander hierarchy of things, but rather they are such that:
a) The ruling class stays the ruling class - After all if all the proles suddenly became bourgeois, things would've gotten hilariously catastrophic to say the least.
b) A bourgeois, in order to retain her class status, has to stay competitive, and such advance the Money-Commodity-Money cycle in order to keep the wheels of the economy spinning.

To summarize, the relationship between the ruling class and the mode of production is far more complex than some "conspiracy" of the wealthy to make themselves even wealthier. The said "conspiracy" makes for some good rhetoric, but for some rather poor analysis.

Speaking of which, regarding the fact that richer means more powerful - This is wrong on both levels.
Firstly, wealth, as such, is meaningless if it's money and not capital.
Secondly, an individual gaining more power in a collective doesn't make the collective more powerful.

To expound on this:
Theoretically, say you are a prole and you win a hundred million dollars in a lottery - There are essentially two basic routes you can take: Keep that money for yourself (and your family, presumably), since you're a careful one. Whereas you may be able to bribe someone somewhere, you aren't exactly powerful. Your word isn't as valued as say, that of some big bourgeois (Bill Gates?), nor do you have means of sustaining your wealth - What's spent is spent. Eventually, your wealth will dwindle and you'll return to status quo ante lottery.
The other option, of course, is to use your stroke of luck and start your own business. This is risky, of course, but it has its advantages. After all, you finally have the means to resupply your capital - Yes, capital, as your wealth has now entered circulation. So, say fifty years later, once your business has grown into a major corporation (a bit idealistic, I know, but eh it serves its purpose). You have successfully joined the ranks of the large bourgeoisie. You can use your capital to influence the state, other people, and so on - After all it is a bourgeois state, and you are a bourgeois.

So, that rise to power didn't require merely wealth - But regenerating capital. A wealthy prole will soon lose her wealth if she doesn't change her relation to the means of production. After all, as you know, classes in marxism are decided precisely by the relation to the means of production, not amount of wealth or capital.

Now secondly, just because a bourgeois becomes more powerful in relation to other members of her class, her class doesn't gain more power because of it. That's like saying, for example, if your Average Jane suddenly somehow became a highly influential politician in the Democratic Party, the party itself would become more powerful because of it. Non sequitor if I ever seen one.

Furthermore, as I have already asserted and consistently proven, the bourgeoisie, being in the position of class rule and cultural hegemony is basically unable to gain more power (with maybe the possible exception of the cultural hegemony), as there is nothing to gain power over. There exists not some "over-class" that stands above the bourgeoisie that they have to struggle against in order to gain more power, there merely exists a proletariat that they have to keep in line.

I disagree. The proletariat's interests are in the best interest of everyone, except for those with excess wealth (big capitalists). They do not "lose" in the same way we would if their interests were fulfilled. If ours our, they are still free.

But still, it goes against their class interests and owing to that, it will be viewed as "utopian" thinking and in majority of cases opposed (with the possible exception of some elements of the petty-bourgeoisie, as their sides can change rather quickly, as situation demands it).

So, essentially, you'll be forcing a lot of people (millions if we count only the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie, billions if we count everyone else) to do something against their will. Quite the liberator you are!
So, if we follow your line of thinking, we are left with two options, either we:
a) Give up on the class struggle, as we are for liberty, not class rule.
b) As each revolutionary class in history since long before us has done, we drag their asses to progress whether they like it or not.

Capitalism itself is corrupt. It's get the rich richer (the powerful more powerful).

I've already addressed both points. As a matter of fact, I've addressed the whole corruption business in the previous post, something you've chosen to ignore.

Come to think of it, you only addressed rather specific parts of my previous post. Whereas I get that my post is somewhat of a behemoth and you have better things to do than to post about here all day, for the sake of discussion, I would ask you to address it in its entirety anyway.

I mean, this way, you make it seem as if you're cherry-picking which parts to respond to and which part is a bit too inconvenient.

Jimmie Higgins

23rd March 2013, 11:42

Actually the concepts can be hard. For instance, explaining the distinction between surplus value and profit is not exactly easy, and something which Marxists themselves seem to confuse. The implications can also be difficult - for instance, as far as overproduction is concerned, the Randian is going to have the intuition that an enterprise will only build as much as a firm needs to fulfill its rational self interest, no more, no less. It's hard to explain that firms will end up overproducing in abstract terms - it's usually just easier to point to historical cases of overproduction and show how Marxist theory explains it.People can generally grasp materialist arguments when it comes to physical sciences, they may not be able to specifically explain the evolution of some specific species over time, it doesn't mean they necissarily have an accurate view of it (like mistakenly thinking man evolved from chimps). People may not know how to rebuild an engine, but they probably realize it's mechanical in nature and not run supernaturally or because it wills itself to run. But where culture pushes an alternative explaination, the understanding can be misdirected by the ideological explaination. Evolution is an example of that for the evangelical subculture. Pop-culture and even some mainstream science promotes idealist explainations for things, this is especially true when it comes to the economy.

Idealist views are not more or less graspable than materialist views. With the economy part of the difficulty is that as individuals on a daily basis we do interact with the market as induvidual workers selling our labor and being consumers of commodities. This daily-level helps bolster the classical idealist explainations for capitalism. But out of the conditions of capitalism, workers are sometimes compelled or drawn to struggle and that's when idealist notions come into conflict with material realities and this is part of how consiousness develops. It's not automatic and it helps if there are people and organizations that have prepared and have studied strategies and looked deeper into understanding the world (which is why we're all here I suppose). But potentially with struggles, people can come to an new understanding.

Better examples would be liberation theology and utopian socialism - these are clearly idealist philosophies but they can be responsive to the material conditions and followers could easily become members of a Leftist movement. It really doesn't matter if you think you're liberating the proletariat or bringing the proletariat into the kingdom of heaven as long as one's response to the material conditions is similarly pragmatic.People can have contradictory ideas and still act on a reasonable basis. I don't think that tons of workers who had been religious will suddenly become aethiests because of class struggle alone (though in countries where there is a strong church-state connection, sometimes this does happen, but it's due to these circumstances). I'm sure pleanty of workers who believe in Jesus or whatever will hold that belief at the same time they are standing on the working class side of the barricades. I'm speaking more of idealism when it comes to the decisive factors of class struggle. So in a revolution, many people who had believed that capital could be negotiated with will have necissarily come to the conclusion that it was worker's power or nothing due to the circumstances they would have been faced with. Not everyone will know how to explain commodity fetishism in detail - or at all really.

Your argument sounds to me like you are saying that people can be idealist as long as when it comes to what they do, they act based on material factors. Well, ok then. Many people will and do because humans have the ability to hold contradictory ideas at once.

Fourth Internationalist

23rd March 2013, 14:24

I mean, this way, you make it seem as if you're cherry-picking which parts to respond to and which part is a bit too inconvenient.

Responding to everything you say would, yes, be inconvenient. Most of what you are objecting to seems to be my use of words.

Comrade Dracula

23rd March 2013, 14:51

Responding to everything you say would, yes, be inconvenient.

Fair enough. If our positions were reversed, I'm pretty sure I'd be doing something similar.

Most of what you are objecting to seems to be my use of words.

True, we both did kinda get carried away from the initial topic. In my defense, (mis)usage of language can lead to quite unpleasant implications, as the theoretical history of our movement has shown.

Of course, there's also the fact I have to work with what you give me. You did, for whatever reason, fail to address some of the points (for example, the whole corruption thing implying universal morality).

If you think this discussion has run its course, fair enough. If, on the other hand, you have desire to continue it, I'd still ask you to respond to the relevant points.

Sinister Cultural Marxist

23rd March 2013, 20:27

People can generally grasp materialist arguments when it comes to physical sciences, they may not be able to specifically explain the evolution of some specific species over time, it doesn't mean they necissarily have an accurate view of it (like mistakenly thinking man evolved from chimps). People may not know how to rebuild an engine, but they probably realize it's mechanical in nature and not run supernaturally or because it wills itself to run. But where culture pushes an alternative explaination, the understanding can be misdirected by the ideological explaination. Evolution is an example of that for the evangelical subculture. Pop-culture and even some mainstream science promotes idealist explainations for things, this is especially true when it comes to the economy.

Idealist views are not more or less graspable than materialist views. With the economy part of the difficulty is that as individuals on a daily basis we do interact with the market as induvidual workers selling our labor and being consumers of commodities. This daily-level helps bolster the classical idealist explainations for capitalism. But out of the conditions of capitalism, workers are sometimes compelled or drawn to struggle and that's when idealist notions come into conflict with material realities and this is part of how consiousness develops. It's not automatic and it helps if there are people and organizations that have prepared and have studied strategies and looked deeper into understanding the world (which is why we're all here I suppose). But potentially with struggles, people can come to an new understanding.

Actually I think most people mix idealist and materialist beliefs because it's simply easier to explain the world that way. It's also intuitive, since our mind seems at first glance to be somehow independent from or metaphysically distinct from matter, and ideas seem to behave in ways different from physical objects. Philosophers such as Descartes and others picked up on this fact. Of course, Cartesian dualism is no longer seen as a particularly justified viewpoint, but the psychological and metaphysical intuitions that lead to it remain. And unless you're a strict determinist, it's hard (but not necessarily impossible) to do away with the intuition that our ideas are something which have creative force and seem to have some kind of ontological separateness from material reality (that is the value of Marx arguing that ideas are conditioned but not determined by reality).

Again, I don't think many Marxists today actually understand the intuitions that drive people to idealist thinking. Marx did because he spent years wrestling with a response to Hegelianism and Liberalism and was a philosophical genius but most Marxists today use idealism as a stupid straw man or an ad hominem line (its almost seems worse than being called bourgeois!)

People can have contradictory ideas and still act on a reasonable basis. I don't think that tons of workers who had been religious will suddenly become aethiests because of class struggle alone (though in countries where there is a strong church-state connection, sometimes this does happen, but it's due to these circumstances). I'm sure pleanty of workers who believe in Jesus or whatever will hold that belief at the same time they are standing on the working class side of the barricades. I'm speaking more of idealism when it comes to the decisive factors of class struggle. So in a revolution, many people who had believed that capital could be negotiated with will have necissarily come to the conclusion that it was worker's power or nothing due to the circumstances they would have been faced with. Not everyone will know how to explain commodity fetishism in detail - or at all really.

Your argument sounds to me like you are saying that people can be idealist as long as when it comes to what they do, they act based on material factors. Well, ok then. Many people will and do because humans have the ability to hold contradictory ideas at once.Actually my position is a little stronger, although I am not explicitly stating it I guess - idealists might actually grasp some things that many materialists wouldn't depending on the issue or the particular idealist and materialist ideologies in question. During the cultural revolution in China, there were these atrocious struggle sessions which consisted of taking a person with some supposedly (often minor) value which seemed bourgeois at face value to some soulless Chinese bureaucrat (only the bourgeoisie has puppies! etc) and dragging them out to get abuse hurled at them for hours (with possibly varying levels of corporal punishment being involved). Presumably, it was a group of people who saw themselves as materialists who proposed such a ridiculous, violent and repressive strategy of social change. It seems like a simplistic application of materialism overlooks a lot which an idealist might get more intuitively, for instance how these actions actually damage the reputation and credibility of Communism and Communist revolution. I'm not saying all materialists would support such things and all idealists would oppose it, but I think such situations play more easily into various idealist beliefs about morality and how human beliefs develop over time than materialist frameworks.

While some materialists seem to have an effective understanding of the social implications of morality and ideology, many do not at all and see any such talk as an admission of idealism or dualism. The religious socialists and liberation theologians (because they actually are idealists who see that there is some kind of ideal way in which the world should be, independent of material conditions) are keenly aware of how these things play into a movement's legitimacy. Take the Shining Path and the EZLN as two opposing examples of this. The Shining Path was clearly oblivious to any moral critique. They would kill 70 peasant women and children simply because a snitch was from the village. Why should they concern themselves with petty moral questions of course? Only whinging idealists would care about questions of whether it was right or wrong to kill a pregnant woman or a child. Yet the Shining Path increasingly terrified the peasants that they claimed to be supporting, their leadership was arrested and the remaining guerrillas were driven into the jungle. The EZLN on the other hand, being influenced by critical tendencies in both materialism (including the same Maoist ideology of the Shining Path) and idealism, gave weapons to peasants so that they could defend themselves if the guerrillas ever went massacring civilians. In addition, when their constituents, the Catholic church and the people of Mexico asked for a negotiated cease fire, they responded. They had a strong grasp of the social forces at play in a way that the Shining Path never did, despite all this "idealist hogwash" that informed much of their movement's ideology. Peru and Mexico are very different countries, but I think that there's sill a lesson there in that the EZLN with its compassionate and moral approach actually had more success in liberating a region of the country.

Also, I've noticed, many Marxists come out of the closet as idealists as soon as topics of racism, sexism and so on come into play. Materialism explains how these come to be, but it doesn't give any kind of normative account. Materialism is descriptive at its heart - it shows how capitalism creates racism but it doesn't explain how we should be instead. Yet Leftists all seem to have some kind of normative ideal at heart which they want to corral all other Leftists into following. They are fundamentally right in saying racism is wrong (and not just an impractical position) but it is still an idealist argument.

More interestingly for me, the liberation theologians and religious socialists may well have better advice for how to live. Marxists ignore "lifestyle" as a serious issue and go so far as to mock anyone who brings up that it might be better or worse to live a certain way (of course, these Marxists are all hypocrites because you could bet that they would berate a fellow Marxist naive enough to join the CPUSA, or greedy enough to become a banker, even though these are "lifestyle choices"). As soon as you mention "lifestyle" or some equivalent term, people assume that you're some kind of naive hippy saying "The revolution starts ... in there *points to a heart*" (because of course caring about oneself and one's society are somehow mutually exclusive). That's not a problem for Marxism and Marxist revolution, because revolution happens on a social scale as a matter of organization and class struggle, and not an individual one of struggle against temptations, sins or whatever else. Yet as far as being a long-lived, healthy, happy person with good family relations, various forms of idealism all seem to function quite well.

What's interesting about the Marxist perspective on lifestyle is that it recognizes how material conditions drive our views on it. However, despite that, it doesn't really care to offer an alternative lifestyle aside from that of a "revolutionary". That is beyond the scope of Marxism.

So in a revolution, many people who had believed that capital could be negotiated with will have necissarily come to the conclusion that it was worker's power or nothing due to the circumstances they would have been faced with. Not everyone will know how to explain commodity fetishism in detail - or at all really.

This is true. Liberal idealism will go to the graveyard of history and it will not be because everyone understands the critique of it. Not all forms of idealism are liberal, however. You could, of course, have a Buddhist Communist or a Christian Anarchist.

Your argument sounds to me like you are saying that people can be idealist as long as when it comes to what they do, they act based on material factors. Well, ok then. Many people will and do because humans have the ability to hold contradictory ideas at once.

These beliefs are not contradictory unless:

(1) Marxism is viewed as a dogma, and not as a set of theories for explaining human relations

(2) We view any attempt at having two realms as a form of incoherent metaphysical dualism

(3) One's ideas support social hierarchy and stratification. If there is an egalitarian idealist, where would the contradiction lie? We're not living in the 1800s where all the "utopian socialists" had their utopian philosophies instead of material science. Idealism in 2013 is not the idealism of the 1800s which Marx and Engels responded to.

Lucretia

24th March 2013, 02:03

The question for the anarchist is, how can the accountability be retained over time? It doesn't matter that the delegation of authority implies accountability because that implication is not historically inert.

I think you are giving anarchists too much credit by saying that is their question. They don't ask the question at all. They assume an answer to it -- that delegation of authority creates a tendency on the part of the delegate to try to forge his or her own independent source for power. It's kind of Nietzschean, really, when you think about it. Or perhaps even Michelsian (Robert Michels was a fascist theorist who, tellingly enough, had formerly been a member of the SPD and a syndicalist). So the degeneration of the October Revolution, for example, tends to be viewed in these cartoonish ways depicting Lenin and his evil motives of wanting a "state capitalist revolution" as *the* driving force. Also notice the "great man" approach to history this entails, which is characteristic of fascism, a supremely petty-bourgeois ideology.

Jimmie Higgins

24th March 2013, 10:33

Actually I think most people mix idealist and materialist beliefs because it's simply easier to explain the world that way.Again, I don't think idealism is any easier or harder to grasp than materialism - I think material explainations are harder when the domninant culture pushes idealist notions instead. So it's just as easy to believe that men and women act as they do due to culture and historical circumstance (since these behaviors change based on cultures or time-periods) but the problem is that from science down to pop-culture there are millions of explainations relying on some kind of concept of "inherent masculinity or femininity". It is not hard for people today to believe that black people are inherently no different from white people in terms of aptatude or whatnot, but 50 years ago this would be a hard sell - not because of the ideas themselves but because of all the competing ideas and the dominant social ideas of the time.

Actually my position is a little stronger, although I am not explicitly stating it I guess - idealists might actually grasp some things that many materialists wouldn't depending on the issue or the particular idealist and materialist ideologies in question. During the cultural revolution in China, there were these atrocious struggle sessions which consisted of taking a person with some supposedly (often minor) value which seemed bourgeois at face value to some soulless Chinese bureaucrat (only the bourgeoisie has puppies! etc) and dragging them out to get abuse hurled at them for hours (with possibly varying levels of corporal punishment being involved). Presumably, it was a group of people who saw themselves as materialists who proposed such a ridiculous, violent and repressive strategy of social change. They also called themselves communists, so I guess we should all give up? Using science or materialist thinking can be used as an excuse to do things for other reason just like anything else. The probelm in this example isn't materialism but political repression to bolster a minority rule. Even if it wasn't, it's idealist to think that if someone has yuppie-tastes, these tastes will lead to capitalist relations - but I don't think that was ultimately the reason behind doing such things. A materialist attempt to end bougoise influence would be to systematically smash capitalist relations in favor of working class democratic coordination, not go after induviduals for "thought-crimes" essentially.

While some materialists seem to have an effective understanding of the social implications of morality and ideology, many do not at all and see any such talk as an admission of idealism or dualism. The religious socialists and liberation theologians (because they actually are idealists who see that there is some kind of ideal way in which the world should be, independent of material conditions) are keenly aware of how these things play into a movement's legitimacy.The idealist take on social change would be that only Jesus can make a just world, or if people just had the right ideas or values we'd have a just world. If catholic workers are striking and organizing, then their religious idealism is not counter-posed to a material understanding of the "here and now" of class struggle.

This is what I'm talking about as far as when idealism becomes a barrier or makes us less effective.

Also, I've noticed, many Marxists come out of the closet as idealists as soon as topics of racism, sexism and so on come into play. Materialism explains how these come to be, but it doesn't give any kind of normative account. Materialism is descriptive at its heart - it shows how capitalism creates racism but it doesn't explain how we should be instead. Yet Leftists all seem to have some kind of normative ideal at heart which they want to corral all other Leftists into following. They are fundamentally right in saying racism is wrong (and not just an impractical position) but it is still an idealist argument.But explaining where this comes from isn't just an intellectual excercize - it informs how and why racism should be fought. Without this materialist understanding, racism and sexism just sort of becomes muddled in with general antagonism in society; this allows right-wingers to claim that there is racism against whites or anti-rich attitudes are equally "unethical" and just as divisive and harmful. A materialist understanding roots these systmeic and persistant oppressions to how society operates as a whole: anti-racism and anti-sexism then are essential to ending class domnination because these are tools used by the ruling class to rule us all ultimately.

More interestingly for me, the liberation theologians and religious socialists may well have better advice for how to live. Marxists ignore "lifestyle" as a serious issue and go so far as to mock anyone who brings up that it might be better or worse to live a certain way (of course, these Marxists are all hypocrites because you could bet that they would berate a fellow Marxist naive enough to join the CPUSA, or greedy enough to become a banker, even though these are "lifestyle choices").I like lifestyles and subcultures, what I reject is the idea that this is a viable way to fight capital.

As soon as you mention "lifestyle" or some equivalent term, people assume that you're some kind of naive hippy saying "The revolution starts ... in there *points to a heart*" (because of course caring about oneself and one's society are somehow mutually exclusive). That's not a problem for Marxism and Marxist revolution, because revolution happens on a social scale as a matter of organization and class struggle, and not an individual one of struggle against temptations, sins or whatever else. Yet as far as being a long-lived, healthy, happy person with good family relations, various forms of idealism all seem to function quite well.Quite well at helping us cope under capitalism? Well sure, there are things induviduals can or have to do in their lives in order to survive, but again, does this help us actuall fight or gain an understanding of how to fight? In my view, ultimately no and it lends itself to many of the same economic assumptions as capitalist classical econ (consumerism, supply and demand, etc).

What's interesting about the Marxist perspective on lifestyle is that it recognizes how material conditions drive our views on it. However, despite that, it doesn't really care to offer an alternative lifestyle aside from that of a "revolutionary". That is beyond the scope of Marxism.No I think the marxist perspective is that in order for people to really choose a lifestyle that best suits them, we need to end capitalism which keeps people in social relations that bow to the demands of capital and keep most people workers where our lifestyle choices are constrained.

MP5

25th March 2013, 08:55

If power inherently corrupts then there's no point in being a revolutionary who wants the self-emancipation of the working class because this can only come through mass-power of workers struggling for their collective interests.

"Power" is not a thing in of itself: does the existance of prisons cause repression, or are prisons created by the ruling class in order to aid in repression? Are imperialist militaries the cause of imperial conflicts, or are imperialist rivalries and the need to dominate other markets and populations the reason for military power?

Hmm this got me thinking actually. It is not so much power i am against as what is worker self emancipation if not power of the individual? It is only when revolutionaries form a state, centralize that power and turn it into a institution that they become corrupt and the whole thing goes to shit. Essentially this is when they make the turn from revolutionaries to just another despot who has overstayed their welcome. Hence why the crushing of the state needs to be done in order to do away with the class system once and for all. There is hardly any sense in going through all the trouble a violence of a revolution and then having nothing to show for it but a different ruling class by a different name and a new flag now is there? Which is exactly what happened in every Stalinist revolution that has happened and that is not worth the blood of one revolutionary. They never give up their power or dismantle these "provisional" governments because they like to hold onto their new found consolidated power as it does corrupt what they set out to do in the first place which is to achieve a classless and stateless society based upon Communist principles. Funny that they never make it past the state capitalism phase :rolleyes:

If power corrupts, why hasn't it ever corrupted the bourgeois? Surely given their lengthy hold on 'power' it would have corrupted their judgement and lead them to betray their class interests, no?

They are corrupt from the get go. Capitalism is in and of itself a corrupt ideology. Their class interests are only to line their pockets and they are not going to shoot themselves in the foot by letting Socialists of any kind take any power away from them now are they? Besides Capitalism is built upon corruption and you can't make someone corrupt if they are already so.

Art Vandelay

25th March 2013, 08:58

They are corrupt from the get go. Capitalism is in and of itself a corrupt ideology. Their class interests are only to line their pockets and they are not going to shoot themselves in the foot by letting Socialists of any kind take any power away from them now are they? Besides Capitalism is built upon corruption and you can't make someone corrupt if they are already so.

Then you're definition of corrupt presupposes some sort of universal morality, no?

MP5

25th March 2013, 09:32

Then you're definition of corrupt presupposes some sort of universal morality, no?

Nope not entirely as morals are all relevant and even change from person to person within the same society and the same background. But it would be hard to argue that Capitalism is anything but a inherently corrupt ideology. What else do you call a economic system that exploits people in order to survive?

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

25th March 2013, 12:15

Actually I think most people mix idealist and materialist beliefs because it's simply easier to explain the world that way. It's also intuitive, since our mind seems at first glance to be somehow independent from or metaphysically distinct from matter, and ideas seem to behave in ways different from physical objects.

The idea that the mind is "independent from of metaphysically distinct from matter" is more recent than people assume, and it is not found in all, or even most, cultures. It is almost completely absent from Chinese philosophy, for example, the exceptions being due to the influence of Buddhism.

So it seems that many if not most people do not have idealist intuitions; in fact, this common assumption that they do is probably the result of philosophers projecting their Cartesian hangups on everyone else.

And unless you're a strict determinist, it's hard (but not necessarily impossible) to do away with the intuition that our ideas are something which have creative force and seem to have some kind of ontological separateness from material reality (that is the value of Marx arguing that ideas are conditioned but not determined by reality).

Ideas can have an effect and not be immaterial; in fact it would be odd if they were material and did not affect the rest of the material world.

Again, I don't think many Marxists today actually understand the intuitions that drive people to idealist thinking. Marx did because he spent years wrestling with a response to Hegelianism and Liberalism and was a philosophical genius but most Marxists today use idealism as a stupid straw man or an ad hominem line (its almost seems worse than being called bourgeois!)

Pointing out idealist deviations from Marxist materialism is not an ad hominem argument.

Actually my position is a little stronger, although I am not explicitly stating it I guess - idealists might actually grasp some things that many materialists wouldn't depending on the issue or the particular idealist and materialist ideologies in question. During the cultural revolution in China, there were these atrocious struggle sessions which consisted of taking a person with some supposedly (often minor) value which seemed bourgeois at face value to some soulless Chinese bureaucrat (only the bourgeoisie has puppies! etc) and dragging them out to get abuse hurled at them for hours (with possibly varying levels of corporal punishment being involved). Presumably, it was a group of people who saw themselves as materialists who proposed such a ridiculous, violent and repressive strategy of social change. It seems like a simplistic application of materialism overlooks a lot which an idealist might get more intuitively, for instance how these actions actually damage the reputation and credibility of Communism and Communist revolution. I'm not saying all materialists would support such things and all idealists would oppose it, but I think such situations play more easily into various idealist beliefs about morality and how human beliefs develop over time than materialist frameworks.

The proletariat participated in those struggle sections en masse; so it seems that in China at least, the "credibility and reputation" of Communism was not damaged. Do you think communists should really care about the attitude of petite bourgeois moralists and bourgeois liberals abroad? The people that can tolerate only dead communists and proletarian struggles crushed in massacres and bourgeois terror?

While some materialists seem to have an effective understanding of the social implications of morality and ideology, many do not at all and see any such talk as an admission of idealism or dualism. The religious socialists and liberation theologians (because they actually are idealists who see that there is some kind of ideal way in which the world should be, independent of material conditions) are keenly aware of how these things play into a movement's legitimacy. Take the Shining Path and the EZLN as two opposing examples of this. The Shining Path was clearly oblivious to any moral critique. They would kill 70 peasant women and children simply because a snitch was from the village. Why should they concern themselves with petty moral questions of course? Only whinging idealists would care about questions of whether it was right or wrong to kill a pregnant woman or a child. Yet the Shining Path increasingly terrified the peasants that they claimed to be supporting, their leadership was arrested and the remaining guerrillas were driven into the jungle. The EZLN on the other hand, being influenced by critical tendencies in both materialism (including the same Maoist ideology of the Shining Path) and idealism, gave weapons to peasants so that they could defend themselves if the guerrillas ever went massacring civilians. In addition, when their constituents, the Catholic church and the people of Mexico asked for a negotiated cease fire, they responded. They had a strong grasp of the social forces at play in a way that the Shining Path never did, despite all this "idealist hogwash" that informed much of their movement's ideology. Peru and Mexico are very different countries, but I think that there's sill a lesson there in that the EZLN with its compassionate and moral approach actually had more success in liberating a region of the country.

This is ridiculous. Do you think that Marxist disregard ideology and consciousness? But there is an entire corpus of Marxist work on the subject. Marxist militants can and should consider what effect their actions have on the consciousness of the proletariat and allied groups, but they can not subordinate themselves to bourgeois morality and seek the approval of the exponents of that morality, as you seem to suggest.

Also, I've noticed, many Marxists come out of the closet as idealists as soon as topics of racism, sexism and so on come into play. Materialism explains how these come to be, but it doesn't give any kind of normative account. Materialism is descriptive at its heart - it shows how capitalism creates racism but it doesn't explain how we should be instead. Yet Leftists all seem to have some kind of normative ideal at heart which they want to corral all other Leftists into following. They are fundamentally right in saying racism is wrong (and not just an impractical position) but it is still an idealist argument.

That might make sense if communists made arguments that sexism and similar phenomena are "objectively" wrong regardless of class etc. They do not, if they are consistent at least. But it is in the interest of oppressed groups to destroy oppression.

More interestingly for me, the liberation theologians and religious socialists may well have better advice for how to live. Marxists ignore "lifestyle" as a serious issue and go so far as to mock anyone who brings up that it might be better or worse to live a certain way (of course, these Marxists are all hypocrites because you could bet that they would berate a fellow Marxist naive enough to join the CPUSA, or greedy enough to become a banker, even though these are "lifestyle choices"). As soon as you mention "lifestyle" or some equivalent term, people assume that you're some kind of naive hippy saying "The revolution starts ... in there *points to a heart*" (because of course caring about oneself and one's society are somehow mutually exclusive). That's not a problem for Marxism and Marxist revolution, because revolution happens on a social scale as a matter of organization and class struggle, and not an individual one of struggle against temptations, sins or whatever else. Yet as far as being a long-lived, healthy, happy person with good family relations, various forms of idealism all seem to function quite well.

What's interesting about the Marxist perspective on lifestyle is that it recognizes how material conditions drive our views on it. However, despite that, it doesn't really care to offer an alternative lifestyle aside from that of a "revolutionary". That is beyond the scope of Marxism.

Revolutionary socialism aims to change society, not make individuals happy. Not to mention how obnoxious those that preach the "correct" lifestyle are.

(2) We view any attempt at having two realms as a form of incoherent metaphysical dualism

What else could it be? These "two realms" theories are nothing but an attempt to insulate emotionally satisfying ideas from scientific criticism.

MP5

25th March 2013, 13:29

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

25th March 2013, 13:47

The whole materialists ridiculing anyone who seems to have the slightest tendency of idealism gets old rather quick...

Defending materialism and Marxism from idealist distortions is of extreme importance; we do not denounce idealists in order to ridicule them but in order to preserve the scientific mode of analysis specific to Marxism, that idealism revises and denies.

...and so does the whole amoral approach that these new Marxists take.

"New Marxists" such as Marx, Lenin and Trotsky?

If say the Bolsheviks had solely been materialists then they would never have even tried to forge ahead for a socialist revolution as know one thought that it could be done in Russia. Lenin himself admitted that Russia was indeed a poor place to start a revolution and basically everyone thought that the first socialist revolution would take place in Germany or hell even the UK as the material conditions favored it far better in those countries then in Russia.

Lenin though the revolution was possible in Russia for reasons he outlined in his work on imperialism and so on; these were all materialist reasons (the accumulation of contradictions, the theory of the "weakest link" and so on), and Lenin mercilessly denounced anyone that thought the material reality will bend to their revolutionary elan.

Also the people who claim to be pure materialists are hypocritical to the bone as if you went by pure material conditions you would not be Communists in the first place. Instead you would just fall in line and be nice Capitalists.

"If we went by pure material conditions"? Material conditions, which can to the best of my knowledge be neither pure nor impure, have placed most of us in oppressed and exploited groups, and by recognising the laws of motion of history, as it were, and struggling for proletarian emancipation, we are struggling for our own interest.

Jimmie Higgins

25th March 2013, 13:53

As to the whole amoral approach to Marxism i don't think removing morality from Communism is a good thing at all. After all if we where amoral would we be socialists at all? No we would be like the opportunistic capitalists who think absolutely nothing of fucking over their fellow man. After all what use is morality?Well I'm not against having ethics, but I just think they have to be based on political and material concerns, not an ideal.

I doubt very much that if we all shred any bit of idealism we had in us to bits that any of us would be socialists of any kind. After all are we not Socialists because we are all striving towards a better world free of capitalist rule?Yeah, but revolutionary workers need to have more precise knowledge about things if they are to rule society and that's why I think a materialist understanding is important. Based on morals, anyone can almost justify anything - you know the whole "moral highground" thing.

MP5

25th March 2013, 14:43

Defending materialism and Marxism from idealist distortions is of extreme importance; we do not denounce idealists in order to ridicule them but in order to preserve the scientific mode of analysis specific to Marxism, that idealism revises and denies.

You could have fooled me on that one.

"New Marxists" such as Marx, Lenin and Trotsky?
Since when did Marx, Lenin or Trotsky claim to be without morals? Lenin certainly hated the brutality of the tsars as he saw it first hand and as we all know it hit rather close to home for him. Both Lenin and Trotsky saw their fair share of brutality and i think it would be rather stupid to deny that this did not shape the way they looked at the world and that this did not atleast play a part in why they wanted to turn the world on it's head. Or atleast this may have played a role in starting them down the road to revolution.

Lenin though the revolution was possible in Russia for reasons he outlined in his work on imperialism and so on; these were all materialist reasons (the accumulation of contradictions, the theory of the "weakest link" and so on), and Lenin mercilessly denounced anyone that thought the material reality will bend to their revolutionary elan.
He thought it was possible yes but everyone including him thought that Germany was a far better bet. I certainly would not have placed my money on Russia being the first country to have a socialist revolution. But then again if i was as intelligent as Lenin i wouldnt be sitting here typing on this computer this morning.

"If we went by pure material conditions"? Material conditions, which can to the best of my knowledge be neither pure nor impure, have placed most of us in oppressed and exploited groups, and by recognising the laws of motion of history, as it were, and struggling for proletarian emancipation, we are struggling for our own interest.

I worded that rather badly i admit. I meant materialism without any idealism whatsoever. If we are all struggling for our own self interests why not just roll in the mud with the rest of the capitalist pigs and fuck over everyone without any qualms to get ahead? We are not so much struggling for our own self interests as rather struggling for the interests of the working class as a whole. There is a difference between the 2. Would you say rat out your fellow comrades if caught by the police because the material conditions where all in favor of you sitting in a prison cell staring at 4 walls for the next few years? Or work as a scab and undermine your fellow workers all to line your pockets? I hope not anyway. I think that if we didn't have some idealism towards a better world free of capitalist exploitation we would not be socialists.

Rurkel

25th March 2013, 14:44

MP5

25th March 2013, 14:52

<Proletarian terror hat on> A revolutionary evaluates Sendero Luminoso's actions from a proletarian materialist perspective, and no matter how many "pleading pregnant women" they killed, he praises them if they furthered the proletarian cause, condemns them if they harmed it, and abstains from judgement if it wasn't either harmed or furthered. A liberal-pacifist-humanist-social-democrat, however, immediately starts whining about "cruelty" and "pleading women ad babies". Proletarian revolutionaries mock and despise liberal-pacifist-humanist-social-democrats. They know that the proletarian revolutionary terror will be as cruel and kill as many pleading pregnant women and babies as necessary for the revolution to triumph over reaction.

Please do not compare scum like the shinning path to the Bolsheviks! The Bolsheviks sought to strike terror into the hearts of the capitalists while the shinning path did nothing but strike terror into the peasant population of Peru all while lining their pockets with cocaine money. Granted i have nothing against exploiting capitalism to further the revolution but the shinning path are little more then a drug gang who terrorized the very people they where claiming to help.

Rurkel

25th March 2013, 14:59

MP5

25th March 2013, 15:19

I didn't compare them to the Bolsheviks, I merely used them as an example of how a proletarian materialist should evaluate them, since Sinister Cultural Marxist, a poster that often subscribes to liberal-humanist-bourgeois-social-democratic concepts, presented a wrong example of a proper critique. If Shining Path should be criticized, it should be criticized from a revolutionary standpoint, not from a liberal-humanist-bourgeois-social-democratic one. A revolutionary critique may point out that their actions negatively affected the proletarian consciousness of the people of Peru, harming proletarian cause, and thus, are to be denounced. But liberal-humanist-bourgeois-social-democrats criticize it merely for "massacring" "precious human beings" or "pleading women" or other moralistic nonsense. A genuine proletarian revolution will massacre reactionaries with cruelty and ruthlessness, no matter how much they "plead". That's what liberal-humanist-bourgeois-social-democrats completely fail to understand!

Yes but who the hell takes those pacifists seriously anyway? I will never understand the ideology of pacifism as it is nothing but mindless. I would not kill a working class person for say robbing a few bucks off me if they needed it (though they would get little but practice off me on most days unfortunately) but i would not have much of a problem with cutting a fascists head off and putting it on a pike simply because they where a fascist.

I don't believe in blood shed for the sake of it as that is rather counterproductive and i hardly think raping and cutting up women like the shinning path did accomplishes anything other then demoralizing the very people they claimed to represent.

Rurkel

25th March 2013, 15:28

Yes but who the hell takes those pacifists seriously anyway?There're many bourgeois-social-democrat-liberal-pacifists on that web site :(

but i would not have much of a problem with cutting a fascists head off and putting it on a pike simply because they where a fascist. Big deal - every bourgeois-social-democrat-liberal-pacifist is against fascism. You should have the same reaction to doing the same thing to every bourgeois who does not help the revolution, to every "free speech" bourgie yapper that opens his mouth against the proletarian revolution. No mercy to the class enemy, mercy is the favourite word of bourgeois-social-democrat-liberal-pacifists. Like I elaborated in my poem, my glorious and admirable poem, that deserves to be cut out in stone and reproduced in every square after the revolution,

Humanists consider us "too ruthless",
"Human beings!", they exclaim in passion.
But you either help the revolution,
Or your life is worth precisely nothing.

Proletarians further revolutionary aims by their very existence, unless they actively work to undermine the revolution, since the revolution is a proletarian affair. The bourgeoisie doesn't, and, thus, worthless in all but a few exceptional cases.

Do you agree? Or are you a bourgeois-social-democrat-liberal-pacifist, after all?

MP5

25th March 2013, 15:34

There're many bourgeois-social-democrat-liberal-pacifists on that web site :(

Big deal - every bourgeois-social-democrat-liberal-pacifist is against fascism. You should have the same reaction to doing the same thing to every bourgeois who does not help the revolution. No mercy to the class enemy, mercy is the favourite word of bourgeois-social-democrat-liberal-pacifists. Like I elaborated in my poem, my glorious and admirable poem, that deserves to be cut out in stone and reproduced in every square after the revolution,

Humanists consider us "too ruthless",
"Human beings!", they exclaim in passion.
But you either help the revolution,
Or your life is worth precisely nothing.

Again i would see no problem using the bourgeois as target practice. I think the notion of revolution without blood shed is rather idealistic myself to say the least.

And i meant who takes these pacifists seriously not that there aren't enough of them on here. If we used their logic the world would be 1 big fascist state by now.

Rurkel

25th March 2013, 15:37

Again i would see no problem using the bourgeois as target practice. This is to certify that
_______MP5___________
Had successfully passed the
"Prove that you are not a
liberal-bourgeois-pacifist-
social-democrat" test
and can be considered
a committed proletarian
revolutionary

Signed_______Rurkel

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

25th March 2013, 16:26

You could have fooled me on that one.

Either demonstrate that idealists have been ridiculed as persons on this thread, or similar threads on this site, or stop spreading slander.

Since when did Marx, Lenin or Trotsky claim to be without morals? Lenin certainly hated the brutality of the tsars as he saw it first hand and as we all know it hit rather close to home for him. Both Lenin and Trotsky saw their fair share of brutality and i think it would be rather stupid to deny that this did not shape the way they looked at the world and that this did not atleast play a part in why they wanted to turn the world on it's head. Or atleast this may have played a role in starting them down the road to revolution.

Trotsky dedicated his article "Their Morals and Ours" (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/morals/morals.htm) to the question; if you have the time for it, I highly recommend it. If not, well, the following paragraph is widely quoted:

Whoever does not care to return to Moses, Christ or Mohammed; whoever is not satisfied with eclectic hodge-podges must acknowledge that morality is a product of social development; that there is nothing invariable about it; that it serves social interests; that these interests are contradictory; that morality more than any other form of ideology has a class character.

And Trotsky terms this recognition of the class nature of morality "amoralism", appropriating the term used by the liberals and by the confused centrist parties of the London Bureau. Lenin and Marx shared this amoralism, of course, as every consistent materialist does. Lenin, for example, writes:

In what sense do we reject ethics, reject morality? In the sense given to it by the bourgeoisie, who based ethics on God's commandments. On this point we, of course, say that we do not believe in God, and that we know perfectly well that the clergy, the landowners and the bourgeoisie invoked the name of God so as to further their own interests as exploiters. Or, instead of basing ethics on the commandments of morality, on the commandments of God, they based it on idealist or semi-idealist phrases, which always amounted to something very similar to God's commandments.
We reject any morality based on extra-human and extra-class concepts. We say that this is deception, dupery, stultification of the workers and peasants in the interests of the landowners and capitalists.

Whereas Marx wrote little about ethics, but approved of the following paragraph attacking the purveyor of universal moral truths E. Dühring:

If, then, we have not made much progress with truth and error, we can make even less with good and evil. This opposition manifests itself exclusively in the domain of morals, that is, a domain belonging to the history of mankind, and it is precisely in this field that final and ultimate truths are most sparsely sown. The conceptions of good and evil have varied so much from nation to nation and from age to age that they have often been in direct contradiction to each other. — But all the same, someone may object, good is not evil and evil is not good, if good is confused with evil there is an end to all morality, and everyone can do as he pleases. — This is also, stripped of all oracular phrases, Herr Dühring's opinion. But the matter cannot be so simply disposed of. If it were such an easy business there would certainly be no dispute at all over good and evil; everyone would know what was good and what was bad. But how do things stand today? What morality is preached to us today? There is first Christian-feudal morality, inherited from earlier religious times; and this is divided, essentially, into a Catholic and a Protestant morality, each of which has no lack of subdivisions, from the Jesuit-Catholic and Orthodox-Protestant to loose “enlightened” moralities. Alongside these we find the modern-bourgeois morality and beside it also the proletarian morality of the future, so that in the most advanced European countries alone the past, present and future provide three great groups of moral theories which are in force simultaneously and alongside each other. Which, then, is the true one? Not one of them, in the sense of absolute finality; but certainly that morality contains the maximum elements promising permanence which, in the present, represents the overthrow of the present, represents the future, and that is proletarian morality.

He thought it was possible yes but everyone including him thought that Germany was a far better bet. I certainly would not have placed my money on Russia being the first country to have a socialist revolution. But then again if i was as intelligent as Lenin i wouldnt be sitting here typing on this computer this morning.

How is that relevant? Lenin based his position on the possibility of the revolution in Russia on a materialist analysis of the social conditions; that other theoreticians disagreed with him does not demonstrate otherwise - quite the opposite, actually. Disagreement and debate is an integral part of scientific analysis.

I worded that rather badly i admit. I meant materialism without any idealism whatsoever. If we are all struggling for our own self interests why not just roll in the mud with the rest of the capitalist pigs and fuck over everyone without any qualms to get ahead? We are not so much struggling for our own self interests as rather struggling for the interests of the working class as a whole. There is a difference between the 2. Would you say rat out your fellow comrades if caught by the police because the material conditions where all in favor of you sitting in a prison cell staring at 4 walls for the next few years? Or work as a scab and undermine your fellow workers all to line your pockets? I hope not anyway. I think that if we didn't have some idealism towards a better world free of capitalist exploitation we would not be socialists.

The class interest of the proletariat is in the long run the personal interest of the proletarians and of other oppressed groups.

Lucretia

26th March 2013, 02:42

The whole materialists ridiculing anyone who seems to have the slightest tendency of idealism gets old rather quick and so does the whole amoral approach that these new Marxists take. If say the Bolsheviks had solely been materialists then they would never have even tried to forge ahead for a socialist revolution as know one thought that it could be done in Russia. Lenin himself admitted that Russia was indeed a poor place to start a revolution and basically everyone thought that the first socialist revolution would take place in Germany or hell even the UK as the material conditions favored it far better in those countries then in Russia. I have a feeling that these Marxists ridiculing people for being idealists would have laughed at Lenin for even thinking that a socialist revolution could take place in Russia. These materialists would have packed it in and just given up. The same with China pretty much as after all neither Russia or China where advanced enough to have socialist revolutions. Also the people who claim to be pure materialists are hypocritical to the bone as if you went by pure material conditions you would not be Communists in the first place. Instead you would just fall in line and be nice Capitalists. This might explain why so many ex Marxists who are now Liberals or Tories just pass off their Marxist phase as youthful idealism :grin: . They simply become cynical and give up on the whole thing.

As to the whole amoral approach to Marxism i don't think removing morality from Communism is a good thing at all. After all if we where amoral would we be socialists at all? No we would be like the opportunistic capitalists who think absolutely nothing of fucking over their fellow man. After all what use is morality?

I doubt very much that if we all shred any bit of idealism we had in us to bits that any of us would be socialists of any kind. After all are we not Socialists because we are all striving towards a better world free of capitalist rule?

You are attacking caricatures of materialism so that you can pretend that allotting any importance to ideas makes one an "idealist." You're just wrong, wrong, wrong. Materialism, at least in its Marxian dialectical version, is not the idea that consciousness mechanically reflects some external, objective world that operates entirely independently of human thought. It allows for the importance of human ideas and human choice, but insists on placing these ideas and choices in a definite material context, so that we get a sense of the range of options open to people, what might encourage one decision over another, and what might make some options highly unlikely given the situational logics -- the structured mosaic of ideological and material incentives -- that they are confronting when making their decisions.

So when you are being criticized for being an idealist, you are not being criticized for saying that ideas are important. Marx, who spent decades of his life formulating and writing about ideas, thought they were important, too. But he also thought that what gave his ideas importance was how they corresponded to and in turn might shape the real world, with that real world not being understood as a static entity divorced from human consciousness, but as a constantly changing and contradictory ensemble of human practices and relationships embedded in an unstable distribution of life-giving material resources.

What anarchists have a tendency to do -- and your "contributions" to this thread have been no fucking exception -- is for starting off your political theorizing with these presumably divinely ordained, highly rigid conceptions of right and wrong, and good and bad, and to apply them willy nilly all over the place in a way that shows absolutely no sensitivity to how human agency is, to repeat again, shaped by structures beyond the control of the individual decision makers. So if revolutions cannot immediately match some highly abstract, decontextualized set of dictates, there's no point in undertaking it.

Political struggles by their very nature involve people suppressing other people. The people doing the suppressing need power of a form -- but NOT of a source or a content -- capable of matching the power they are opposing. This involves some amount of centralization of authority, if there is to be any chance of success. And if the power being centralized is democratic in nature, this will involve some delegation of authority. This is the nature of the beast. People sitting atop a highly nasty and exploitative class society don't magically renounce their own power because a lot of people are articulating "good ideas" somewhere out there in the streets. Power concedes nothing. It is brought to its knees by alternative sources of power, once that alternative source has been fashioned into a tool of effective action.

What makes your views idealist is that they don't' take account of how power operates, what their actual and potential sources are, or -- most importantly of all -- how certain forms of power-generating social relations create certain types of people, so that the banal one-liners about the corrupting influence of power on "people" are so abstract and decontextualized (from the material roots of power in social relations) that they are meaningless at best, anti-communist at worst.

Your "anarchist" ideas on revolution all just a hodgepodge of theoretical confusion, cynicism, and political paralysis. That you choose to top it off with your petty sniping and arrogance is just too much. This is all I am going to say on the matter.

MP5

26th March 2013, 03:22

You are attacking caricatures of materialism so that you can pretend that allotting any importance to ideas makes one an "idealist." You're just wrong, wrong, wrong. Materialism, at least in its Marxian dialectical version, is not the idea that consciousness mechanically reflects some external, objective world that operates entirely independently of human thought. It allows for the importance of human ideas and human choice, but insists on placing these ideas and choices in a definite material context, so that we get a sense of the range of options open to people, what might encourage one decision over another, and what might make some options highly unlikely given the situational logics -- the structured mosaic of ideological and material incentives -- that they are confronting when making their decisions.

So when you are being criticized for being an idealist, you are not being criticized for saying that ideas are important. Marx, who spent decades of his life formulating and writing about ideas, thought they were important, too. But he also thought that what gave his ideas importance was how they corresponded to and in turn might shape the real world, with that real world not being understood as a static entity divorced from human consciousness, but as a constantly changing and contradictory ensemble of human practices and relationships embedded in an unstable distribution of life-giving material resources.

What anarchists have a tendency to do -- and your "contributions" to this thread have been no fucking exception -- is for starting off your political theorizing with these presumably divinely ordained, highly rigid conceptions of right and wrong, and good and bad, and to apply them willy nilly all over the place in a way that shows absolutely no sensitivity to how human agency is, to repeat again, shaped by structures beyond the control of the individual decision makers. So if revolutions cannot immediately match some highly abstract, decontextualized set of dictates, there's no point in undertaking it.

Political struggles by their very nature involve people suppressing other people. The people doing the suppressing need power of a form -- but NOT of a source or a content -- capable of matching the power they are opposing. This involves some amount of centralization of authority, if there is to be any chance of success. And if the power being centralized is democratic in nature, this will involve some delegation of authority. This is the nature of the beast. People sitting atop a highly nasty and exploitative class society don't magically renounce their own power because a lot of people are articulating "good ideas" somewhere out there in the streets. Power concedes nothing. It is brought to its knees by alternative sources of power, once that alternative source has been fashioned into a tool of effective action.

What makes your views idealist is that they don't' take account of how power operates, what their actual and potential sources are, or -- most importantly of all -- how certain forms of power-generating social relations create certain types of people, so that the banal one-liners about the corrupting influence of power on "people" are so abstract and decontextualized (from the material roots of power in social relations) that they are meaningless at best, anti-communist at worst.

Your "anarchist" ideas on revolution all just a hodgepodge of theoretical confusion, cynicism, and political paralysis. That you choose to top it off with your petty sniping and arrogance is just too much. This is all I am going to say on the matter.

I am attacking caricatures of materialism so that i can pretend that allotting any importance to ideas makes one an idealist? Really how so? I was disagreeing with people who attach no importance whatsoever to some basic idea of what people think the world should be or the motivations behind these ideas to begin with. If i even bring this up i seem to get called a idealist so how in the name of fucking christ does what you said make any sense at all? Also how am i anti-communist? Because i don't agree with a trot? Sorry but you guys don't have the monopoly on Marxism and certainly not socialism. If anything your Trotskyist ideas of revolution is nothing more then regurgitated text that was written 100 years ago. What is revolutionary about that? Also show me 1 just 1 revolution where centralizing power did not turn revolutionaries into power hungry bureaucrats? Just 1 now comon? :rolleyes:

Also my sniping is not petty nor am i arrogant when i call someone a fuck head i come right out and say it. Your coming off as the arrogant one here not i.

Fuckit I'm done i haven't the ganja or the patience to deal with this shit and if i say what's really on my mind now it will atleast result in a infraction.