SPGB Euroelection broadcast for Wales

[robbo203]

This will be of interest and, if I'm not mistaken, a historic first for revolutionary socialism in that part of the world

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5sp7SZzDiI&feature=youtu.be

[Stained_Class]

Video is pretty slick. But if you don't mind my asking, what's the historic first you're referring to? Surely other revolutionary socialist groups have run for the EU parliament in Wales?

[Dennis the 'Bloody Peasant']

..not sure how 14 candidates in a Euro election are going to lead to the World Socialism mentioned, but a nice vid compared to other election broadcasts.

[La Guaneña]

..not sure how 14 candidates in a Euro election are going to lead to the World Socialism mentioned, but a nice vid compared to other election broadcasts.


They never said that the Euro elections are gonna magically bring socialism...

If they actually agitate for socialism in electoral campaigns, people here whine that the said campaign won't bring socialism. If they don't, and do a moderate campaign, the same people whine that they are leaving out radical discourse. gah

[VinnieUK]

Video is pretty slick. But if you don't mind my asking, what's the historic first you're referring to? Surely other revolutionary socialist groups have run for the EU parliament in Wales?

I would appreciate a reference. It would be very interesting to see such a broadcast :)

[Comrade Jacob]

Good for them, I guess.

[QueerVanguard]

I mean, it's OK but why is there a conspicuous lack of LGBTQ representation on the video? Like why weren't our interests included in their vision of a better world beyond capitalism? From the looks of it, their World Socialism or whatever they call it seems restricted to a bunch of privileged old white people and one token POC. Not very representative of the world if you ask me. I can tell you that that video wouldn't encourage me to look further into them -- I would just assume they are another group unable to see how they are stuck in a fundamentally patriarchal white supremacist paradigm, and they may be for all I know.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Well, the SPGB explicitly rejected the slogan of an end to the discrimination of lesbians in one of their execrable texts on "women and socialism" (I believe). The best they can muster is "in socialism no group will receive unequal treatment as a result of their gender of sexual preference", a statement any liberal would happily undersign.

But yeah, someone please vote for them, it might keep them quiet a bit.

[QueerVanguard]

Well, the SPGB explicitly rejected the slogan of an end to the discrimination of lesbians in one of their execrable texts on "women and socialism" (I believe). The best they can muster is "in socialism no group will receive unequal treatment as a result of their gender of sexual preference", a statement any liberal would happily undersign.

But yeah, someone please vote for them, it might keep them quiet a bit.

I can't say that I'm all that surprised. I mean, I'm trying to give these folks the benefit of the doubt and just hope they are behaving like most other electoral "Socialist" parties in using opportunistic populist rhetoric as a way to get their candidate's lily-complected, plump derrieres into a parliamentary seat, but I can't help but sense an underlying failure on their part to genuinely understand issues like LGBTQ oppression, sexism, white supremacy and so on. This is one of the main reasons I've stayed out of politics over the years.

[robbo203]

Video is pretty slick. But if you don't mind my asking, what's the historic first you're referring to? Surely other revolutionary socialist groups have run for the EU parliament in Wales?

In the sense of a party political broadcast. Personally, I think this one is like a breath of fresh air, compared to most. As for the other points on this thread, I think you have to be reasonable and bear in mind the time constraints. There is not much you can say in 2 min 40 sec but I think the video pulled it off reasonably well under the circumstances. Good on 'em, I say...

[Stained_Class]

In the sense of a party political broadcast. Personally, I think this one is like a breath of fresh air, compared to most. As for the other points on this thread, I think you have to be reasonable and bear in mind the time constraints. There is not much you can say in 2 min 40 sec but I think the video pulled it off reasonably well under the circumstances. Good on 'em, I say...

You'll have to forgive me for this then, but don't you think that it's a little presumptuous to claim that the SPGB running in an election and releasing a video are "historic first[s] for revolutionary socialism" in Wales and SE England?

[robbo203]

You'll have to forgive me for this then, but don't you think that it's a little presumptuous to claim that the SPGB running in an election and releasing a video are "historic first[s] for revolutionary socialism" in Wales and SE England?

No, once again, the "historic first" relates to the "party political broadcast" bit. I may, of course, be wrong but that is for others to point that out (with the relevant evidence) to show that some other revolutionary socialist party has got there first. I only stated what I believed to be the case but Im quite amenable to being corrected. Its really no big deal as far as Im concerned....

[Red Deathy]

I mean, it's OK but why is there a conspicuous lack of LGBTQ representation on the video? Like why weren't our interests included in their vision of a better world beyond capitalism? From the looks of it, their World Socialism or whatever they call it seems restricted to a bunch of privileged old white people and one token POC. Not very representative of the world if you ask me. I can tell you that that video wouldn't encourage me to look further into them -- I would just assume they are another group unable to see how they are stuck in a fundamentally patriarchal white supremacist paradigm, and they may be for all I know.Can I just ask how you know that none of the talking heads were LGBTQ?

We do, though, concentrate on campaigning for the abolition of the wages system, and don't insist on sticking our oar in to every other campaign that's going. The Socialist Party is a specialist tool for a specialist job.

[whichfinder]

From the looks of it, their World Socialism or whatever they call it seems restricted to a bunch of privileged old white people and one token POC.

Your ageist remark is quite staggering, not to mention inconsistent, considering your concerns about discrimination towards LGBTQ people. You're also completely off track with your suggestion of tokenism.

The comrades who appeared in the video were all volunteers who just happened to be available on the day of the shoot. Their age or colour is totally irrelevant.

[bricolage]

While I generally have little time for the SPGB and find the idea of this being an 'historic first' laughable, when you look at this broadcast by TUSC the one that robbo posted looks fantastic in comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GshJ8vJ3vqU

[robbo203]

While I generally have little time for the SPGB and find the idea of this being an 'historic first' laughable, when you look at this broadcast by TUSC the one that robbo posted looks fantastic in comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GshJ8vJ3vqU

aargh. Once again and not to blow this out of all proportion, my reference to the "historic first" relates to the fact that we are talking about a televised party political broadcast in Wales by a revolutionary socialist party standing for socialism and nothing but. Now that is either true or false. I just dont see where "laugable" comes into the picture. The TUSC video if Im not mistaken was for Scotland not Wales and, yes, in comparison with the SPGB video, is dire

[GiantMonkeyMan]

That TUSC one was made in 2010, when the coalition was first formed, and yeah it's pretty shoddy but I think it was a quickly thrown together job. This is the video made for the local elections this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u8LerPf4e8 It's better, not great but at least it doesn't look like something people in the seventies would be embarrassed about. Plus, I'm in it so it's infinitely more awesome (in the background at one point).

[Rugged Collectivist]

In terms of content the SPGB ad is by far my favorite. But if we're ranking them by presentation then I'd have to put it in last place. It looked like they were trying to sell iPods. I actually like the 2010 TUSC video the best in this regard. But I guess these ads aren't made for me.

[robbo203]

In terms of content the SPGB ad is by far my favorite. But if we're ranking them by presentation then I'd have to put it in last place. It looked like they were trying to sell iPods. I actually like the 2010 TUSC video the best in this regard. But I guess these ads aren't made for me.

Maybe thats the genius behind the SPGB video in this instance - using a particular form of presentation which , lets be frank here, most workers are more familiar with and responsive to, to convey a political message that is thoroughly subversive and revolutionary....;)2

[Red Commissar]

So, will this kind of video be carried on public TV or is it just something they'll keep on social media? I don't know how these kinds of elections work, I'm only used to the way they are run here.

but the video pleasantly surprised me. Some of these parties have a lot of older folk who don't know how to make quality videos, and I was expecting something really bizzare like the UKIP one someone posted here to make fun of because of the production values (besides their dumb views of course).

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Decent broadcast.

Could have been more of a reference to people, though. It didn't really make me feel anything until the last 30 seconds with the corny music, but there you go.

I agree it's a first.

[SmirkerOfTheWorld]

I mean, it's OK but why is there a conspicuous lack of LGBTQ representation on the video? Like why weren't our interests included in their vision of a better world beyond capitalism? From the looks of it, their World Socialism or whatever they call it seems restricted to a bunch of privileged old white people and one token POC. Not very representative of the world if you ask me. I can tell you that that video wouldn't encourage me to look further into them -- I would just assume they are another group unable to see how they are stuck in a fundamentally patriarchal white supremacist paradigm, and they may be for all I know.

Um, how do you know the people on that aren't LGBTQ?

[QueerVanguard]

Um, how do you know the people on that aren't LGBTQ?

If you read carefully what I wrote I said they made no mention of our interests hence we LGBTQ's weren't represented. The only thing that bothered me about the casting was that here is a group talking about "World Socialism" and it's cast is exclusively White except for one token POC. Shit, I bet even UKIP is makes more diverse commercials than that.

[Queen Mab]

The black woman isn't 'token', I think she's quite high up in the party. At least I remember her being in charge of proceedings when I went to a talk on Rosa Luxemburg at the SPGB headquarters.

[Dave B]

I think I would like to appeal to the moderators here.

I imagine that this person who I know well will be extremely offended as being referred to as “ a token black woman”.

[robbo203]

If you read carefully what I wrote I said they made no mention of our interests hence we LGBTQ's weren't represented. The only thing that bothered me about the casting was that here is a group talking about "World Socialism" and it's cast is exclusively White except for one token POC. Shit, I bet even UKIP is makes more diverse commercials than that.

Jeezuz christ - give em a break. Just how much do you think you can fit in within the time constraints of a public broadcast of only 2 mins 40 odd secs? Personally Im miffed that they didnt get to explain how a rise in the absolute mass of profits is compatible with a falling rate of profit as per Marx's Theories of Surplus Value but there you are - you can't always have everything exactly like you want it. Anyways, I think most people would take it as read that an organisation standing for genuine social equality across the board would apply that also to the question of LGBTQs. In the short time available to it, the essence of the message that it needed to get across was the idea of working to achieve a fundamentally different kind of society to capitalism altogther and I think it did that reasonably well

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Jeezuz christ - give em a break. Just how much do you think you can fit in within the time constraints of a public broadcast of only 2 mins 40 odd secs? Personally Im miffed that they didnt get to explain how a rise in the absolute mass of profits is compatible with a falling rate of profit as pewr Marx's Theories of Surplus Value but there you are - you cant always have everything exactly like you want it. Anyways I think most people would take it as read that an organisation standing for genuine social equality across the board would apply that also to the question of LGBTQs.

Except the SPGB doesn't, demonstrably. At best they make noises about "equality", but they never raise any slogans related to gay liberation and the smashing of the bourgeois family.

[robbo203]

Except the SPGB doesn't, demonstrably. At best they make noises about "equality", but they never raise any slogans related to gay liberation and the smashing of the bourgeois family.

How do you "smash" the bourgeois family and how do you convey that in the space of 2 mins 40 secs? I think the overwhelming majority of workers on hearing a slogan like that would immediately be turned off and simply dismiss you as a nutjob on a par with the Monster Raving Looney Party or whatever. You have to start on a positive note and with the big picture first and foremost. The more nuanced and detailed analyses comes with greater understanding. The Left is too fond of talking to itself and navel gazing, as it is. It needs to get out there and talk more in terms that most workers can relate to. Which is why I think the SPGB video is a bit of a mould breaker, frankly.

[QueerVanguard]

How do you "smash" the bourgeois family and how do you convey that in the space of 2 mins 40 secs?

You smash the bourgeois family by moving beyond Capitalism, pretty simple really. The monogamous marriage/bourgie family is a byproduct of property relations, this is well known to anyone who has looked at its history. When the SPBG cast were describing all the wonderful things that would happen in their World Socialism, one of those buffoons could have easily said "an end to the family and oppression of the LGBTQ community", it would have taken all of 2 seconds tops, but they didn't do that because a. they don't give two shits about ending LGBTQ oppression or the family and don't think that it will end after Crapitalism or b. they didn't want to scare petite bourgeois voters because they're spineless opportunists who are more interested in getting their duffs into Parliament than ending class society.


I think the overwhelming majority of workers on hearing a slogan like that would immediately be turned off and simply dismiss you as a nutjob on a par with the Monster Raving Looney Party or whatever.

Nice of you to assume workers are just as moralistic as the petite bourgeois, maybe you're projecting....


The Left is too fond of talking to itself and navel gazing, as it is. It needs to get out there and talk more in terms that most workers can relate to. Which is why I think the SPGB video is a bit of a mould breaker, frankly.

"Screw Lenin, political opportunism is grand! 'The people' are nationalist xenophobes too so let's not talk about ending racism or Fascism either!" Did I get that right?

[robbo203]

You smash the bourgeois family by moving beyond Capitalism, pretty simple really.

And how do you do that without first knowing 1) what is meant by capitalism 2) what is meant by "moving beyond capitalism". To give it its due, the SPGB video does at least make a decent stab at both these things . Most on the Left if they are even aware of 2) shrink from explaining what it entails lest they be seen as "utopian"


The monogamous marriage/bourgie family is a byproduct of property relations, this is well known to anyone who has looked at its history.

But how many people have "looked at its history". Be realistic. This is a Party Political Broadcast intended for general viewing by the public at large; it is not a friggin university history seminar. And it is constrained by strict time limits applying to the broadcasting of such material which are beyond the power of the SPGB to do anything about



When the SPBG cast were describing all the wonderful things that would happen in their World Socialism, one of those buffoons could have easily said "an end to the family", it would have taken all of 2 seconds tops, but they didn't do that because a. they don't give two shits about ending LGBTQ oppression or the family and don't think that it will end after Crapitalism or b. they didn't want to scare petite bourgeois voters because they're spineless opportunists who are more interested in getting their duffs into Parliament than ending class society.

This is grossly unfair, insulting and way off beam as far as the SPGB's view on using the parliamentary method is concerned about which you seem to know next to nothing. That apart , I still think it would be tactically dumb and psychologically inept to start off sloganising about "ending the family" because it could be so easily misconstrued. Its not a question of opportunism but using your common sense. Starting on a positive note and focussing on the big picture first is far preferable. Most workers unfortunately dont know what socialism is about and think it is something to do with the state or what happened in the state capitalist soviet union. You have to get rid of that idea first if you gonna make any progress at all




Nice of you to assume workers are just as moralistic as the petite bourgeois, maybe you're projecting....


But most workers are "moralistic" on a whole range of issues as public survey after public survey reveal. Whether it be on the merits of the death penalty or "British jobs for British workers". Sad but true. Im not quite sure why you counterpose the views of "workers" to those of the so called "petite bourgeosie". We can have a long discussion on who precisely are the latter though I take the Marxist view that capitalism is more and more just a two class class society consisting of capitalists and workers. Workers who wear a tie to work, speak with a plummy accent and have graduated from college are still just workers. Indeed ,there is a burgeoning literature on the whole concept of the shrinking "middle class" which you must surely have bumped into by now




"Screw Lenin, political opportunism is grand! 'The people' are nationalist xenophobes too so let's not talk about ending racism or Fascism either!" Did I get that right?

No you got it terribly wrong! The video talked precisely about a global alternative to capitalism - what you sneeringly called "their World Socialism" - which anyone with two brain cells to rub together would instantly recognise as a fundamental attack on the whole concept of nationalism. It also talked in terms of black and white , old and young etc uniting. Within the time constraints of a very short video you cannot explicitly say everything that might need to be said but I think enough was said to allow one to gain a very good impression where the SPGB stand as far as nationalism and racism is concerned. Dont you?

[QueerVanguard]

And how do you do that without first knowing 1) what is meant by capitalism 2) what is meant by "moving beyond capitalism". To give it its due, the SPGB video does at least make a decent stab at both these things . Most on the Left if they are even aware of 2) shrink from explaining what it entails lest they be seen as "utopian"

They didn't even take a stab at it. They basically said "wouldn't it be great if we could feed, cloth and house everyone on earth? Well we can because: Socialism!" Take the word "Socialism" out of the video and replace it with "Ethical Capitalism" and it would be identical to a Barack Obama advert. They didn't talk about ending private property or the dictatorship of the proletariat or anything else relevant to building Communism. They just rambled on about "Cooperation" as if that's some unique idea a million other bourgeois politicians don't go on about. There rhetoric is literally no different than what you'd find in the collected works of Proudhon or in Hillary Clinton's "It Takes A Village"


But how many people have "looked at its history". Be realistic. This is a Party Political Broadcast intended for general viewing by the public at large; it is not a friggin university history seminar. And it is constrained by strict time limits applying to the broadcasting of such material which are beyond the power of the SPGB to do anything about

Cool your jets and try actually reading what I say. I don't give a shit who has read the history. Explaining that Socialism will end LGBTQ oppression and the bourgeois family is explaining tangible fucking benefits workers will get after they destroy Capitalism. Whatever few right-wing moralist workers find that idea objectionable are going to be on the other side of the barricades with their moralist petite bourgeois and Capitalist and Fascist buddies any way. The name of the game is class struggle and we only win it by letting workers know exactly why its in their interests to destroy Capitalism, not by using moralistic language and hiding what will follow from Socialism because it might alienate petite bourgeois fuckwits.


This is grossly unfair, insulting and way off beam as far as the SPGB's view on using the parliamentary method is concerned about which you seem to know next to nothing.

Ever hear the expression Actions Speak Louder Than Words? If not, now you have.


That apart , I still think it would be tactically dumb and psychologically inept to start off sloganising about "ending the family" because it could be so easily misconstrued.

Its straight forward: we want to end monogamous marriage and bourgeois little family units because they are relics of the Capitalist age which we are moving past. You talk about how we shouldn't shrink at things? Well we shouldn't shrink that explaining *that* because most workers are already aware that marriage is a sham and raising kids in an isolated individual setting is a giant pain in the ass. They want to hear a party talking to that concern. We also shouldn't shrink at discussing LGBTQ and POC oppression, you know why? Because those are fucking *workers* and we aren't going to win the global class struggle if workers can't accept one another completely and unite against Capital.


Its not a question of opportunism but using your common sense. Starting on a positive note and focussing on the big picture first is far preferable. Most workers unfortunately dont know what socialism is about and think it is something to do with the state or what happened in the state capitalist soviet union. You have to get rid of that idea first if you gonna make any progress at all

All I'm seeing are bullshit excuse for a party more interested in political gain than smashing Capital.


But most workers are "moralistic" on a whole range of issues as public survey after public survey reveal. Whether it be on the merits of the death penalty or "British jobs for British workers". Sad but true.

That's a bunch of crap made up by the media to keep workers passive. Of course there are a *few* moralistic workers and Nationalist balls of shit floating around, but it's our job to shake them out of that bullshit and aim our message to the vast majority of workers who are already aware of their interests. Otherwise we're not going to make it anywhere anytime soon.


Im not quite sure why you counterpose the views of "workers" to those of the so called "petite bourgeosie".

Maybe it's because I'm a Marxist and understand how class works......


No you got it terribly wrong! The video talked precisely about a global alternative to capitalism - what you sneeringly called "their World Socialism" - which anyone with two brain cells to rub together would instantly recognise as a fundamental attack on the whole concept of nationalism.

Why would someone "recognise" that? I hear Liberals go on all day about how great global cooperation is but at the end of the day they still support borders and boundaries, nation-states, division. The SPGB didn't really say shit about how they want to end nations, why is that? If I had to guess it's because they're opportunists or actually think nations are going to exist after Capitalism. Either way its bad.

[consuming negativity]

Not only was I bored, but everybody in it looked bored except for the woman who started it off. Some random people with a blank background talking into a camera at a nauseating angle such as that is on the same attention-grabbing level as "hi, I like ice cream and long walks on the beach". The most interesting thing it did was say the word "socialism" a few times on television in a positive context, but that isn't even brave when you consider that even the actual socialists have already fallen asleep by that point in the broadcast.

[robbo203]

They didn't even take a stab at it. They basically said "wouldn't it be great if we could feed, cloth and house everyone on earth? Well we can because: Socialism!" Take the word "Socialism" out of the video and replace it with "Ethical Capitalism" and it would be identical to a Barack Obama advert. They didn't talk about ending private property or the dictatorship of the proletariat or anything else relevant to building Communism. They just rambled on about "Cooperation" as if that's some unique idea a million other bourgeois politicians don't go on about. There rhetoric is literally no different than what you'd find in the collected works of Proudhon or in Hillary Clinton's "It Takes A Village"


Well you're entitled to your opinion but I think your opinion is ridiculous frankly. Within the time constraints of a very short video you have to be selective - very selective. And I would love to see the evidence that statements such as these, repeated verbatim from the video, can be found in a "Barack Obama" advert as you absurdly claim...

"take common owqnership of the world and its resources" (so much for your claim that it didnt talk about "ending private property")

"A planet owned in common by all its people"

"No leaders. No government" (care to name a "capitalist politician" that advocates that? Ha!)

Your comments illustrate very well why the so called revolutionary Left remains a tiny irrelevant voice barely audible above the noise of capitalism and growing dimmer and fainter with ever passing year.

Here, for once, we have a revolutionary socialist organisation saying something that is unquestionably different from what the mainstream capitalist political parties are saying and yet you still find cause to whinge. Pathetic. Truly pathetic

[Blake's Baby]

... a party more interested in political gain than smashing Capital...

... The SPGB didn't really say shit about how they want to end nations, why is that? If I had to guess it's because they're opportunists ...

I can't really let these go. I guess, QueerVanguard, that you don't really know who the SPGB are.

They're about as far from 'opportunist' as you could get. In their entire existence since 1904 (they're the second-oldest political party in Britain), they have never had anyone elected to anything. They left the 2nd International when they formed out of the BSP because they considered it irredemably reformist (before WWI, 10 years before Lenin and Luxemburg etc had come to the conclusion that the 2nd Int had betrayed the working class). They adhere to the 'impossiblist' tradition, advocating nothing less than the destruction of capitalism and the establishment of a world socialist society.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I can't really let these go. I guess, QueerVanguard, that you don't really know who the SPGB are.

They're about as far from 'opportunist' as you could get. In their entire existence since 1904 (they're the second-oldest political party in Britain), they have never had anyone elected to anything.

So they're alright, because they're unsuccessful?


They left the 2nd International when they formed out of the BSP because they considered it irredemably reformist (before WWI, 10 years before Lenin and Luxemburg etc had come to the conclusion that the 2nd Int had betrayed the working class).

Which just shows how irredeemably stupid their notion of reformism is, particularly since the Second International contained groups like the Bolsheviks and the Tesnyaki when the SPGB had their little spat with Hyndman.

Of course, during the October Revolution, the SPGB supported the worst elements of the Second International, the Mensheviks, objectively placing them on the same side as Kerensky, Kolchak and the British interventionists. To this day the SPGB mourns their beloved Constituent Assembly with an intensity that would have shocked the most committed Kadet.


They adhere to the 'impossiblist' tradition, advocating nothing less than the destruction of capitalism and the establishment of a world socialist society.

They can advocate whatever they want in their meetings and their debates with fascists, it's not as if they're doing anything to bring the destruction of capitalism about. And the charge of homophobia is spot on - as I said, the SPGB explicitly rejected the slogan of an end to the discrimination of homosexuals. That's not even opportunism of the sort robbo displays here - "Oh, we can't mention gays because then the voters would reject us.". It's open hostility to gay liberation. Their attitude toward abortion, transsexuality etc. is also from the Edwardian period, as is most of their ideology.

[Gravediggers]

Well, the SPGB explicitly rejected the slogan of an end to the discrimination of lesbians in one of their execrable texts on "women and socialism" (I believe). The best they can muster is "in socialism no group will receive unequal treatment as a result of their gender of sexual preference", a statement any liberal would happily undersign.

But yeah, someone please vote for them, it might keep them quiet a bit.

Is this the quote from 'Women and Socialism':
vi) An end to discrimination against lesbians
This would mean a great deal to the individuals concerned. However, it is a very limited aim. Socialists seek to bring about a society in which no group receives unequal treatment as a result of their gender or sexual preference. To call for the end of discrimination against minority groups within capitalism will not and cannot bring about emancipation in its broadest sense, that is, the means for each individual to live a worthwhile life as defined by themselves.


If so your comments are way out of context in regards to the bigger picture of all discrimination originating within a class society. It appears the message in the quote is clear enough in that if you want to get rid of discrimination in all its forms get rid of class society.

[The Idler]

Of course, during the October Revolution, the SPGB supported the worst elements of the Second International, the Mensheviks, objectively placing them on the same side as Kerensky, Kolchak and the British interventionists. To this day the SPGB mourns their beloved Constituent Assembly with an intensity that would have shocked the most committed Kadet.The SPGB never took the side of the Mensheviks (or any faction in Russia) and explicitly repudiate anything less than hostility to any other political group. By contrast in 1903, before the SPGB existed, Trotsky was explicitly offering support for the Mensheviks against the Bolsheviks. There were ideas of the Mensheviks that the SPGB would share, but surely you realise two opposing groups can share some of (or more accurately arrive at) the same ideas without being on each others side? If your view on the SPGB (or any other group such as Russian anarchists or anarcho-communists) is predicated on whether they supported the Bolsheviks actions during the October Revolution (and where does this place young Stalin), then this is a dogmatic analysis not a scientific one.

[Dave B]

It is bit rich coming from a Leninist Trot accusing the SPGB of supporting the constituent assembly.

What about Trotsky’s ‘long live the constituent assembly speech on the eve of the Bolshevik coup?

http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1989/trotsky1/15-towards.html

And Lenin’s and the Bolshevik constant and reiterated support for the constituent assembly throughout 1917?

Quotes can be provided, I have most of them in a big file.




The 1919 Mensheviks were more Trotskyist than SPGB.

Resolution of the RDSRP [Menshevik] faction, prepared for the 7th Congress of Soviets (December 1919)




6. The congress considers that a leading role for the state in the economic life of the country is essential. However, it believes that this leading activity on the part of the state can increase the country's productive forces and gradually transform social relations in a socialist direction only if it is based on the active participation of workers' organisations in setting up and restoring economic life. In turn, this is only possible where workers' organisations are self-governing and independent of the state, and where general political conditions ensure that the proletariat can act freely of its own accord. The congress believes that work on restoring the economy must be based on freedom for the working masses to organise themselves and their own activities. Only in this way will it be possible to hold on to the positions which have been won by the workers. Then the path can be laid not to the restoration of capitalism and the political domination of the exploiters, but to real workers' power and the gradual establishment of socialism through the exercise of that power.




http://www.korolevperevody.co.uk/korolev/mensh-19-7-cong.htm

you would have thought that bureaucratic caste trots would have been interested in 1919 ,Menshevik warnings about;


………tendency of the developing Soviet bureaucracy to reduce the participation of workers' organisations in the administration and management of production to a minimum…..



And the;



………strengthening military and civil bureaucratism……



In fact the Menshevik centre had become almost indistinguishable from Trotskyism by the mid 1930’s.


Including their pre 'Revolution Betrayed' thesis of the soviet 'deformed workers state'.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Is this the quote from 'Women and Socialism':
vi) An end to discrimination against lesbians
This would mean a great deal to the individuals concerned. However, it is a very limited aim. Socialists seek to bring about a society in which no group receives unequal treatment as a result of their gender or sexual preference. To call for the end of discrimination against minority groups within capitalism will not and cannot bring about emancipation in its broadest sense, that is, the means for each individual to live a worthwhile life as defined by themselves.


If so your comments are way out of context in regards to the bigger picture of all discrimination originating within a class society. It appears the message in the quote is clear enough in that if you want to get rid of discrimination in all its forms get rid of class society.

The context was the SPGB rejecting the slogan of an end to the discrimination of lesbians. And in fact, the SPGB has never written on the gay question (good old Idler, trying to demonstrate the opposite could only link to a... theatre review), even when gay people made up the second most numerous group in the prisons of the British state. The SPGB can piously claim that gay people will not be discriminated against in socialism, but then again, everyone thinks that gay people, women etc. would not be discriminated against in their "ideal" society. The point is not to utter platitudes, any idiot can do that (and most idiots do), but to put forward a revolutionary programme that addresses the oppression (not simply "discrimination") of gay people. The SPGB have not done this - in fact they refuse to. Why, on this thread we have robbo, openly admitting that the execrable SPGB propaganda doesn't address gay liberation because they want to attract bigots (and in fact he compares gay liberation to points of economic theory that, while elementary to us, are beyond arcane to most people). I would say "fuck them, then", but this laughable remnant of a bygone era doesn't deserve even that.


The SPGB never took the side of the Mensheviks (or any faction in Russia)[...]

Yes, they did, and don't pretend otherwise. If printing articles against the war means taking a stand against the British state - and it does - then printing Menshevik-whiteguard articles against the Bolshevik state means siding with the Mensheviks, with the Whites, with Kolchak and with the British.


By contrast in 1903, before the SPGB existed, Trotsky was explicitly offering support for the Mensheviks against the Bolsheviks.

And in 1903, Trotsky was a scoundrel. But nonetheless, there is quite a difference between the Menshevik group in 1903 and in 1918. Originally, the Mensheviks were merely an opportunist group in Russian social-democracy. Sometimes they were better than that - there were a lot of Menshevik-directed sailour uprisings in 1905 and in the aftermath. By 1918, however, the best elements had left the Menshevik group, including Larin, Uritsky etc. What remained was a whiteguard organisation.


If your view on the SPGB (or any other group such as Russian anarchists or anarcho-communists) is predicated on whether they supported the Bolsheviks actions during the October Revolution (and where does this place young Stalin), then this is a dogmatic analysis not a scientific one.

It places Stalin on the correct side of the class line? You appear to have confused Trotskyism for some sort of petty opposition to Stalin personally. In 1918, Stalin and Trotsky were on the same side - the side of the proletariat - whereas the Mensheviks and the SPGB were not.


It is bit rich coming from a Leninist Trot accusing the SPGB of supporting the constituent assembly.

What about Trotsky’s ‘long live the constituent assembly speech on the eve of the Bolshevik coup?

http://www.marxists.org/archive/clif...5-towards.html (http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1989/trotsky1/15-towards.html)

And Lenin’s and the Bolshevik constant and reiterated support for the constituent assembly throughout 1917?

Quotes can be provided, I have most of them in a big file.

"On the eve of the Bolshevik coup" apparently means in the Pre-Parliament. In any case, yes, the Bolsheviks supported the convocation of the Constituent Assembly (and Sverdlov presided at several of the sessions, a task that he apparently found immensely boring). Two things need to be kept in mind, though.

First, the Bolsheviks did not count on the PSR-PLSR split not being recorded by the voting lists. I have already gone into this at length: most people (as seen from the results in the peasants' soviets) supported the PLSR, but the elections returned a PSR majority.

Second, the Bolsheviks did not support the Constituent Assembly for the Constituent Assembly's sake, but as a possible organ of proletarian power. In fact the Bolshevik group was flexible when it came to institutions, alternately supporting and opposing the assembly, factory committees, soviets, unions etc. To the vulgar democrat this means inconsistency - but to socialists it is the only correct strategy. The proletarian party can't support any sort of institution mindlessly, but recognise the potential for revolutionary action in all of them.


you would have thought that bureaucratic caste trots would have been interested in 1919 ,Menshevik warnings about;

[...]

Ah, the Mensheviks and their beloved unions (the "workers' organisations" in question). In fact the "warnings" (I can think of less flattering descriptions of the Mensheviks' writings in that period) set up a false dichotomy between the state administration and the unions etc. The Soviet bureaucratic caste was also composed of the officials in the unions (Tomsky etc.).


In fact the Menshevik centre had become almost indistinguishable from Trotskyism by the mid 1930’s.


Including their pre 'Revolution Betrayed' thesis of the soviet 'deformed workers state'.

Now you're just making things up! See e.g. Abramovich's response to Otto Bauer in the journal Die Gesselleschaft. Or Dan's article in the same journal from 1932. Liebich discusses both in "Marxism and Totalitarianism".

[Dave B]

The Trials And Executions In Moscow

Eliminating the Opposition Under the New Constitution?
By Theodore Dan

We reprint the following letter sent to the editor of the MANCHESTER GUARDIAN by Theodore Dan, appearing in that publication on September 4, 1936. Dan is the leader of the Russian Menshevik (Social Democratic) party, and a member of the Bureau of the Socialist and Labor International. While we are not in accord with all the political views of Theodore Dan, his letter on the trial and executions in Moscow is, we feel, of signal interest to our readers.—The Editors.
To the Editor of the Manchester Guardian.



Sir,—Sixteen men have been shot in Moscow and one, Tomsky, menaced and hounded into suicide. Among the sixteen were Zinovieff, Kameneff, Smirnov, Mratchkovsky, the most noted of the fellow-workers of Lenin, co-founders of the Bolshevik party and the international Communist movement, men who led the Bolshevik revolution and during its heroic period filled the highest posts in the Soviet State and in the party and trade union organizations. The turn of other Bolshevik leaders no less prominent, men who have held high positions in the State and the army—Radek, Bukharin, Rykoff, Piatokoff, Sokolnikoff, Serebriakoff—has still to come. Everyone who at any time played a leading part in the Bolshevik party is awaiting his fate in fear and horror.



Even those nearest to Stalin feel insecure.
Stalin is not content even with having the old party leaders shot; he is having them covered with infamy—and with them the leader who is now out of his reach, Trotsky, the actual organiser of the October rising, of the Red Army, and of the victories in the civil war. If one is to believe the court and the Soviet press, the men who were the making of the Bolshevik party and of international Communism, and who led the Bolshevik revolution, were nothing but blackguards and thieves, spies and mercenaries of Hitler and the Gestapo!


But did there really exist a terrorist conspiracy against Stalin among the old Bolshevik leaders? It is only too natural that terrorist ideas should simmer in many a hot head in a country in which every opportunity is lacking of organised peaceful opposition to the arbitrary “totalitarian” omnipotence of a single person. But one may well suspect that these hot heads would not be found on the shoulders of old and experienced politicians, who, as Marxists, had for many a year strongly condemned terrorism, if only on account of its futility. The suspicion becomes a certainty when one examines the case for the prosecution and the reports of the Soviet press on the proceedings.



There is not a single document, not a single definite piece of evidence, not a single precise detail of the alleged plans of assassination, not a single attempt to reconcile the conflicting statements made, and only two “witnesses,” both brought into court from prison and both due to appear themselves as defendants in the “second” terrorist trial before the same court!



There is nothing but malevolent phrases in general terms and, most incredible of all, the most abject of self-vilification and “confessions” on the part of the accused men, once more without any concrete detail of any sort concerning their “crime”; they fairly enter into competition with the State prosecutor in branding themselves, and actually beg for the death penalty.




But why is Stalin thus getting rid of the old party leaders on the very eve of the enactment of the new Constitution, with all its democratic flavour? Why is he breaking, at this particular moment, the bonds that still unite him with the old traditions and the past history of the Bolshevik party, the international Communist movement, and the Bolshevik revolution, as Napoleon once broke with the Jacobins from among whom he had risen to power?




In spite of all the democratic rights granted to Soviet citizens by the new Constitution Stalin intends to be in a position to make it a serviceable instrument of the consolidation of his personal dictatorship. For there is one right that is still denied the Soviet citizen—the right of free political self-determination and free organisation in general, without which all other rights can easily be rendered valueless. The political monopoly and the leadership in all permitted organisations and all State and municipal bodies, and therewith the disposal of the press, of the right of assembly, and so on, remains in the hands of the Communist party which Stalin has politically emasculated; in other words, it remains constitutionally reserved to Stalin himself.


But he still has to face the danger that certain provisions of the new Constitution, above all, the secrecy of the ballot, may become buttresses for a legal struggle of the working masses for their rights—above all, for the right of free organisation. For that reason he is urgently at work now making “innocuous” all those who are in a position to organise this mass struggle. He is sending Social Democrats wholesale into his concentration camps. And he is hurriedly exterminating the last of the old Bolshevik leaders whose names and whose opposition to him are known to the masses and who could thus become particularly dangerous to him in his peaceful and constitutional struggle for his sole dominance.


If the Soviet Union is to be preserved as the nucleus of peace, and the war peril facing all humanity thus exorcised, all friends of the Russian Revolution and of world peace must stand resolutely on the side of the Russian workers and peasants in order to assist them to defend the possibilities of democratic and Socialistic development of the Soviet Union against the nationalistic and Bonapartist policy of Stalin. The Moscow murders are perhaps one of the final warnings.—

Yours, &c.,
Paris, August 28.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I recall you posting that article before. So what? What's the point in posting it, particularly without commentary? Are we supposed to be impressed by the vague, liberal phrase "nucleus of peace"? I imagine Dimitrov said similar things about "anti-fascist" imperialists.

[Dave B]

Lenin 1917







Today we must point out that the programme of the Menshevik Minister Skobelev (https://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/s/k.htm#skobelev-matvei) goes even further than Bolshevism. Here is the programme, as reported in the ministerial paper, Rech:

“The Minister [Skobelev] declared that ’... the country’s economy is on the brink of disaster. We must intervene in all fields of economic life, as there is no money in the Treasury. We must improve the condition of the working masses, and to do that we must take the profits from the tills of the businessmen and bankers’. (Voice in the audience: ‘How?’) ’By ruthless taxation of property,’ replied the Minister of Labour, Skobelev. ’It is a method known to the science of finance. The rate of taxation on the propertied classes must be increased to one hundred per cent of their profits.’ (Voice in the audience: ’That means everything.’) ‘Unfortunately,’ declared Skobelev, ’many corporations have already distributed their dividends among the share holders, and we must therefore levy a progressive personal tax on the propertied classes. We will go even further, and, if the capitalists wish to preserve the bourgeois method of business, let them work without interest, so as not to lose their clients.... We must introduce compulsory labour service for the shareholders, bankers and factory owners, who are in a rather slack mood because the incentive that formerly stimulated them to work is now lacking.... We must force the shareholders to submit to the state; they, too, must be subject to labour service.’”
We advise the workers to read and reread this programme, to discuss it and go into the matter of its practicability.



The important thing is the conditions necessary for its fulfilment, and the taking of immediate steps towards its fulfilment.



This programme in itself is an excellent one and coincides with the Bolshevik programme, except that in one particular it goes even further than our programme, namely, it promises to take the profits from the tills of the bankers “to the extent of one hundred per cent”.



Our Party is much more moderate. Its resolution demands much less than this, namely, the mere establishment of control over the banks and the “gradual [just listen, the Bolsheviks are for gradualness!] introduction of a more just progressive tax on incomes and properties”.
Our Party is more moderate than Skobelev.




https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/may/16b.htm

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Dave B, if you want to say something, say it. Simply posting articles without commentary will not do - particularly since you've posted those same articles before (now I wonder if you have a big text file full of those somewhere).

[Dave B]

Oh I am sorry I didn’t think it needed an explanation; it is about lying Leninist historians.

Where is your evidence that the evil Mensheviks were Kadet loving white-guardist capitalist lickspittles?

Or is it just of slandering people who opposed;


When we are reproached with having established a dictatorship of one party and, as you have heard, a united socialist front is proposed, we say, "Yes, it is a dictatorship of one party! This is what we stand for and we shall not shift from that position because it is the party that has won,



https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/aug/05.htm

Like the homophobic, Menshevik, gaybashing and ‘token black woman’ SPGB.

[Dave B]

It might seem like just Banter now but we know what accusations of Menshevism means when it comes to Leninist in power;


“For the public manifestations of Menshevism our revolutionary courts must pass the death sentence, otherwise they are not our courts, but God knows what.”



http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm

[Hrafn]

Dave B, do you use that letter size to intentionally make your posts harder to read, or is it by ignorant accident?

[whichfinder]

The black woman isn't 'token', I think she's quite high up in the party. At least I remember her being in charge of proceedings when I went to a talk on Rosa Luxemburg at the SPGB headquarters.

You're quite correct to say that she wasn't "token", she just happened to be one of the six comrades featured in the video who was available on the day of the shoot. Nothing more.

However, she's no more "quite high up in the party" than anyone else. Speakers, literature sellers, writers and those who look after the party's premises occupy precisely the same position. That's what you'd expect of a fully democratic, leaderless organisation.

[The Idler]

Yes, they did, and don't pretend otherwise. If printing articles against the war means taking a stand against the British state - and it does - then printing Menshevik-whiteguard articles against the Bolshevik state means siding with the Mensheviks, with the Whites, with Kolchak and with the British.



And in 1903, Trotsky was a scoundrel. But nonetheless, there is quite a difference between the Menshevik group in 1903 and in 1918. Originally, the Mensheviks were merely an opportunist group in Russian social-democracy. Sometimes they were better than that - there were a lot of Menshevik-directed sailour uprisings in 1905 and in the aftermath. By 1918, however, the best elements had left the Menshevik group, including Larin, Uritsky etc. What remained was a whiteguard organisation.



It places Stalin on the correct side of the class line? You appear to have confused Trotskyism for some sort of petty opposition to Stalin personally. In 1918, Stalin and Trotsky were on the same side - the side of the proletariat - whereas the Mensheviks and the SPGB were not.



"On the eve of the Bolshevik coup" apparently means in the Pre-Parliament. In any case, yes, the Bolsheviks supported the convocation of the Constituent Assembly (and Sverdlov presided at several of the sessions, a task that he apparently found immensely boring). Two things need to be kept in mind, though.

First, the Bolsheviks did not count on the PSR-PLSR split not being recorded by the voting lists. I have already gone into this at length: most people (as seen from the results in the peasants' soviets) supported the PLSR, but the elections returned a PSR majority.

Second, the Bolsheviks did not support the Constituent Assembly for the Constituent Assembly's sake, but as a possible organ of proletarian power. In fact the Bolshevik group was flexible when it came to institutions, alternately supporting and opposing the assembly, factory committees, soviets, unions etc. To the vulgar democrat this means inconsistency - but to socialists it is the only correct strategy. The proletarian party can't support any sort of institution mindlessly, but recognise the potential for revolutionary action in all of them.
[/SIZE]
Every issue of the Socialist Standard has stated 'The Socialist Party of Great Britain enters the field of political action determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist.'



The Bolsheviks asserted “Soviets are the perfect form of State. They are the magic wand by which all inequalities, all misery, may be suppressed” (p. 14). Martov ridiculed the Bolsheviks for their belief that revolutions were ready to break out everywhere, for their belief that workers and peasants, by embracing Soviets (a world merely meaning Council), could establish Socialism. He held the Marxian view that no political form can enable Socialism to be won, unless the material conditions are ripe. The SPGB thought similarly.
In 1917, Lenin urged that the Russian workers would shatter the old bureaucratic and oppressive features of the State. Martov observed '“Reality has cruelly shattered all these illusions. The ‘Soviet State’ has not established in any instance electiveness and recall of public officials and the commanding staff. It has not suppressed the professional police . . . It has not done away with social hierarchy in production . . . On the contrary, in proportion to its evolution, the Soviet State shows a tendency in the opposite direction. It shows a tendency toward the utmost possible strengthening of the principles of hierarchy and compulsion. It shows a tendency toward the development of a more specialised apparatus of repression than before . . . It shows a tendency toward the total freedom of the executive organisms from the tutelage of the electors”'. The SPGB thought similarly.
The Bolsheviks, however, thought it possible for an active minority, representing the vague aspirations of the workers, to gain political power before the capitalist revolution itself had been completed.

Whatever side you think the Bolsheviks were on, it wasn't socialism.

[Red Deathy]

The context was the SPGB rejecting the slogan of an end to the discrimination of lesbians. And in fact, the SPGB has never written on the gay question (good old Idler, trying to demonstrate the opposite could only link to a... theatre review), even when gay people made up the second most numerous group in the prisons of the British state. The SPGB can piously claim that gay people will not be discriminated against in socialism, but then again, everyone thinks that gay people, women etc. would not be discriminated against in their "ideal" society. The point is not to utter platitudes, any idiot can do that (and most idiots do), but to put forward a revolutionary programme that addresses the oppression (not simply "discrimination") of gay people. The SPGB have not done this - in fact they refuse to. Why, on this thread we have robbo, openly admitting that the execrable SPGB propaganda doesn't address gay liberation because they want to attract bigots (and in fact he compares gay liberation to points of economic theory that, while elementary to us, are beyond arcane to most people). I would say "fuck them, then", but this laughable remnant of a bygone era doesn't deserve even that. We don't want to attract bigots, that's nonsense. In fact, I can't see anywhere where Robbo said that, I'm afraid, unless you can provide a quote (which I may be missing) I'll have to say that you are grossly mistaken on that point, and ask you to retract.

What you're doing is like going up to an 19th Century abo0litionist and asking them "What about the gay slaves" "Er, we'll emancipate them too?" They'd reply. Likewise, we'd reply that we want the LGBTQ Wages Slaves to emancipate themselves too. As has been proven by history, Gay Liberation is perfectly compatible with the continued existence of capitalism and the wages system (The UK now has laws to prevent discrimination in the workplace, and full gay marriage laws, unless I'm missing something, there remains no statutory discriminations against gay people).

The SP is a specialist tool, for the abolition of the wages system, it exists for no other purpose. You'd be as well off railing against the RSPCA or the Society for Preservation of Historic Buildings for not publishing articles on LGBTQ rights.

[Dave B]

I am a factory worker working for a large multinational capitalist corporation. Like most of them they know what is important and what is not when it comes to getting most out of their workers.

And as far as they are concerned discrimination and hostility between their employees based on antiquated “ism’s” isn’t one of them.

All the factory floor workers have been taken off the job and given extensive ‘equality and diversity’ training.

Including the full range of sexual orientations and gender preferences as well as obviously ‘race’ and religion.

[robbo203]

. Why, on this thread we have robbo, openly admitting that the execrable SPGB propaganda doesn't address gay liberation because they want to attract bigots (and in fact he compares gay liberation to points of economic theory that, while elementary to us, are beyond arcane to most people). I would say "fuck them, then", but this laughable remnant of a bygone era doesn't deserve even that.


You are being dishonest here and this is not the first time you've been caught out. Here is what I actually said

How do you "smash" the bourgeois family and how do you convey that in the space of 2 mins 40 secs? I think the overwhelming majority of workers on hearing a slogan like that would immediately be turned off and simply dismiss you as a nutjob on a par with the Monster Raving Looney Party or whatever. You have to start on a positive note and with the big picture first and foremost. The more nuanced and detailed analyses comes with greater understanding. The Left is too fond of talking to itself and navel gazing, as it is. It needs to get out there and talk more in terms that most workers can relate to. Which is why I think the SPGB video is a bit of a mould breaker, frankly.

I did not mention gay liberation. I was referring to Queervanguard's suggestion that the SPGB video should have said something about "smashing the bourgeois family". Its a crackpot suggestion not because doing away with (I dont like the stupid term "smashing" in this context) the bourgeois family is not a good idea but because it will almost certainly prove counterproductive in a very short video in which you simply do not have the time available to explain what you mean by this. People could and almost certainly will get completely the wrong idea and react negatively. Which is precisely why I said "The more nuanced and detailed analyses comes with greater understanding". You simply cannot convey a nuanced and detailed analysis in under 2 mins 40 secs but presumably such an analysis will be found elsewhere in the literature of the SPGB for instance should people feel inclined to make contact with the SPGB

As for the suggestion that the SPGB wants to "attract bigots" I think this is just idiotic frankly

[robbo203]

Yes, they did, and don't pretend otherwise. If printing articles against the war means taking a stand against the British state - and it does - then printing Menshevik-whiteguard articles against the Bolshevik state means siding with the Mensheviks, with the Whites, with Kolchak and with the British.



In the fantasy world of left wing conspiracy theorists, anything goes. This illogical and ridiculous claim of yours illustrates the point nicely. Firstly what articles are you talking about? Please provide the evidence to back up your claim. You have a reputation for being economical with the truth to put it mildly and it is about time you should be called out on this Apart from Martov's critique of the Bolsheviks I'm not aware of any other article that the SPGB published from the Mensheviks so do enlighten us all. Anyway, by no stretch of the imagination could you call Martov a whiteguardist. He actually supported the red army against the whites and was critical of those Mensheviks who joined the Kerensky government towards which incidentally the SPGB was equally scathing calling Kerensky an "agent of the master class" http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1910s/1918/no-168-august-1918/revolution-russia-where-it-fails

Even if it were true that the SPGB did print articles from the Mensheviks - and with the exception of Martov , I think it is untrue - how on earth do you jump from that to the conclusion that "printing Menshevik-whiteguard articles against the Bolshevik state means siding with the Mensheviks, with the Whites, with Kolchak and with the British." The SPGB incidentally was highly critical of the Russian government's agreement in 1920 to repay foreign property-owners their losses and allied Governments their “debts.” - those same governments. like the British, whose armies had invaded Russia . For the SPGB this meant "continued exploitation of Russian workers to pay foreign exploiters" http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1920s/1920/no-192-august-1920/super-opportunists-criticism-bolshevist-policy). Would such a sentiment be possible if the SPGB had sided with the British as you stupidly claim?

Yes of course there were some commonalities between the SPGB and the Mensheviks just as there were some commonalities between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. But that does not mean the SPGB supported the Mensheviks. Its ridiculous to suggest otherwise. I was reading recently of a UKIP politician who put forward a view on the nature of taxation that was to all intents and purposes exactly the same view that Marx held - namely that taxation in reality is a burden on the capitalist class alone , not the workers, even if there appear to be tax deductions being made on our pay slips . By your warped logic if one were to publish this article by a UKIP politician this must mean one supported UKIP:rolleyes:


Yes the SPGB argued that it was simply not possible for the Bolshevik revolution to have delivered "socialism" as did the Mensheviks. Such a view stemmed from a common orthodox marxist position on the prerequisites of a socialist revolution which even Lenin had at one time adhered to. Neverthless the SPGB's attitude towards the Mensheviks was rather like its attitude to Second International as a whole which was that it was irredeemably reformist and lost to socialism. That included the Mensheviks too. I believe the SPGB had published some pamhlets by Kautsky too even though it pretty early on had sussed out that Kautsky had gone reformist. Nevertheless, the pamphlets were published becuase what Kautsky had to say in them seemed relevant and useful.

As for the SPGB attacking the Bolshevik state yes of course it did and rightly so. Bolshevik style state capitalism - Lenin had fulsomely admired German state capitalism under Bismarck as well as Scientific Taylorism (meaning how to efficiently screw your workforce) - could not BUT be opposed by any socialist claiming to be a socialist. This viciously anti working class regime - even before Stalin came to power - destroyed any kind of autonomous expression of working class power like the Factory Committees and imposed one man management from above while centralising political power in the hands of an emerging state capitalist class and banning political opposition both inside and outside the pseudo-communist party as it sought to establish its brutal dictatorship over the working class.






It places Stalin on the correct side of the class line? You appear to have confused Trotskyism for some sort of petty opposition to Stalin personally. In 1918, Stalin and Trotsky were on the same side - the side of the proletariat - whereas the Mensheviks and the SPGB were not.


Oddly enough the SPGB was one of the few organisations that praised the Bolsheviks at the time for taking Russia out of the capitalist First World War. Its initial attutude towards the Bolsheviks was a lot more circumspect than you seem to imagine. See this chapter from Dave Perrin's book on the SPGB (http://wspus.org/in-depth/russia-lenin-and-state-capitalism/). Its opinion on the Bolsheviks only hardened as the evidence came in. It had never at any time believewd that the revolution could deliver socialism and the passing of time more and more proved this judgement to be absolutely correct.

As for Stalin and Trotsky being on the side of the proletariat the hell they were. Just saying you are on the side of the proletariat doesnt make you so. The proof of the pudding in in the eating. We all know about Stalin but Trotsky's own viciously anti working class record is perhaps less well known. It was under his leadership that the militarisation of labour programme was advanced. In his speech 30. March 1920 at the 9th party congress he declared:

"If we seriously speak of planned economy, which is to acquire its unity of purpose from the center, when labor forces are assigned in accordance with the economic plan at the given stage of developement, the working masses cannot be left wandering all over Russia. They must be thrown here and there, appointed, commanded, just like soldiers". In the same speech, he says "Deserters from labour ought to to be formed into punitive battalions or put into concentration camps".

If that is not a thoroughly anti working class perspective I dont know what is...

[QueerVanguard]

I did not mention gay liberation.

Of course not. You clowns never do because you either don't give a shit about liberating LGBTQs or don't want to offend the sensibilities of the moralist petite bourgeois.


I was referring to Queervanguard's suggestion that the SPGB video should have said something about "smashing the bourgeois family". Its a crackpot suggestion not because doing away with (I dont like the stupid term "smashing" in this context) the bourgeois family is not a good idea but because it will almost certainly prove counterproductive in a very short video in which you simply do not have the time available to explain what you mean by this.

Why do we need to explain it? The family came w/ property and will end w/ property. Simple. If the family continues to exist after the SPGB have their World Socialism take root --which a shit ton of them are probably hoping), it will be a sign we're nowhere near Socialism. Non-moralist workers --y'know, the huge majority of workers- welcome the end of the family so there's no need to spend minutes explaining it. They could have said "A world without oppression of LGBTQs, without gender, without the family", simple as that. They didn't and that's really fucking suspect.

[Lord Testicles]

Non-moralist workers --y'know, the huge majority of workers- welcome the end of the family so there's no need to spend minutes explaining it.

This is nonsense. If a huge majority of workers wanted the end of the family then they'd stop organising themselves into family units.

[QueerVanguard]

This is nonsense. If a huge majority of workers wanted the end of the family then they'd stop organising themselves into family units.

They can't yet because the material conditions aren't ready, you're putting the cart before the horse. Most workers yearn for the end of the family but for now it makes the most sense to continue to live in isolated semi-monogamous units for financial reasons. They also fear being judged for stepping outside the gender binary and becoming polyamorous because they fear being ethically condemned by the moralist bourgeois who they depend on for the means of survival.

[robbo203]

Of course not. You clowns never do because you either don't give a shit about liberating LGBTQs or don't want to offend the sensibilities of the moralist petite bourgeois.



Why do we need to explain it? The family came w/ property and will end w/ property. Simple. If the family continues to exist after the SPGB have their World Socialism take root --which a shit ton of them are probably hoping), it will be a sign we're nowhere near Socialism. Non-moralist workers --y'know, the huge majority of workers- welcome the end of the family so there's no need to spend minutes explaining it. They could have said "A world without oppression of LGBTQs, without gender, without the family", simple as that. They didn't and that's really fucking suspect.

You are talking complete bollocks now. Youve got your head in the clouds frankly. I invite you to test your claim that the "huge majority of workers" would currently "welcome the end of the family". I think you would find the exact opposite is the case. Tell them in your party political broadcast that you bluntly intend to "get rid of the family" and you will be overwhemingly regarded as some kind of weird religious sect with a bee in its bonnet about enforced communisation of peoples' living arrangements or whatever. Alternatively, I suppose, you might be seen as wanting to further promote the bourgeois atomisation of society into a collection of free floating individuals. At any rate, your simplistic attack on that institution you call the "family" will be interpreted by them as a direct assault on, and a devaluation of, the affective ties they have with their own family members

Your reasoning is laughably inept:

"The family came w/ property and will end w/ property. Simple"

Bullshit. You dont even understand what the family is yourself yet you pretend that it would "simple" to explain what it is about. In traditional hunter gatherer societies predating the emergence of private property, the organising principle of social organisation was kinship. Here just at random I picked out something after a quick websearch, for your edification

The fundamental social organization in foraging societies is-based on family, marriage, kinship, gender, and age. The two basic elements of social organization for foraging populations are the nuclear family and the band. The nuclear family is the small family unit associated with procreation: parents and offspring. The nuclear family appears to be most adaptive for hunting-gathering societies because of the flexibility needed for the location and easy distribution and exchange of food resources, and the other exigencies of hunting (Fox, 1967; Pasternak, 1976).

The most common type of band is made up of a related cluster of nuclear families ranging in size from twenty to one hundred individuals. At times, in societies such as the desert-dwelling Shoshone Indians, the bands may break up into nuclear families to locate food and other resources. Under other circumstances, several families may cooperate in hunting and other foraging activities. In some instances, bands may contain up to four or five (sometimes more) extended families, in which married children and their offspring reside with their parents. These multifamily bands provide the webs of kinship for foraging societies, enabling them to cooperate in subsistence and economic exchanges.
(http://iitg.vlab.co.in/?sub=72&brch=173&sim=881&cnt=1)


See , its not quite so "simple" as you make out, is it? No doubt in socialism there will be considerable variability and fluidity in living arrangements and affective ties but to dogmatically rule out altogether the possibility of people living in what are clearly consanguineal family units and emotionally identifying with other members of that family is just dumb. And it comes across as authoritarian and overly prescriptive It makes you sound like some kind of social engineer who will tell people how to live their lives down to the intimate details. Workers would be quite right to spurn what you have to say as they would overwhelmingly


Finally as has already been explained to you by Reddeathy, the SPGB is just a specialist tool, for the abolition of the wages system, it exists for no other purpose. Though I am not a member of the SPGB myself, I think he is correct in his assessment and I note you did not respond to his point:

What you're doing is like going up to an 19th Century abo0litionist and asking them "What about the gay slaves" "Er, we'll emancipate them too?" They'd reply. Likewise, we'd reply that we want the LGBTQ Wages Slaves to emancipate themselves too. As has been proven by history, Gay Liberation is perfectly compatible with the continued existence of capitalism and the wages system (The UK now has laws to prevent discrimination in the workplace, and full gay marriage laws, unless I'm missing something, there remains no statutory discriminations against gay people).



It seems to me that if anything it is you whose standpoint is that of the "moralist petite bourgeois" which you claim to so vehemently oppose

[bricolage]

They can't yet because the material conditions aren't ready, you're putting the cart before the horse. Most workers yearn for the end of the family but for now it makes the most sense to continue to live in isolated semi-monogamous units for financial reasons. They also fear being judged for stepping outside the gender binary and becoming polyamorous because they fear being ethically condemned by the moralist bourgeois who they depend on for the means of survival.
What's your basis for this? From what I can see most workers (and most other people) are actually very supportive of monogamous relationships and families. Not that I'm saying that is good but this argument seems more like you trying to project what you'd like to be the case rather than actually what is the case.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

It really says something about the quality of discussion on RevLeft that the only time I can be bothered to post is when I'm off my face on painkillers.


Oh I am sorry I didn’t think it needed an explanation; it is about lying Leninist historians.

Oh, and who exactly are those lying historians? What are they lying about? Is it not rather you who is lying, or more precisely, implying something that is completely untrue?

Take the second article. It is clear to anyone that has read the article in question that Lenin is mocking Skobelev, who had no intention of carrying out the programme he put forward, blaming of course the group then known as the "bourgeois ministers" of the Provisional Government (as if Chernov, Peshekhonov, Skobelev etc. were any less bourgeois than Lvov and Konovalov and so on).

The Bolshevik programme was more moderate on paper, because the Bolsheviks had every intention of carrying it out. Of course, if you know that your programme will never be put into practice, you can write whatever you want in it. Why stop at a tax rate of 100%? Why not 120% or 500%? Why not proclaim that you want to immediately abolish money and all forms of finance? Why not proclaim yourself the king of the unicorns?

And because the Bolsheviks had every intention of carrying their programme out, they had to take the objective economic circumstances - those of a near-collapse - into account. A decree to the effect that the entire industry was to be nationalised immediately would be nothing more than empty posturing. The situation was such that, in May 1917 (and indeed in October as well), immediate and complete nationalisation was not possible. The chief thing was to smash the bourgeois state - which October accomplished. Following the seizure of power there necessarily exists a transitional period in which the relations of production change.

As for the first article, what of it? Again, are we supposed to be impressed that one Fyodor Dan, who has mysteriously become a Theodore, could write hypocritical eulogies of Bolshevik revolutionaries? Suffice it to say that not one member of the Left Opposition, excepting the former member and future Nazi Ciliga, wanted anything to do with Dan, the whiteguard.

On that note:


Where is your evidence that the evil Mensheviks were Kadet loving white-guardist capitalist lickspittles?

I presented the evidence several times, and in fact I am copying this from my earlier posts.

Several prominent members of VIKZhel, the (then) central executive of the railways' union, a proto-white organisation that tried to force the Bolsheviks into a coalition with Mensheviks, Esers and Popular Socialists (who even the Mensheviks derided as Social-Kadets), were Mensheviks. (Source: Brovkin, "The Mensheviks after October".)

To quote Martov:

"All this caused a great turmoil in the Party. At first, our Right elements …took the next step and openly identified themselves with the foreign occupation… and with the struggle against the Bolsheviks as part of a ‘coalition’. They proclaimed it to be a ‘national task’ to restore capitalist order. Headed by Liber, they organised the Committee for Active Struggle for the Regeneration of Russia.

This created a de facto split in the Party, which did not become de jure only because terror put such pressure on all of us that any public debate… or convocation of a conference or congress to judge any rebellious elements became impossible…."

(Source: Brovkin, "Dear Comrades: Menshevik Reports on the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War".)

Unfortunately, Martov's excuse doesn't really stand up to scrutiny: not only was the Menshevik organisation legal in the period, they had the time and the resources for a struggle with the Bolsheviks within the trade unions. But apparently not for expelling Liber and so on.

The whiteguard Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia contained two Menshevik members, Kobolov and Yudin. (Source: Pereia, "White Siberia".)

The whiteguard Ufa Directorate contained the Menshevik Maysky, and the Menshevik Preobrazhensky was appointed the Directorate's Plenipotentiary in Samara. The Mensheviks organised a special branch for the KomUch territory (KomUch being a predecessor of the Ufa government), which empowered its members to assist the KomUch and its successors "as long as they were defending the accomplishments of the February Revolution" (such as capitalist industry being "removed from the tutelage of the state"). (Source: Smith, "Captives of the Revolution".)

One of the major White governments, "Democratic" Georgia, was almost entirely staffed by Mensheviks, including the once-minister of the post, Tsereteli.


Or is it just of slandering people who opposed;


When we are reproached with having established a dictatorship of one party and, as you have heard, a united socialist front is proposed, we say, "Yes, it is a dictatorship of one party! This is what we stand for and we shall not shift from that position because it is the party that has won,

Hardly, given how prominent the Mensheviks were in the White movement - much more than their microscopic size warranted. But yes, Leninists, and everyone whose brain hasn't gone soft from decades of parliamentarianism, oppose, oppose in all circumstances, a coalition with reformists and bourgeois "workers'" parties.


It might seem like just Banter now but we know what accusations of Menshevism means when it comes to Leninist in power;

When the revolutionary party has seized political power, it will of course crush all those who act to undermine this power, whether they call themselves Mensheviks, Bolsheviks (quite a few modern reformist groups consider themselves to be Bolsheviks, and I would hardly expect much mercy for the "Bolshevik" Tudeh if there was a proletarian revolution in Iran). The Mensheviks have only themselves to blame - if they did not act to undermine the morale and the logistics of the proletarian power as it was struggling with the Whites - many of who were Mensheviks themselves - no one would talk about shooting them. In fact Lenin makes it clear that the Mensheviks were not to be shot for being Mensheviks, but for undermining the war effort.

Unfortunately very few Mensheviks were actually shot.


Every issue of the Socialist Standard has stated 'The Socialist Party of Great Britain enters the field of political action determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist.'

Well that's nice. And the British SWP describes itself as a mass party (the "smallest mass party in the world", but, you know, a mass party nonetheless). And the WRP described themselves as, well, a workers', revolutionary group. And the central organ of the US RCP doesn't carry the warning "WE ARE ACTUALLY CRAZY BIGOTS".

If political groups are to be judged by what they say, instead of what they do, we must be living in some sort of utopia. Why, just a few days ago a "workers' party" was founded here.

In practice, of course, the SPGB does not even fight openly capitalist parties, let alone "socialist" reactionaries like the Mensheviks. Like all anti-communists the SPGB takes the side of these reactionaries against the Bolsheviks.


The Bolsheviks asserted “Soviets are the perfect form of State. They are the magic wand by which all inequalities, all misery, may be suppressed” (p. 14).

And where did the Bolsheviks assert that? In one of Martov's horrifyingly boring pamphlets. So we're off to a good start - the first statement in your little list is false.


In 1917, Lenin urged that the Russian workers would shatter the old bureaucratic and oppressive features of the State. Martov observed '“Reality has cruelly shattered all these illusions. The ‘Soviet State’ has not established in any instance electiveness and recall of public officials and the commanding staff. It has not suppressed the professional police . . . It has not done away with social hierarchy in production . . . On the contrary, in proportion to its evolution, the Soviet State shows a tendency in the opposite direction. It shows a tendency toward the utmost possible strengthening of the principles of hierarchy and compulsion. It shows a tendency toward the development of a more specialised apparatus of repression than before . . . It shows a tendency toward the total freedom of the executive organisms from the tutelage of the electors”'. The SPGB thought similarly.

Why, if Martov said so, it must be true. Martov, after all, was noted as an objective and insightful observer of the political situation. Just recall his incisive articles against the social-democratic persecution of the Communists while he was living in Germany.

(Here is a hint: no such articles are to be found in Martov's collected works. Like all anti-communists, Martov had no problem accommodating himself to the bourgeois SPD government in Germany, all the while criticising the Bolsheviks from a feigned "left" standpoint. It reminds me of those Kronstadters - those poor "anarchist" martyrs - who found White Finland so pleasant.)


The Bolsheviks, however, thought it possible for an active minority, representing the vague aspirations of the workers, to gain political power before the capitalist revolution itself had been completed.

And here we come to the most perplexing point in this portray of the spamgbot as a Menshevik, the point where the adherent of the One, True, Catholic and Orthodox Socialist Party actually departs from the SPGB doctrine and adopts the doctrine of the Organising Committee. Because as I recall it the SPGB was founded on the assumption that the conditions for socialism have been attained - that there was no need for any "capitalist revolution" in any part of the world. That - the notion of a "capitalist revolution" that needs to precede the socialist revolution in today's world - is undiluted Menshevism.


We don't want to attract bigots, that's nonsense. In fact, I can't see anywhere where Robbo said that, I'm afraid, unless you can provide a quote (which I may be missing) I'll have to say that you are grossly mistaken on that point, and ask you to retract.

Or what, you'll draw up a bill of attainder? Don't be ridiculous. You're in no position to ask anything, and the sheer arrogance is astounding. Here is what robbotnik said:


How do you "smash" the bourgeois family and how do you convey that in the space of 2 mins 40 secs? I think the overwhelming majority of workers on hearing a slogan like that would immediately be turned off and simply dismiss you as a nutjob on a par with the Monster Raving Looney Party or whatever.

And who opposes slogans like that? Family-values bigots. It is absolutely hilarious, by the way, that robbo thinks the workers (or rather electors - he doesn't distinguish between the two as per the SPGB's bizarre view on the class composition of modern societies) will "dismiss... as a nutjob" someone who talks about smashing the bourgeois family, but not someone who talks about the socialisation of the means of production.


What you're doing is like going up to an 19th Century abo0litionist and asking them "What about the gay slaves" "Er, we'll emancipate them too?" They'd reply.

I imagine that the actual response would be that they are to be hanged or imprisoned, which was probably what the average SPGB member would have said as well, when the organisation was founded in 1904, and the SPGB have not updated their analysis of the question of gay liberation - in fact they have not addressed the question at all.


Likewise, we'd reply that we want the LGBTQ Wages Slaves to emancipate themselves too.

Except, of course, it is more than possible for someone to "want the LGBTQ Wages Slaves [sic] to emancipate themselves" as workers, and for the oppression of LGBT people to continue. It isn't doable - because the oppression of gay people is intimately connected to the conditions of the reproduction of the proletariat - but the SPGB has never analysed this question.

Now compare this abstract, bigoted and workerist attitude to that expressed by Marx, by no means a particularly enlightened individual, to the question of women's liberation. Did Marx confine himself to abstract pronouncements about how "women wage slaves are to be emancipated as well"? No, that would be laughable. Instead he - and after him Engels, Bebel, Zetkin, etc. - analysed the oppression of women, its roots in class society, and raised particular slogans concerning the oppression of women - the same thing the SPGB refuses to do when it comes to women, gay people, national minorities etc.


I am a factory worker working for a large multinational capitalist corporation. Like most of them they know what is important and what is not when it comes to getting most out of their workers.

And as far as they are concerned discrimination and hostility between their employees based on antiquated “ism’s” isn’t one of them.

All the factory floor workers have been taken off the job and given extensive ‘equality and diversity’ training.

Including the full range of sexual orientations and gender preferences as well as obviously ‘race’ and religion.

Oh, you dear, how difficult that must have been for you. Just so we're clear, are you claiming that the oppression of gay people doesn't exist in modern Britain?


You simply cannot convey a nuanced and detailed analysis in under 2 mins 40 secs but presumably such an analysis will be found elsewhere in the literature of the SPGB for instance should people feel inclined to make contact with the SPGB

"Presumably". So, where is this "nuanced and detailed analysis" of the gay question by the SPGB? Are you going to link to a theatre review again? It's those rare moments when your opponent completely fucks up that make this site borderline-tolerable.


Firstly what articles are you talking about? Please provide the evidence to back up your claim. You have a reputation for being economical with the truth to put it mildly and it is about time you should be called out on this Apart from Martov's critique of the Bolsheviks I'm not aware of any other article that the SPGB published from the Mensheviks so do enlighten us all.

The article from Martov is more than enough! You know your site is borked in several ways, and the search function has gone to keep the company of Martov in the afterlife. But as you yourself said, you published another article by the honorary Menshevik, the late (in both meanings) Kautsky. Another (http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/study-guides/notes-mans-social-nature-and-capitalist-role-bolshevism) article cites Dan, the Menshevik leader, who has again become Theodore (why the fy - th switch? it doesn't even make sense as a translation convention - Russians don't go to the fyeatr).


Anyway, by no stretch of the imagination could you call Martov a whiteguardist. He actually supported the red army against the whites and was critical of those Mensheviks who joined the Kerensky government [...]

In fact it doesn't take much imagination to call Martov a whiteguard - simply an appreciation of the facts. Martov was always in the highest organs of the Organising Committee. Every action I have mentioned previously - Menshevik participation in White governments, forming a separate KomUch branch etc. - all of these happened with his acquiescence. He was instrumental - being one of the few Mensheviks of the Organising Committee (the United Internationalists and former-Menshevik members of the Mezhrayonka having gone over to the Bolsheviks) with a positive public image - in spreading disruptive propaganda while the Bolshevik authorities were fighting a war against the very White movement that contained numerous Mensheviks in its rank.

The only reason people do not usually think of Martov as a whiteguard is that he had cultivated the image of a wide-eyed idealist. But, as I said, when has that wide-eyed idealist ever criticised the Whites, the SPD in Germany, the LSI that the Mensheviks were close to? He called for Mensheviks to join the Red Army, true, but one conciliatory note (made while he was in Bolshevik territory, naturally) doesn't change the character of his actions.


Even if it were true that the SPGB did print articles from the Mensheviks - and with the exception of Martov , I think it is untrue - how on earth do you jump from that to the conclusion that "printing Menshevik-whiteguard articles against the Bolshevik state means siding with the Mensheviks, with the Whites, with Kolchak and with the British." The SPGB incidentally was highly critical of the Russian government's agreement in 1920 to repay foreign property-owners their losses and allied Governments their “debts.” - those same governments. like the British, whose armies had invaded Russia . For the SPGB this meant "continued exploitation of Russian workers to pay foreign exploiters" http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/s...shevist-policy (http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1920s/1920/no-192-august-1920/super-opportunists-criticism-bolshevist-policy)). Would such a sentiment be possible if the SPGB had sided with the British as you stupidly claim?

Yes, it would. In fact it was the only way for the SPGB to support the British. Of course the reparations meant extracting money from the Russian workers (and peasants, but as I said many times, we are not the party of the peasantry) to pay the British bourgeoisie. But it was not something the Bolsheviks decided to do because of their kind feelings for the British bourgeoisie. It was a decision, a hard decision but a necessary one, made after the landing in Arkhangelsk, after British attacks in the Caucasus, after numerous threats. Agitating against these unpopular but necessary measures objectively meant agitating for actions that would give the British state a pretext for further intervention - undoubtedly on the behalf of your beloved Mensheviks, as in Baku etc.


Yes of course there were some commonalities between the SPGB and the Mensheviks just as there were some commonalities between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. But that does not mean the SPGB supported the Mensheviks. Its ridiculous to suggest otherwise. I was reading recently of a UKIP politician who put forward a view on the nature of taxation that was to all intents and purposes exactly the same view that Marx held - namely that taxation in reality is a burden on the capitalist class alone , not the workers, even if there appear to be tax deductions being made on our pay slips . By your warped logic if one were to publish this article by a UKIP politician this must mean one supported UKIP

...yes? With the exception of polemic articles, one doesn't print articles that one does not politically agree with.


As for Stalin and Trotsky being on the side of the proletariat the hell they were. Just saying you are on the side of the proletariat doesnt make you so. The proof of the pudding in in the eating. We all know about Stalin[...]

Do we now? What do we know? Don't for a moment imagine that your view of Stalin is the same as that of the Trotskyists. Did "Stalin" (who has come to symbolise the entire state apparatus, apparently) limit sacred democratic liberties? Good for him. He should have done more of that. In fact his removal of restrictions on whiteguards and priests is one of his many mistakes (I am adopting here the convention of talking about "Stalin", mind you). Did he collectivise the economy? He should have done so earlier. Etc.

[Dave B]

On Skobelev quote.

As the Mensheviks are described by lying Leninists as white-guardist capitalist lickspittles.

Sometimes it is best just left to letting the Mensheviks speak for themselves and to let people see for themselves their political orientation.

And who better than the arch rightwing Menshevik Skobelev (soon to become a Bolshevik); as often portrayed by lying Leninists as the paradigm of Menshevik pro capitalist lickspittles?

People can judge for themselves whether or not the content of Skobelev’s political programme of a 100% taxation and compulsory labour of the capitalist etc is in anyway conceivably consistent with the modern Bolshevik story.

Any opinion I may have on what Skobelev said or how Lenin responded to it is beyond that point.

However as to


A decree to the effect that the entire industry was to be nationalised immediately would be nothing more than empty posturing. The situation was such that, in May 1917 (and indeed in October as well), immediate and complete nationalisation was not possible.


There was no mention for what it matters of nationalisation; that had to wait until September 1917 where Lenin proposed his state capitalism.

http://www.marx2mao.net/Lenin/IC17.html


Fyodor is the Russian spelling of Theodore I believe.

Far from the Mensheviks being ‘legal’ in mid 1918 and therefore able to control renegade members on the right, on pages 127-9 immediately following on from your quote, on page 126, from;

Dear Comrades: Menshevik Reports on the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War; edited by Vladimir N. Brovkin.

Martov goes on to give a long list Mensheviks in prison and a few who had been shot.

And;



The prisons are overflowing with party members. Still in prison in Moscow are members of the central committee; Iugov, Iakhontov, …..


Among those arrested with Abromovitch………… etc


Again perhaps we can let these people speak for themselves?

Re Abromovitch;



The imaginary dictatorship of the proletariat has definitely turned into the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party, which attracted all sorts of adventurers and suspicious characters and is supported only by the naked force of hired bayonets. Their sham socialism resulted in the complete destruction of Russian industry, in the country's enslavement to foreign capital, in the destruction of all class organisations of the proletariat, in the suppression of all democratic liberty and of all organs of democratic State life, thus preparing the ground for a bourgeois counter-revolution of the worst and most brutal kind.

The Bolsheviks are unable to solve the food problem, and their attempt to bribe the proletariat by organising expeditions into the villages in order to seize supplies of bread drives the peasantry into the arms of the counter-revolution and threatens to rouse its hatred towards the town in general, and the proletariat in particular, for a long time to come. . . . In continuing the struggle against the Bolshevik tyranny which dishonours the Russian revolution, social democracy pursues the following aims :

(1) To make it impossible for the working class to have to shed its blood for the sake of maintaining the sham dictatorship of the toiling masses or of the sham socialistic order, both of which are bound to perish and are meanwhile killing the soul and body of the proletariat ;

(2) To organise the working class into a force which, in union with other democratic forces of the country, will be able to throw off the yoke of the Bolshevik regime, to defend the democratic conquests of the revolution and to oppose any reactionary force which would attempt to hang a millstone around the neck of the Russian democracy. . . . Forty delegates elected by workmen of various towns, to a con- ference, for the purpose of making arrangements for the convocation of a Labour Congress, have been arrested and committed for trial by the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal, created to pass death sentences without the ordinary guarantees of a fair trial.

They are falsely and calumniously accused of organising a counter-revolutionary plot. Among the arrested are the most prominent workers of the Social Democratic Labour movement, as, for instance, Abramovitch, member of the Central Executive Committees of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and of the " Bund," who is personally well known to many foreign comrades ; Alter, member of the Executive Committee of the " Bund " ; Smirnov, member of last year's Soviet Delegation to the Western Countries ; Vezkalin, member of the Executive Com- mittee of the Lettish Social Democratic Party ; Volkov, chairman of the Petrograd Union of Workmen's Co-operative Societies ; Zakharov, secretary of the Petrograd Union of Workmen of Chemical Factories ; and other prominent workers of the trade union and co-operative movement. We demand immediate intervention of all Socialist parties to avert the shameful and criminal proceeding. (Protest of the Social Democratic Labour Party and of the Jewish Socialist Party sent to the Executive Committees of all Socialist Parties of Europe and America, August, 1918.)


The position of the Mensheviks re the anti Bolshevik rebellion is covered by Brovkin in his Mensheviks After October.



And in detail on Maiskii and the ‘white- guardist’ Dan.

On page 266-7

‘The Rift between the Right and Centre-Left Mensheviks’

It discusses the Menshevik Cental Committee resolution forbidding Menshevik participation in anti Bolshevik uprisings.


For the right Mensheviks there was no question about supporting in anyway the ‘counter- revolutionary monarchists’;or in other words the whites.

It was a matter of whether or not to support spontaneous peasant and worker armed insurrections against the Bolsheviks that were occurring.

Page 267


“Dan vehemently objected, brushing aside the SR’s actions as mere adventure”



But for our Bolshevik ‘historians’ all anti Bolsheviks were whites including self described Marxists and Socialist Revolutionary peasants whose long standing main programme was to dispossess the aristocracy of its land etc.

Again we can get a flavour, for which people can judge for themselves, of the white-guardist character of these SR’s from the political cv’s from the 12 who were executed in the Bolshevik show trial of 1921.


1. Abraham Gotz; entered the Revolutionary Movement in 1900; beginning with the year 1904 one of the most active members of the fighting brigade of the Socialist Revolutionists, the organization so terrifying to the Czarist Government. Under his direct participation were organized attempts) at assassination upon Minister of the Interior Durnovo, the suppressor of the Moscow rebellion in 1905, General Min and
Colonel Riman, Minister of Justice Akimoff, the Mayor of Moscow Schuwaloff and the head of the Czarist Secret Service and Assistant Director of the Department of Police, Rachkovsky; his record is imprisonment in the fortress of St. Peter and Paul, in ejtpectation of execution, trial by court martial,eight years of hard labor and exile to Siberia, where the Revolution of 1917 found him.

2. Eugene Timofeyeff; entered the revolutionary movement in 1900; sentenced by a Czarist court in 1905 to five years of hard labor and resentenced, shortly before the conclusion of his term, to 10 years; liberated from prison by the Revolution.

3. Gendelman, entered the revolutionary movement in 1898; in 1901 sent into the army as a private for participation in student disturbances; spent about 3 years in Czarist prisons.

4. Donskoy; entered the revolutionary movement in 1897; sent into the army as a private for participation in student disturbances; exiled thrice; spent 6 years in Czarist
prisons.

5. Eugenia Ratner; joined the Party of Socialists-Revolutionists in 1903; arrested eight times under the Czarist regime; spent more than 6 years in Czarist prisons.

6. Gerstein; self-educated workman; in the revolutionary movement since 1898; previus record: four and half years' imprisonment and five years exile.

7. Nicolai Ivanoff; entered the revolutionary movement in 1906; member of the fighting brigade of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionists; participated in the reparation for and the assassination of the Chief of the Prison Administration Maximoff, sentenced to death by the party for cruel treatment of political prisoners; also participated in the plot to blow up the Imperial Council in 1907; spent ten years at hard labor; was arrested by Kolchak but escaped death by flight.

8. Lichatch; entered revolutionary movement in 1903; spent two years in jail and six years in Siberian exile under the Czar.

9. Sergei Morozoff; member of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionists since 1905; sentenced twice to hard labor; spent seven years athard labor in various prisons.

10. Nicolai Artemieff ; entered the revolutionary movement in 1903; in exile four times, spending part of it in the Tiirchansk district of the Polar region.

11. Helen Ivanova; entered the Party of Socialists-Revolutionists in 1905; member of the fighting brigade of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionists; cooperated in the assasi
sination of the Prison-Chief Goodim and the Police Chief of the Ochtinsk section Rodziersky, who was guilty of severe tortures of workmen in cells under his supervision; she also organized the assassination of the chief of the Petrograd prison „Kresty", and participated in the assassination of the Chief of the Prison Administration Maximovsky; condemned to death in 1908, the sentence being commuted to hard labor for life; regained her liberty with the revolution.

12. Vladimir Agapoff, the youngest of the condemned; entered the Party of Socialists-Revolutionists in 1909; exiled to Siberia under the Czar.

And thus the Twelve Who Are To Die have a total record of 240 years' service to the Revolution and the cause of the emancipation of Russia and a total record of 70 years' imprisonment.



From a book prefaced by the white-guardist Kautsky.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1922/xx/twelve.htm

On which from Lenin;


http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/lenin/works/1922/feb/20c.htm



(http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/lenin/works/1922/feb/20c.htm)

Also;



Speech by Rafail Abramovich (Rein) to a rally in Berlin, organised by the SPD in protest against both Italian Fascism and the "Menshevik Trial" in Moscow, 2 March 1931.

Against Fascism and Bolshevik Slander!




We have always categorically rejected the methods of armed uprising, sabotage and intervention. Not only have we rejected them but, as the Bolsheviks know full well, have always waged an active struggle against such methods. Permit me to recall that during the civil war, despite our rejection of the Bolshevik dictatorship in principle, in order to save the revolution from White Guard reaction and foreign intervention we voluntarily mobilised members of our party to fight in the ranks of the Red Army against counterrevolution.


http://www.korolevperevody.co.uk/korolev/abramovich01.htm

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

On Skobelev quote.

As the Mensheviks are described by lying Leninists as white-guardist capitalist lickspittles.

Sometimes it is best just left to letting the Mensheviks speak for themselves and to let people see for themselves their political orientation.

Indeed. But as they say, actions speak louder than words. The minister Skobelev had done nothing to carry out his programme. In fact he never had the intention of doing so. And this was widely understood - the programme did not impress, not just the Bolsheviks, but the entire left of Russian socialism - the Bolsheviks, the Internationalists, the Mezhrayonka, the Maximists or the left Esers. And it did not draw any protest from the bourgeoisie, allegedly threatened with a tax rate of 100% and compulsory labour.


People can judge for themselves whether or not the content of Skobelev’s political programme of a 100% taxation and compulsory labour of the capitalist etc is in anyway conceivably consistent with the modern Bolshevik story.

Of course it is. Bourgeois and petit-bourgeois parties will often adopt wildly r-r-revolutionary programmes, statements and so on. That is besides the point, however. What matters are their actions.


There was no mention for what it matters of nationalisation

I was making a broader point.


Far from the Mensheviks being ‘legal’ in mid 1918 and therefore able to control renegade members on the right, on pages 127-9 immediately following on from your quote, on page 126, from;

Dear Comrades: Menshevik Reports on the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War; edited by Vladimir N. Brovkin.

Martov goes on to give a long list Mensheviks in prison and a few who had been shot.

Yet interestingly enough, the Organising Committee was more than able to control renegade members on the left, who supported the Bolsheviks in the trade union debates. And yes, of course individual Mensheviks would find themselves in prisons or shot. So did individual Bolsheviks. But the Menshevik organisation - I can't recall if they were still formally called the Organising Committee by that point - carried out political work openly.


Re Abromovitch;

And again you simply post a paragraph without any commentary. I mean, alright, the paragraph says what it says. So what. Are we supposed to be impressed by d-d-democratic sloganeering? Most of us are not that naive (of course I can't speak for everyone).

And, of course, the resolution, which was a resolution of the Menshevik central committee if I recall correctly, openly mentions organising for the "throwing off the yoke of the Bolshevik regime". Fine. But then don't cry when the proletarian authorities shoot you because you tried to unite with "forces of democracy" like the dumas, the Czechs, etc., and "throw off" the revolution.

And by the way, the assertion that "all sorts of adventurers and suspicious characters" were attracted to the Bolsheviks is hilarious. Just recall - the Mensheviks lost Uritsky, the elder Ezhov, Bazarov, Sukhanov, Larin, and the rest of their actual left wing to the Bolsheviks, despite the best efforts of these people to remain outside the Bolshevik group. The Bolsheviks were also joined by Trotsky, the rest of the Mezhrayonka, a lot of Maximists and former PLSR members - all of the consistent internationalists. Who did the Mensheviks attract? No one of note. Not even the Kadets, Octobrists and Progressists, who were doing their best to appear as "left" as possible. They were passed over in favour of the Esers.


It discusses the Menshevik Cental Committee resolution forbidding Menshevik participation in anti Bolshevik uprisings.

Again, resolutions and statements and programmes are simply wasting paper if they are not put into practice. And this resolution was not put into practice. And every violation of the resolution happened with the acquiescence of Martov, Dan etc., who people try to portray as the "good", the "left" Mensheviks.


“Dan vehemently objected, brushing aside the SR’s actions as mere adventure”

Which they were. But being a cautious whiteguard doesn't make one any less of a whiteguard.


It was a matter of whether or not to support spontaneous peasant and worker armed insurrections against the Bolsheviks that were occurring.

Yes, peasant uprisings against proletarian power, triggered by the food dictatorship. Again, your own claims condemn the Mensheviks. But what was "spontaneous" about the KomUch, the Samara government, the various Siberian White governments?


But for our Bolshevik ‘historians’ all anti Bolsheviks were whites including self described Marxists and Socialist Revolutionary peasants whose long standing main programme was to dispossess the aristocracy of its land etc.

"Self-described Marxists" can be found in bourgeois movements, bourgeois governments, even in fascist bourgeois governments (Bombacci). As for the "long standing programme", apparently it stood for a bit too long because the KomUch government, and other Menshevik-SR-Kadet governments failed to implement it. Leading to the defection of most of the People's Army of the KomUch to the Bolsheviks, by the way.


Again we can get a flavour, for which people can judge for themselves, of the white-guardist character of these SR’s from the political cv’s from the 12 who were executed in the Bolshevik show trial of 1921.

Similar things could be said of Plekhanov, of Chernov, Kerensky, and indeed - of de Ambris, of Lagardelle, of Mussolini. Having been a revolutionary in the past means little when one is acting as a reactionary.


Speech by Rafail Abramovich (Rein) to a rally in Berlin, organised by the SPD in protest against both Italian Fascism and the "Menshevik Trial" in Moscow, 2 March 1931.

Again, you make my argument for me - much obliged! Associating with the rotten, reformist SPD, murderers of communists, in opposition to Bolsheviks, is hardly the course of action a Marxist revolutionary would take.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Sometimes the sheer absurdity of what I'm doing hits me - I'm arguing with Internet Mensheviks and crypto-Wohlforthites. Surely there is something more pleasant I could be doing. Like hammering nails with my eyeballs.

[robbo203]

I couldnt really be arsed to wade through the entirety of Vincent West's turgid and rambling diatribe - to be honest my eyes glazed over half way through - but what I managed to get from it only confirms my suspicion that what we have here is a complete fantasist whose idea of an argument is to studiously avoid addressing the point you are making in order to indulge his nasty and thoroughly dishonest habit of inventing some bizarre political view which he can then conveninetly foist on you -- even if it bears absolutely no relation to what you actually think.

I will leave others who have been similarly subject to this sort of disgusting treatment to deal with this clown after their own fashion. For myself I will confine myself to one or two of the comments he directed at me.

Firstly all that nonsense about "the family". I stand by my statement that to talk about "smashing the bourgeoois family" in a very short party political broadcast would be inadvisable not sot say downright stupid

How do you "smash" the bourgeois family and how do you convey that in the space of 2 mins 40 secs? I think the overwhelming majority of workers on hearing a slogan like that would immediately be turned off and simply dismiss you as a nutjob on a par with the Monster Raving Looney Party or whatever.


It would be far better to focus, I said, on the "big picture" in positive terms in the very short time available to you rather than risk say something that will amost certainly be misconstrued or misunderstood. That apart there is the question of what you mean by "the family" in bourgeois society. Queervanguard earlier made the frankly ridiculous claim that

The family came w/ property and will end w/ property. Simple. If the family continues to exist after the SPGB have their World Socialism take root --which a shit ton of them are probably hoping), it will be a sign we're nowhere near Socialism


I pointed out that this was absolute rubbish and anthropologically illiterate, that famility units clearly existed prior to emergence of property society in hunter gatherer bands and will probably continue in some form and to some extent after the disappearance of property society as well. It would amount to breathtaking arrogance - Vincent West is forever accusing others of "arrogance" but he takes the biscuit when it comes to arrogance - to assert that this cannot be so. You cannot legislate for how people order their living arrnangments in a future socialist society. If they chose to live in what are clearly consanguineal family units and to emotionally bond with other members of that family unit then that is their choice. You come across as a some kind of authoritarian social engineer in seeking to deny them that choice

I cannot believe that Mr West is so stupid as to not understand this point I was making. I can only conclude that, true to form, he is being thoroughly disinegenuous . According to him, it makes me some kind of right wing "family values bigot" if I dont like the idea of including the slogan "smash the bourgeois family" in a party political broadcast . Frankly the only bigot here is Mr West himself - and Queervanguard. To this pair of clowns , I repeat again the challenge. Go out into the real world of working class lives, not the fantasy world of facile political slogans that you inhabit, and tell your fellow workers that you are going to "smash" their familial set up and disperse their family members or whatever it is you have in mind for your post-family fascist utopia and they will overwhelmingly treat you with the contempt you plainly deserve. I am quite amenable to the idea that the form of the family will evolve and change in a socialist society and that there will be greater fluidity and variability in the way people live togther but to dogmatically assert that they will not live in familiy units at all becuase that " will be a sign we're nowhere near Socialism" is completely over the top and ridiculous beyond belief

Secondly , on the question of the SPGB and the Mensheviks . Here Mr West's virulently anti-communist pro-Bolshevik sentiments shine through. Some of his comments are so pureile as to be hardly worth dealing with. Apparently the "average SPGB member would have said as well, when the organisation was founded in 1904" that "gay slaves" would be hanged or imprisoned. Oh fuck off you stupid stupid little kid. You seriously need to do some growing up. Strikes me that you are just some attention seeking bigot wanting to say something controversial for the sake of it.

However, I cannot let you get away with the rubbish ytou have written. You made a claim about the SPGB as follows:

Yes, they did, and don't pretend otherwise. If printing articles against the war means taking a stand against the British state - and it does - then printing Menshevik-whiteguard articles against the Bolshevik state means siding with the Mensheviks, with the Whites, with Kolchak and with the British.


I challenged you to provide evidence to back up your claim. As usual you squirmed out of it, preferring to plump for the "guilt by association" line of argument. The only article I know of which the SPGB published which was written by a Menshevik, was Martov's critique of the Bolshevik state on which he quite correctly pointed out that what had been established was not a dictarship of the proletariat but a party dictatorship over the proletariat. Only a complete fantasist could infer from this that that means the SPGB " siding with the Mensheviks, with the Whites, with Kolchak and with the British"

Unbelievably in response to my point

The SPGB incidentally was highly critical of the Russian government's agreement in 1920 to repay foreign property-owners their losses and allied Governments their “debts.” - those same governments. like the British, whose armies had invaded Russia . For the SPGB this meant "continued exploitation of Russian workers to pay foreign exploiters" http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/s...shevist-policy). Would such a sentiment be possible if the SPGB had sided with the British as you stupidly claim?

You say:

Yes, it would. In fact it was the only way for the SPGB to support the British.

Huh? What sort of idiotic argument is that???

Going back to Martov, it seems to me your are prepared to lie through your teeth to score a point. Martov was not a supportrer of the Whites but an oppnent of them but, of course, for you it is important to establish such an untenable connection sdo that you can by inference tar the SPGB with "supporting the british"

This is how your stupid logic goes

The SPGB published something by Martov attacking the Bolshevik state
Martov supported the Whites
Therefore the SPGB supported the Whites
Since the Whites were aided by the British, therefore the SPGB supported the British

This is laughable. Not even your prudent capitalist politician would stoop to such underhand and devious tactics but that does not stop you from doing it. I mentioned the SPGB published something by Karl Kautsky in 1906 - namely a pamphlet entitled "From handicraft to capitalism" http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/handicraft-capitalism-karl-kautsky-1906. (I thinkl they might have also published something Kautsky wrote on religion). Your response to that is to call Kautsky an "honorary Menshevik". So we are back in the loop again. Because Kautsky is an
"honorary Menshevik" that means the SPGB...er... supported the British.

You cant seem to get it through your thick skull that it is entirely possiuble to agree with some ideas that a person holds while disagreeing with others. As I pointed out there is an UKIP politician who wrote a thesis on taxation that accords completely with Marx's views on taxation. Are you seriously suggesting therefore that becuase a Marxist on reading what this UKIP politician wrote about taxation and agreeing with it, must therefore be a supporter of UKIP.??? Dont be so stupid

Similarly the SPGB attitude towards the Mensheviks was throughly mixed. It did not support the Mensheviks as you claim but it went along with some of the ideas that some of the Mensheviks - like Martov - propagated

The very article you quote from the SPGB makes this clear

Thus the Bolsheviks aimed at political power, to be achieved by insurrection, to introduce democracy. The Mensheviks, while not opposed to insurrection, aimed at developing working class consciousness. It is all too easily assumed that the difference between Menshevism and Bolshevism was that between the reformist and the revolutionary position. Though those who were Revisionists and reformists were to be found amongst the Mensheviks, the disagreement was about the bourgeois not the socialist revolution.

As far as the socialist revolution was concerned there was no difference between the two wings. Up till 1917 the Bolsheviks were orthodox Social Democrats. They were members of the Second International. They accepted that Socialism could only be international, the materialist conception of history and Marxian economics. Like the Mensheviks they had a reform programme.http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/study-guides/notes-mans-social-nature-and-capitalist-role-bolshevism

The Mensheviks were in the tradition of the reformist Second International which the SPGB had decisively broken with

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I will reply to the rest later, but for now, it's interesting to note that both robbo and Dave have not addressed the most important part of my posts. So, Dave B, do you think that gay people are not oppressed in modern Britain? And robbo203, where is that "nuanced and detailed" analysis of homosexuality and homophobia that the SPGB has made?

And pray tell, if QV and I are bigots, who are we bigoted against?

When the SPGB was founded, the penalty for homosexuality was imprisonment, when many of the original SPGB members were born it was death. Unlike Bebel, Liebknecht or Zetkin, the SPGB never opposed any of this, so it stands to reason that its members agreed with it.

[Red Deathy]

Why, on this thread we have robbo, openly admitting that the execrable SPGB propaganda doesn't address gay liberation because they want to attract bigots



robbo203[/B]]
How do you "smash" the bourgeois family and how do you convey that in the space of 2 mins 40 secs? I think the overwhelming majority of workers on hearing a slogan like that would immediately be turned off and simply dismiss you as a nutjob on a par with the Monster Raving Looney Party or whatever. In no way could that be read as “wanting to attract bigots” without stretching the English language to breaking point and beyond. I think you do owe him an apology. I can only ask for this, and leave others to judge from your response. It’s your reputation, and up to you what you do with it.


Except, of course, it is more than possible for someone to "want the LGBTQ Wages Slaves [sic] to emancipate themselves" as workers, and for the oppression of LGBT people to continue. It isn't doable - because the oppression of gay people is intimately connected to the conditions of the reproduction of the proletariat - but the SPGB has never analysed this question.Well, no, if they are still oppressed they are not emancipated, and the point of socialism is that the necessity for co-operation precludes oppressing minorities because the mutual interdependence required for our freedom.

However, if LGBTQ oppression continued despite the abolition of the wages system, then we would have to address that. But the Socialist Party is concerned solely with abolishing the wages system, in the same way the RSPB is solely concerned with protecting birds.

Reality does seem to have refuted your claims that capitalism requires LGBTQ oppression, having legalised gay marriage, made it illegal to sack people for being gay, etc.. Capitalism can continue very nicely without LGBTQ oppression. Nothing in this is to minimise, excuse or ignore the genuine oppression LGBTQ people suffer and have suffered, nor is it a claim that there doesn’t need to be LGBTQ campaign groups (indeed, there are some very good ones) but to say that the socialist party solely campaigns for the abolition of the wages system, and leaves those sorts of campaigns to dedicated groups who do it better.

[Red Deathy]

When the SPGB was founded, the penalty for homosexuality was imprisonment, when many of the original SPGB members were born it was death. Unlike Bebel, Liebknecht or Zetkin, the SPGB never opposed any of this, so it stands to reason that its members agreed with it.

Actually, if they opposed the state, the naturally opposed the death penalty.

Anyway, here's what one writer said about smashign the familly in 1910:

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1910s/1910/no-76-december-1910/case-free-love-some-capitalist-hypocrisies-exposed

[Q]

Very decent broadcast. Congratulations on making most use of a limited time on video.

[Dave B]

So, Dave B, do you think that gay people are not oppressed in modern Britain?

I assume the capitalist class do otherwise they wouldn’t send us on courses etc

I don’t know how old you are or what circles you mix in but things are much better than they were 20 years ago particularly amongst the lower working class.

Then, where I work, abusive racial language etc was common place amongst the shop floor workers and management; you only had to look at the graffiti on the back of toilet doors for that.

I work in the heartland of white north Manchester and not far from Bernard Manning’s notorious club.

All that kind of thing is much less fashionable than it used to be and although anything at all like that now and you would be in really deep shit with human resources, I don’t think it is just a matter of it going underground.

Peoples real attitudes have changed including some particular individuals I can think of who have been there as long as I have.

I can promise you I do not need to lectured to about that kind of thing from anyone.

[robbo203]

I will reply to the rest later, but for now, it's interesting to note that both robbo and Dave have not addressed the most important part of my posts. So, Dave B, do you think that gay people are not oppressed in modern Britain? And robbo203, where is that "nuanced and detailed" analysis of homosexuality and homophobia that the SPGB has made?

And pray tell, if QV and I are bigots, who are we bigoted against?
.

Definition of Bigot


" a person who strongly and unfairly dislikes other people, ideas, etc. : a bigoted person; especially : a person who hates or refuses to accept the members of a particular group (such as a racial or religious group)"

(http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bigot)

I consider your criticisms of the SPGB ( and I'm not even a member) and what it stands for are grotesquely unfair, totally unreasonable and utterly dishonest. There are legitimate criticisms that can be made of the SPGB - Ive made them myself - but no revolutionary socialist can fail to regard them as fully comrades in the struggle to achieve a genuine socialist society. Their contribution to the development of socialist ideas and socialist theory has been considerable but mostly unappreciated, ignored or wilfully distorted by ignorant bigots on the left such as yourself. We have seen this time and time and time again, how you have lied through your teeth , to foist on the SPGB a view they do not hold , so you can indulge your nasty and tedious little habit of knocking down straw arguments.

I also consider that the dogmatic and anthropologically nonsensical view held by QV and seemingly yourself too on the question of the family to be a clear case of bigotry. The family as an institution and marriage as an institution are not the same thing. It is bullshit to claim, as QV did, that the family as institution emerged with private property - families clearly existed long before private property - and it can only be a case of breathtakingly arrogant social engineering to insist that the family must as an institution disappear with the disappearance of private property itself. As QC said himself, as long as the family continues to exist after the SPGB have their World Socialism take root --which a shit ton of them are probably hoping), it will be a sign we're nowhere near Socialism . Ive never heard such absolute rubbish.

So here's a question for you to respond to rather than dodge as is your habit. Do you agree that individuals in a socialist society should be able to live in what are clearly consanguineal family units and to emotionally bond with other members of that family unit if that is their choice? If so , what is the point in calling for the "abolition of the family"? Particularly, I might add, in a very short party political broadcast in which it is most likely going to be misconstrued as meaning that your political party wants to break up the family, confiscate the kids and send them off to some state rehabiliation centre where they will turned into model citizens with no other loyalties than to the fascist state itself....

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Well, no, if they are still oppressed they are not emancipated, and the point of socialism is that the necessity for co-operation precludes oppressing minorities because the mutual interdependence required for our freedom.

Careful now, if you indulge in any more hand-waving you might just be the first person to fly without mechanical assistance. Obviously the "necessity for cooperation" does not necessarily extend to any single group - it is more than possible to exclude gay people from society.


Actually, if they opposed the state, the naturally opposed the death penalty.

It is possible to kill people without the state.


Anyway, here's what one writer said about smashign the familly in 1910:

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/s...risies-exposed (http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1910s/1910/no-76-december-1910/case-free-love-some-capitalist-hypocrisies-exposed)

"And Balak said unto Balaam, What hast thou done unto me? I took thee to curse mine enemies, and, behold, thou hast blessed them altogether."

I realise your position is untenable and you need all the "evidence" you can muster, even if you have to go back to over a century (now there's a frightening thought) ago, but perhaps you should have thought twice before citing as an example of progressive thinking an article that claims:

"The natural purpose for which men and women should mate is the perpetuation of the race and the incidental satisfaction of the sexual instinct."

And:

"With this freedom established, all human activities will depend upon their desirability and usefulness to those who perform them. Consequently our faculties will be devoted, unhampered by economic considerations, to their true purpose. When women have free access, as members of the community, to a sufficiency of those things necessary to a healthy and happy life, their genuine sex-nature will assert itself. When children are born with a similar birthright, the need for avoiding them or exploiting them for private ends will disappear also."


I consider your criticisms of the SPGB ( and I'm not even a member) and what it stands for are grotesquely unfair, totally unreasonable and utterly dishonest. There are legitimate criticisms that can be made of the SPGB - Ive made them myself - but no revolutionary socialist can fail to regard them as fully comrades in the struggle to achieve a genuine socialist society.

Revolutionary socialists like Dan, Martov, Portugeis and Zhordania, perhaps.

And where have I been dishonest? I have cited numerous instances of the Menshevik organisation assisting the Whites, all with the acquiescence of your beloved Martov. And I have clearly specified the sources (in fact I have done so several times, because Dave, the last Menshevik truth-bender, constantly posts the same few articles and claims). You have not responded to this. The arrogant, dismissive and bigoted approach of the SPGB to the question of gay liberation has been demonstrated again and again, particularly when the spamgbots try to defend their beloved party and end up praising articles about how the "natural purpose" of sex is "the perpetuation of the race", or, like RD and Dave B, try to claim that gay people are not oppressed - I gleefully await their restriction given the precedent of Vanguard1917.


I also consider that the dogmatic and anthropologically nonsensical view held by QV and seemingly yourself too on the question of the family to be a clear case of bigotry.

Ha! Bigotry against who, the good bourgeois nuclear heterosexual family? I am guilty as charged, as any Marxists should be.


As QC said himself, as long as the family continues to exist after the SPGB have their World Socialism take root --which a shit ton of them are probably hoping), it will be a sign we're nowhere near Socialism . Ive never heard such absolute rubbish.

Well, the desire of many members of the SPGB family for the het family to continue existing in what they imagine to be "socialism" is obvious, and the incompatibility of any sort of family with socialism has been established already by Engels.


So here's a question for you to respond to rather than dodge as is your habit. Do you agree that individuals in a socialist society should be able to live in what are clearly consanguineal family units and to emotionally bond with other members of that family unit if that is their choice?

"Should" is not acceptable in Marxist vocabulary. We Marxists base ourselves on the concrete, material economic process, not abstract "rights". The family is incompatible with socialism - if the family exists, socialism does not. If socialism does exist, the family doesn't. There will probably be no need to prohibit the family, just as today there is no need to prohibit uji clans.

[The Idler]

Vincent West logic
SPGB = Opponents of the Bolsheviks = Mensheviks = White Guard = Supporters of the British state
Or as George W. Bush put it
"If you're not with us you're against us"

Bolshevism or White Guards, a false dichotomy if ever there was one.

Actions may speak louder than words, and by all means judge parties on what they do, but it doesn't mean what they say counts for nothing. Judging the Bolsheviks on what they did would be a good start.

[robbo203]

And where have I been dishonest?




Where to begin? There are so many examples to chose from! Perhaps we can begin with this example as an explanation of your rank dishonesty which I provided earlier




This is how your stupid logic goes

The SPGB published something by Martov attacking the Bolshevik state
Martov supported the Whites
Therefore the SPGB supported the Whites
Since the Whites were aided by the British, therefore the SPGB supported the British



When I said:

The SPGB incidentally was highly critical of the Russian government's agreement in 1920 to repay foreign property-owners their losses and allied Governments their “debts.” - those same governments. like the British, whose armies had invaded Russia . For the SPGB this meant "continued exploitation of Russian workers to pay foreign exploiters" http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/s...shevist-policy). Would such a sentiment be possible if the SPGB had sided with the British as you stupidly claim?

You responded

Yes, it would. In fact it was the only way for the SPGB to support the British.

So you clearly maintain then that the SPGB did in fact "support the British". This is a lie and a pretty stupid lie at that.

Need I go on?




Well, the desire of many members of the SPGB family for the het family to continue existing in what they imagine to be "socialism" is obvious, and the incompatibility of any sort of family with socialism has been established already by Engels.


You are getting pretty close to a position of expressing anti-heterosexual bigotry. Despite you idiotic comments regarding the arrogant, dismissive and bigoted approach of the SPGB to the question of gay liberation none of the SPGB comrades here have expresssed even the slightest bigotry towards gays. Indeed, some members of the SPGB are themselves gays. Forthright opposition to any kind of prejudice based on race, gender or sexual preference is part and parcel of the SPGB's outlook and rightly so. Such prejudice can only serve to divide workers and so strengthen capitalism.

What you still dont seem to understand, however, is that the SPGB was not set up as a body to campaign/lobby for such things as legal rights for gays. Its sole purpose is to strive for socialism and nothing but. You also dont seem to understand the point that it is being made about gay liberation by the SPGB comrades here. No one is denying that there is still prejudice against gays; all that is being asserted is that there is no legal discrimination against gays any more. (if there is then show me an example) In other words, such prejudice continues to exist despite the absence of legal discrimination against gays. In other words this is an attitude problem which is not going to be solved by further legal reform but by changing ideas which is what the SPGB is in the business of doing

Finally, regarding your claim that the incompatibility of any sort of family with socialism has been established already by Engels. this is nonsense. Show me where Engels said such a thing . My guess is you are probably referring to his work "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" and my further guess is that you imagine Engels is saying that these 3 institutions coincided in a temporal sense when they did not. This is no doubt is what led QC to infer that The family came w/ property and will end w/ property. Wrong


Engels is quite clear that the family as an institution long predated private property and was to be found in different forms in "primitive" society. These corresponded in his view to different stages. 1) the consanguine family 2) the punaluan family and 3) the pairing family. The monogamous patriarchical family developed out of the last of these and corresponded to the beginning of property society or civilisation.

It was this last form of the family - the monogamous patriarchical familiy that Marxists criticise, not "the family" as such. Whatever Engels may or may not have said on the matter - and his schema is based on Lewis Henry Morgan's work Ancient Society (1877) whose stagist approach has been shown to be somewhat questionable, modern anthroplogy clearly attests to the existence of distinct family units in "primitive" societies predating the emergence of private property (see my earlier quote)

If that is the case then there are absolutely no grounds on which to dogmatically assert apriori that if the family exists, socialism does not. If socialism does exist, the family doesn't This is just mindless dogmatism and very bad sociology, The form that the family might take will doubt be different to what it is today but families will continue to exist one way or another and they dont even necessarily have to take the form of heterosexual families either, incidentally....

[QueerVanguard]

You are getting pretty close to a position of expressing anti-heterosexual bigotry. Despite you idiotic comments regarding the arrogant, dismissive and bigoted approach of the SPGB to the question of gay liberation none of the SPGB comrades here have expresssed even the slightest bigotry towards gays. Indeed, some members of the SPGB are themselves gays.

"I can't be racist, some of my best friends are Black!!1!" And lol @ "anti-heterosexual bigotry". What's next? You people are gonna start saying "anti-racist is code word for anti-WHITE" :laugh::laugh:

[robbo203]

"I can't be racist, some of my best friends are Black!!1!" And lol @ "anti-heterosexual bigotry". What's next? You people are gonna start saying "anti-racist is code word for anti-WHITE" :laugh::laugh:


Nope. Anti-racist is not a code word for anti white and I would never suggest such a thing but if you imagine that just becuase someone is not white they cannot be racist (that in itself is a sort of inverted racism) then you are dead wrong. If course it happens. I came across a website some months ago run by a group of "black supremacists" - I wish I had the link now but cannot find it anymore - in which some pretty vile racists sentiments were expressed particularly towards white women, incidentally. Oh and gay bashing as well lives and thrives among some of these people. Check this out from Russia Today http://rt.com/usa/ayo-kimathi-wald-dhs-982/


Racism is not a one way street, you know, even if the victims of structural racism at least in place like the US or the UK are overwhelmingly black. Only a dyed-in-the wool liberal with his or her head firmly stuck in the ground would deny this. Revolutionary socialists attack racism whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head, regardless of the "race" of the racists in question.


Anyway, why are you trying to divert attention from your foolish comments on the question of the family and private property which were earlier demolished and which i note you have made no effort to defend

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Vincent West logic
SPGB = Opponents of the Bolsheviks = Mensheviks = White Guard = Supporters of the British state
Or as George W. Bush put it
"If you're not with us you're against us"

You could have mentioned either Bush or Mussolini - you chose Bush. Interesting. This is besides the point, but I have to admit my eyes roll a little whenever someone compares a figure to Bush. It's been, what, five years? Get over it already. The man was a bog-standard bourgeois politician who got a bog-standard imperialist power involved in a few bog-standard imperialist wars. This obsession with Bush as the Worst President Ever (TM) is simply a way for people to support his successor, who most American "socialist" groups tailed.

In any case, perhaps, along with Jesus, you think that "whoever is not against us is with us", but that sentiment is, to put it mildly, not applicable to a revolutionary civil war, when all the contradictions of class society are expressed in the most antagonistic form.


Bolshevism or White Guards, a false dichotomy if ever there was one.

To be fair, there were also the peasant insurgents and bandits of the Makhnovshchina and the Antonovshchina. But these three - and the Central Powers - were the only serious contenders for power in that situation.


Actions may speak louder than words, and by all means judge parties on what they do, but it doesn't mean what they say counts for nothing. Judging the Bolsheviks on what they did would be a good start.

What people say counts for nothing if they have no intention of carrying it out.


So you clearly maintain then that the SPGB did in fact "support the British". This is a lie and a pretty stupid lie at that.

I have explained how the SPGB supported the British, which you haven't addressed.

Also, I'm still waiting, where is that "detailed and nuanced" SPGB analysis of homophobia?


You are getting pretty close to a position of expressing anti-heterosexual bigotry.

Cry us a river, straight people.


What you still dont seem to understand, however, is that the SPGB was not set up as a body to campaign/lobby for such things as legal rights for gays. Its sole purpose is to strive for socialism and nothing but.

And what you don't seem to understand is that gay liberation is inseparable from the struggle for socialism - of course, not the sort of "socialism" Wohlforthite family-mongers like you desire.


You also dont seem to understand the point that it is being made about gay liberation by the SPGB comrades here. No one is denying that there is still prejudice against gays; all that is being asserted is that there is no legal discrimination against gays any more. (if there is then show me an example) In other words, such prejudice continues to exist despite the absence of legal discrimination against gays. In other words this is an attitude problem which is not going to be solved by further legal reform but by changing ideas which is what the SPGB is in the business of doing

First of all, your friend Dave never mentioned legal discrimination but relations in the workplace. So your attempt to salvage the situation has failed, and I still await his restriction. It would only be fair. Second, "attitude problem"? Oh fuck of, straight. We are talking about structural, systematic violence and you reduce it to an "attitude problem".


Finally, regarding your claim that the incompatibility of any sort of family with socialism has been established already by Engels. this is nonsense. Show me where Engels said such a thing . My guess is you are probably referring to his work "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" and my further guess is that you imagine Engels is saying that these 3 institutions coincided in a temporal sense when they did not.

No, I do not imagine that they did, having actually read the work (which, as you note, is dated - in fact I would say the entire concept of primitive communism is on uncertain ground). And even if they did, that would prove nothing. The primitive classless society was not some primitive theophany of future communism, but a society that was too primitive - in terms of the development of the means of production - for classes. History is not T-invariant, and the only commonalities between communism and the primitive classless society will be the absence of classes. One might as well say that cities appeared with property (which they did), so cities will not exist in communism (which is blatantly incorrect).

The point is that Engels analyses the family, not as some abstract form, but in its economic role. Families ensure inheritance and create a supply of unpaid domestic and reproductive labour preformed by individual women. In socialism, there is no inheritance, and all labour is preformed socially. There is no material basis for the family, then.

[Dave B]

Today, LGBT citizens have most of the same legal rights as non-LGBT citizens and Britain provides one of the highest degrees of liberty in the world for its LGBT communities. In ILGA-Europe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILGA-Europe)'s 2014 review of LGBTI rights, Britain received the highest score in Europe, with 82% progress toward "respect of human rights and full equality."[2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_Kingdom#cite_note-2)…………LGBT rights organisations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_organization) and very large LGBT communities have been built across the length and breath of Britain, most notably in Birmingham (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Gay_Village), Blackpool, Brighton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_community_of_Brighton_and_Hove), Leeds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Calls), Liverpool (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_culture_in_Liverpool), London (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Compton_Street), Manchester (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_Street_(Manchester)) and Newcastle, which all host annual pride festivals (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_pride).




An illustration of social attitudes towards homosexuality in the UK was provided in May 2007 in a survey by YouGov. The poll indicated that legislation outlawing discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation was supported by 90% of British citizens. It also showed positive public perceptions of gay people in particular, but recognised the extent to which prejudice still exists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_Kingdom







It isn’t hard to find is it?


For what it matters some of the worst examples of persisting homophobia etc are found in Britians ‘ethnic minorities’.

Which part of the world do you live in Vincent?





(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_Kingdom)

[robbo203]

I have explained how the SPGB supported the British, which you haven't addressed.

You havent "explained" how the SPGB supported the British. You lied about the SPGB supporting the British. And you continue to lie about it. You are a lying little toerag who doesnt have a shred of personal integrity in your whole body. And most amazingly of all you continue to dig yourself ever deeper into a hole of your own making.

Your pathetic idiotic "explanation" consists in asserting that the SPGB supports the Mensheviks the Mensheviks supported the Whites and the Whites had the support of the British. Therefore the "SPGB supported the British". Every one of the links in this so called argument are false apart from the last one about the Whites and the British.

The SPGB did not and does not support the Mensheviks. It agrees with some of the analyses presented by some Mensheviks like Martov on the Bolshevik state capitalist dictatorship (which you support). The Mensheviks have been viewed by the SPGB in much the same light as they viewed the Second International in general - as irredeemably lost to the socialist cause having embraced reformism.

It was same with the SPGB view of Kautsky. The SPGB sussed out pretty early on that Kautsky had abandoned his revolutionary socialist postion. Neverthless he wrote some stuff of considerable value from a revolutionary socialist point of view - particularly his historical material such as the pamphlet I referred to which the SPGB published.

Can you not get it through your thick skull once and for all that because somebody writes something that you approve of that does not mean you endorse everything that person has ever said. Is that really so hard to understand or are you really as stupid as you appear to be?

[Rugged Collectivist]

I might be a little late on this one, but if class society is the material basis that props up the family, why address it specifically? It follows that the destruction of class society will precede the destruction of the family, so why agitate for something that can't happen until after the revolution anyway? And before someone tries to say "Then why should we agitate for the end of racism, or sexism, or homophobia?" we should agitate for these things because they can be helped (not cured, but helped) now, and they divide the working class against itself. Despite whatever delusions QV might hold, the vast majority of people are absolutely not opposed to the nuclear family. Again, this doesn't mean that we should support the family as an institution, it means that advocating the destruction of the family right now is premature. And if you think the absence of a "and we're gonna destroy the family!" (a demand which most people wouldn't even understand at this point) in this ad makes it unredeemable and useless, then you're the one with misplaced priorities and you're the one who's a bigger problem than the SPGB.

[Hrafn]

Someone please do remind me how the conflict between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks is in any way relevant to the SPGB's involvement in the European Parliament elections. I lost track somewhere inbetween all the vicious accusations and underhanded insults.

[Dave B]

Well it is quite simple really.

Orthodox Trotskyists like the Socialist Equality Party are also standing in the election.

Anybody who opposes them, like the SPGB, are deemed White-Guardist crypto-gaybashing Mensheviks who would be shot should they seize power.

[Lord Testicles]

The family is incompatible with socialism - if the family exists, socialism does not. If socialism does exist, the family doesn't.

Why? What is the reasoning which has brought you to this conclusion?


There will probably be no need to prohibit the family, just as today there is no need to prohibit uji clans.

Maybe today there isn't a need to prohibit clans but it's not like the clan system melted away with the approach of modernity. The Scottish clans at least had to be stomped out of existence by the British establishment after the Jacobite risings.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Hah, you got me, I'm actually worried that all five supporters of the SPGB will vote for them, and that the One, True, Catholic and Orthodox Socialist Party will defeat the political bandits posing as Trotskyists that make up the SEP and their four supporters. Then they will go to the European Parliament and this will undoubtedly somehow lead to socialism. Honest guv'nor.


Someone please do remind me how the conflict between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks is in any way relevant to the SPGB's involvement in the European Parliament elections.

It's quite simple. The support the SPGB gave to the Mensheviks demonstrates the rotten, counterrevolutionary nature of their politics - if their creepy parliamentary fetish wasn't enough - just as e.g. the support the SWP gave to Khomeini demonstrates the counterrevolutionary nature of SWP politics or the support the USEC gave to Solidarnosc the counterrevolutionary nature of theirs.


I might be a little late on this one, but if class society is the material basis that props up the family, why address it specifically? It follows that the destruction of class society will precede the destruction of the family, so why agitate for something that can't happen until after the revolution anyway?

No, it doesn't follow. Class society is the material basis of the family, but the family is part of the process by which the capitalist mode of production is reproduced. To demand the end of the family - through the socialisation of all forms of domestic labour, the abolition of inheritance etc. - is to demand an end to the process that daily generates capitalism.

It is the same with the bourgeois state and capitalism - the former exists on the basis of the latter. But smashing the bourgeois state is not something that happens after the end of class society, but the first act in the destruction of the same.


Your pathetic idiotic "explanation" consists in asserting that the SPGB supports the Mensheviks the Mensheviks supported the Whites and the Whites had the support of the British. Therefore the "SPGB supported the British". Every one of the links in this so called argument are false apart from the last one about the Whites and the British.

We have established that the SPGB printed Menshevik articles and agrees with the Menshevik attitude to the Bolsheviks. And pardon, once again you do not print an article unless you are in political agreement with the author, or you specifically print the article as part of a polemic. Apparently the SPGB would not mind printing UKIP articles, which speaks volumes about their politics. And as for the Mensheviks, I have cited numerous instances of Menshevik participation in the White movement, when your beloved Martov was part of the CC, and the sources for my claims. The Mensheviks did not support the Whites - the Mensheviks were Whites. Until you address these events, you're just blustering and trying to cover up your rotten politics.

Still waiting for that "detailed and nuanced" analysis, by the way.

[robbo203]

We have established that the SPGB printed Menshevik articles and agrees with the Menshevik attitude to the Bolsheviks. And pardon, once again you do not print an article unless you are in political agreement with the author, or you specifically print the article as part of a polemic. Apparently the SPGB would not mind printing UKIP articles, which speaks volumes about their politics. And as for the Mensheviks, I have cited numerous instances of Menshevik participation in the White movement, when your beloved Martov was part of the CC, and the sources for my claims. The Mensheviks did not support the Whites - the Mensheviks were Whites. Until you address these events, you're just blustering and trying to cover up your rotten politics..

FFS, obviously Im not getting through to this idiot. Perhaps someone else can have a bash. If the SPGB published an article by a Menshevik -and I only know of one, namely Martov's critique of the Bolshevik capitalist state (which the anti-communist, Vincent West, supports) - that does NOT ,repeat NOT, mean the "SPGB supports the Mensheviks". It merely means the SPGB broadly endorses the contents of the article in question. There is much more to the Menshevik's position than merely the argument expressed by one member of the party on one particular topic and the plain fact is that the SPGB did NOT support the Mensheviks any more than they supported the reformist parties of the Second International

There now - do you understand this or not or do I really have to teach you once again how to suck eggs?

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

FFS, obviously Im not getting through to this idiot. Perhaps someone else can have a bash. If the SPGB published an article by a Menshevik -and I only know of one, namely Martov's critique of the Bolshevik capitalist state (which the anti-communist, Vincent West, supports) - that does NOT ,repeat NOT, mean the "SPGB supports the Mensheviks". It merely means the SPGB broadly endorses the contents of the article in question.

And the contents of the article are whiteguard nonsense! The article outlines the Menshevik position on the Bolsheviks, which led to their participation in the White movement.

Still waiting for that analysis, of course.

[Dave B]

The SPGB would agree with Kautsky and the Mensheviks in the primary importance of democracy in the communist movement.

The Mensheviks and Bolsheviks split on the issue of Lenin’s centralised democracy or the leadership by the elite members of the party or in other words the ‘Bourgeois intelligentsia’/vanguard.

An issue that hadn’t changed in 1920;

The Trade Unions, The Present Situation
And Trotsky’s Mistakes

Speech Delivered At A Joint Meeting Of Communist Delegates To The Eighth Congress Of Soviets, Communist Members Of The All-Russia Central Council Of Trade Unions And Communist Members Of The Moscow City Council Of Trade Unions December 30, 1920





But the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised through an organisation embracing the whole of that class, because in all capitalist countries (and not only over here, in one of the most backward) the proletariat is still so divided, so degraded, and so corrupted in parts (by imperialism in some countries) that an organisation taking in the whole proletariat cannot directly exercise proletarian dictatorship.

It can be exercised only by a vanguard…….


http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/lenin/works/1920/dec/30.htm


The SPGB position on Russia in 1918 was the same as Lenin’s in 1905 ie that an attempt to have a socialist revolution in Russia was impossible and any attempt would lead to disaster;




This argument is based on a misconception; it confounds the democratic revolution with the socialist revolution, the struggle for the republic (including our entire minimum programme) with the struggle for socialism. If Social-Democracy sought to make the socialist revolution its immediate aim, it would assuredly discredit itself. It is precisely such vague and hazy ideas of our “Socialists—Revolutionaries” that Social-Democracy has always combated.

For this reason Social-Democracy has constantly stressed the bourgeois nature of the impending revolution in Russia and insisted on a clear line of demarcation between the democratic minimum programme and the socialist maximum programme. Some Social-Democrats, who are inclined to yield to spontaneity, might forget all this in time of revolution, but not the Party as a whole. The adherents of this erroneous view make an idol of spontaneity in their belief that the march of events will compel the Social-Democratic Party in such a position to set about achieving the socialist revolution, despite itself.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/apr/12b.htm


You have not cited ‘cited numerous instances of Menshevik participation in the White movement’.

You have mentioned some right wing Menheviks (who against the party centre which was crippled by Bolshevik state oppression) participating in the various SR lead anti Bolshevik rebellions.

The SR’s were the most anti White organisation in Russia and had been assassinating the 'Whites' in terrorist operations from the early 1900’s.

The SR’s, quite correctly, as things turned out, saw the Bolsheviks as a greater threat to their constituency than the Whites; who had in fact little support and no chance of ultimately regaining power.



The political program of the Socialist Revolutionaries (1905)


In 1905 the Socialist Revolutionary party (SRs) drafted a political manifesto, outlining its objectives.





The Socialist Revolutionary Party of Russia views its task as an organic, component part of a universal struggle of labour against the exploitation of human dignity, against all barriers that prevent its development into social forms, and conducts it in the spirit of general interests of that struggle in ways that are determined by concrete conditions of Russian reality.

Since the process of the transformation of Russia is led by non-socialist forces, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, on the basis of the above principles will advocate, defend, and seek by its revolutionary struggle the following reforms:

In the matters of politics:

The establishment of a democratic republic with broad autonomy for oblasts and communes, both urban and rural.

Increased acceptance of federal principles in relations between various nationalities, granting them unconditional right to self-determination.

Direct, secret, equal, and universal right to vote for every citizen above twenty years of age regardless of sex, religion, or national origin.

Proportional representation; direct popular legislation (referenda and initiatives); election, removability at all times, and accountability of all officials.

Complete freedom of conscience, speech, press, meetings, strikes, and unions; complete and general civil equality inviolability of the individual and home; complete separation of the church from the state and declaration that religion is a private affair for every individual.

The introduction of a compulsory, general public education at government expense; equality of languages.

Abolition of permanent armies and their replacement by a people’s militia.

In the matters of economics:

A reduction of the working time in order to relieve surplus labour.

Establishment of a legal maximum of working time based on norms determined by health conditions (an eight-hour working norm for most branches of industry as soon as possible, and lower norms for work which is dangerous or harmful to health).

Establishment of a minimum wage in agreement between administration and labour unions.

Complete government insurance (for accident, unemployment, sickness, old age, and so on), administered by the insured at the expense of the state and employers.

Legislative protection of labour in all branches of industry and trade, in accordance with the health conditions supervised by factory inspection commissions elected by workers (normal working conditions, hygienic conditions of buildings; prohibition of work for youngsters below sixteen years of age, limitation of work for youngsters, prohibition of female and child labour in some branches of industry and during specified periods, adequate and uninterrupted Sunday rest, and so forth).

Professional organisation of workers and their increased participation in determining internal rules in industrial enterprises.

In matters of agricultural policy:

Socialisation of all privately owned lands; that is, their transfer from private property of individual owners to public domain and administration by democratically organised communes and territorial associations of communes on the basis of equalised utilisation.


http://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/the-political-program-of-the-socialist-revolutionaries-1905/

[Hrafn]

I have a distinct feeling this type of behaviour is what's holding back the left.

[Dave B]

The SR's were a broad church organisation and the manifesto probably better reflects the position of the 'majority rightwing'.

[robbo203]

No, I do not imagine that they did, having actually read the work (which, as you note, is dated - in fact I would say the entire concept of primitive communism is on uncertain ground). And even if they did, that would prove nothing. The primitive classless society was not some primitive theophany of future communism, but a society that was too primitive - in terms of the development of the means of production - for classes. History is not T-invariant, and the only commonalities between communism and the primitive classless society will be the absence of classes. One might as well say that cities appeared with property (which they did), so cities will not exist in communism (which is blatantly incorrect).

The point is that Engels analyses the family, not as some abstract form, but in its economic role. Families ensure inheritance and create a supply of unpaid domestic and reproductive labour preformed by individual women. In socialism, there is no inheritance, and all labour is preformed socially. There is no material basis for the family, then.


Another example oif Vincent West's illogic.

You seem to agree that Engels spoke of different forms of the family prior to the emergence of private property and "civilisation" viz 1) the consanguine family 2) the punaluan family and 3) the pairing family. But you then go on to argue that point is that "Engels analyses the family, not as some abstract form, but in its economic role. Families ensure inheritance "etc But when Engels talks about the family's economic role in ensuring inheritance etc he is talking about a specific kind of family formation - namely the monogamous patriarchal familiy which he quite clearly states emerged out of the pairing family.

It is this particular form of the family which Engels is analysing not the family as such . This is what you dont seem to understand. If the material basis for the monogamous patriarchical family will no longer exist in socialism - because there is no inhereitance etc in socialism - that does NOT mean the family as such will cease to exist as an institution. You have nowhere provided any evidence that Engels made such claim . Nor can you for the simple reason that he did not make such a claim. He was talking about the monogamous patriarchical family not the family as such

I repeat - the family in some form existed long before the emergence of private property. Whatever Engels might have said on the matter is neither here nor there; it is a fact universally accepted among modern anthropologists.

You and Queervanguard have sought to link the family to the emergence of private property and to argue that with the disappearance of private property the family will dispappear becuase there is"no material basis for the family" (your words). Which begs the question - what was the "material basis" of the family prior to the emergence of private property?

Your whole argument can thus be seen as completely reductionist and simplistic crap . There is no reason not to expect the familiy as an institution to contrnue in socialism albeit in a changed form. And why not? Families unlike cities did not appear with property so there is absolutely no grounds for supposing they will disappear with property

[The Idler]

The Bolsheviks offered peace, land and bread.
You state Skobelev offered a hundred percent taxation and compulsory labour.
The SPGB offer common ownership, democratic control and production for use, if the SPGB weren't serious this wouldn't be the platform for contesting elections.
Which is revolutionary, and if actions speak louder than words, which one was delivered by the Bolsheviks who captured power? If you want a moderate party with moderate demands, you can vote for one.


What was the Bolshevik advice to British Communists in relation to the Labour Party? Does that mean Bolsheviks = Labour Party? I don't think so. In relation to the SPGB article from 1910, you asked about the attitude of original SPGB members so it is not unreasonable to post the article from 1910.


In relation to addressing LGBT issues in the election address, where was this in Lenin's April Theses, the closest thing to a short platform for power?


The formulation 'if you're not with us, you are against us' has been used for a long time. George W. Bush was chosen because he was a recent prominent example, while Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and Mussolini are material of history as Hrafn observes. The logic is not “detailed or nuanced analysis” as you claim to want, yet you persist in using this sort of logic.


Ironically, in accusing the SPGB of holding a dogmatic exclusive sectarian “one true catholic orthodox socialism”, you might find this dogmatic exclusive sectarianism more applicable to your notions about the Bolsheviks and their opponents. The SPGB and their sympathisers here have stated ideas can be arrived at seperately, and different opposing groups can have some members who agree on some ideas.

[The Idler]

I have a distinct feeling this type of behaviour is what's holding back the left.
The willingness to disagree on ideas and try different tactics?

Or the idea that only one party can have the sole exclusive fully-correct ideas and analysis and everyone else is 'counterrevolutionary Mensheviks on the wrong-side of the class line' who need shooting as much as possible?

[Hrafn]

The fact that every single debate on modern issues inevitably turns into a fuckfest about people's rigid, ever unchanging position on events in early 20th century Russia.

[PhoenixAsh]

The fact that not mentioning LGBTQ rights explicitly directly makes you homophobic ....

[Dave B]

From the History of Homosexuality in Europe and America edited by Wayne R. Dynes, page 358;


The Soviet regime in the 1920’s saw it as an illness to be cured. This view is clearly stated in the book Sexual Life of Comtemporary Youth published in Moscow in 1923 under the aegis of the Peoples Commisariat of Public Health and authored by Israel Gelman.

“Science has now established with precision that excludes all doubt..[that homosexuality]..is not ill will or a crime but a sickness. The world of a female or male homosexual is perverted , it is alien to the normal sexual attraction that exists in a normal person……….



By Science that presumably refers to Freudism which was standard at the time.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

The Bolsheviks were generally pretty homophobic, although much less homophobic than other Russian political groups, with the exception of the urban anarchists (the Black Flag group etc.). The exceptions to this trend were Chicherin, himself openly gay, and Bonch-Bruevich, the expert on the Old Believers, and incidentally the chairman of the first security organ of the Soviet republic. Dzerzhinsky, as I recall, protested the actions of a CheKa officer who interrupted a lesbian wedding (unofficial, of course), but then again Dzerzhinsky, popular misconceptions aside, was extremely wary about using the repressive powers of the ChK.

This represents a serious failure of the Russian Marxists to carry out a materialist analysis of the phenomenon of homosexuality, along with abortion etc., and it would have resulted in problems had the revolution in Germany not been defeated - by the very SPD the Mensheviks found themselves in bed with - but presumably if the revolution had triumphed in Germany the centre of gravity of the movement would have switched from Moscow to Berlin.

That said, the revolutionary upsurge brought on by the October Revolution resulted in positive changes for homosexuals in Russia. The old Tsarist laws against homosexuality were abolished - something the Kadets and the Mensheviks refused to do. Homosexual culture flourished in the cities - Bonch-Bruevich was able to collect a massive library of literary works in Russian dealing with male-male love. The text you cite - written in 1923 - postdates the defeat of the revolution in Germany and the deep bureaucratic reaction resulting from the same.

This does not mean, of course, that Bolshevik homophobia is not to be criticised. No one said the Bolsheviks were perfect - in fact if you look through the earlier pages of this discussion, you will notice that I explicitly stated that Lenin's slogan of a "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" was nonsense. But, pardon, the Bolsheviks no longer exist as a group. We are not talking about Russia in the second decade of the previous century - when the Bolsheviks were the most progressive group on the question of gay rights in any case - but about Great Britain in the second decade of the current century. I mentioned the attitude of the SPGB in the past, not in order to criticise the SPGB of the present for that attitude, but to criticise them for not moving forward one bit, for remaining stuck in the mud of homosexual erasure and abstract posturing.


I have a distinct feeling this type of behaviour is what's holding back the left.

I do hope so, because there are few things I despise more than "left unity" (the sentiment, not the party, although the party is pretty shit too). There can be no unity between revolutionaries and opportunists, and if having principles and carrying on the political struggle by criticising other groups disrupts this false "unity", well, so much the better for those who have principles.


The fact that every single debate on modern issues inevitably turns into a fuckfest about people's rigid, ever unchanging position on events in early 20th century Russia.

Is that really surprising, though? The early 20th century coincided with a massive revolutionary wave, and most of us think that the proletariat was able to seize state power in Russia, Hungary and briefly in Bavaria. We are still feeling the repercussions of these events. So, sorry, why should we treat the October Revolution as some minor footnote in history? So we can "focus on the now" and unite with opportunists? But we'd rather not.

The SPGB and the Menshevik attitude to the October Revolution represent a great betrayal of the international proletariat, the Menshevik more so since they had the means to do something about it. And when we are discussing a political group, its betrayals are significant, particularly if it is clear the group in question holds onto the positions that constituted the betrayal. So it is with the SPGB and the October Revolution, so it is with the SWP and Khomeini, with USEC and Solidarnosc, and so on.


The Bolsheviks offered peace, land and bread.
You state Skobelev offered a hundred percent taxation and compulsory labour.
The SPGB offer common ownership, democratic control and production for use, if the SPGB weren't serious this wouldn't be the platform for contesting elections.
Which is revolutionary, and if actions speak louder than words, which one was delivered by the Bolsheviks who captured power? If you want a moderate party with moderate demands, you can vote for one.

Skobelev talked about a tax rate of 100% and compulsory labour, but had no intention (or means) of carrying this alleged programme of his out. And, as I already said, when one doesn't intend to apply one's pronouncements in practice, one is free to be as r-r-revolutionary as they like. If I raise the slogan of, not just immediate peace with no annexation or indemnities, but also the immediate abolition of war, which is impossible to fulfill, does this mean I am more revolutionary than the groups who propose immediate peace? No, it means I'm an idiot that has let his mouth run off.

"Peace, land and bread" was not the only Bolshevik slogan - it was a slogan widely used among the peasantry. But the main Bolshevik slogan of the period was the seizure of political power - a dictatorship of the proletariat. This slogan is more revolutionary than the democratic platitudes the SPGB offers because it expresses the real historical task of the proletariat.


What was the Bolshevik advice to British Communists in relation to the Labour Party? Does that mean Bolsheviks = Labour Party? I don't think so.

Well, what was the Bolshevik advice? Because it has been distorted both by anti-communists and opportunistic "left of Labour" types. The advice was to expose the Labour Party. It was sound advice.

Now, what about groups who advocate voting for the Labour Party on principle, without understanding the tactic of exposing reformists? Do they - groups like the old Militant - support the Labour Party? Of course they do.


In relation to the SPGB article from 1910, you asked about the attitude of original SPGB members so it is not unreasonable to post the article from 1910.

And not only does the article not address homophobia, it repeats verbatim the usual bigoted assertions about the "natural purpose" of sex. So, once again this proves my point.


The formulation 'if you're not with us, you are against us' has been used for a long time. George W. Bush was chosen because he was a recent prominent example, while Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and Mussolini are material of history as Hrafn observes. The logic is not “detailed or nuanced analysis” as you claim to want, yet you persist in using this sort of logic.

Obama is a more recent example, yet you chose to focus on Bush.

In any case, the point is that robbo made a statement - that "a more detailed and nuanced analysis" of the question of homosexuality can be found in the SPGB material. So, where is it? He is avoiding the question because he knows damn well that the SPGB has kept mum about the subject.

"Chi non è con noi..." is the rule in revolutionary periods because revolutions represent the most aggravated form of class struggle, where an incipient proletarian power is opposed to all the elements of the old society and their hangers-on. It isn't particularly conductive to people who would play a loyal democratic opposition, but such is life.


But when Engels talks about the family's economic role in ensuring inheritance etc he is talking about a specific kind of family formation - namely the monogamous patriarchal familiy which he quite clearly states emerged out of the pairing family.

That is simply not the case - inheritance is explicitly mentioned in the analysis of what Engels, following Morgan, calls the punaluan family, although not as a right of inheritance (which presupposes the emergence of the state):

"In the very great majority of cases the institution of the gens seems to have originated directly out of the punaluan family. It is true that the Australian classificatory system also provides an origin for it: the Australians have gentes, but not yet the punaluan family; instead, they have a cruder form of group marriage. In all forms of group family it is uncertain who is the father of a child; but it is certain who its mother is. Though she calls all the children of the whole family her children and has a mother’s duties towards them, she nevertheless knows her own children from the others. It is therefore clear that in so far as group marriage prevails, descent can only be proved on the mother’s side and that therefore only the female line is recognized. And this is in fact the case among all peoples in the period of savagery or in the lower stage of barbarism. It is the second great merit of Bachofen that he was the first to make this discovery. To denote this exclusive recognition of descent through the mother and the relations of inheritance which in time resulted from it, he uses the term “mother-right,” which for the sake of brevity I retain. The term is, however, ill-chosen, since at this stage of society there cannot yet be any talk of “right” in the legal sense."


You and Queervanguard have sought to link the family to the emergence of private property and to argue that with the disappearance of private property the family will dispappear becuase there is"no material basis for the family" (your words). Which begs the question - what was the "material basis" of the family prior to the emergence of private property?

Generalised scarcity due to insufficiently developed means of production, resulting in the institution of inheritance, and the relations that prevailed when it came to domestic labour (i.e. domestic labour being preformed by one sex in several family-units).

And what would be the material basis of the family in socialism, pray tell? Are you going to tell us fairy-tales about how the family is "natural"?


The SPGB would agree with Kautsky and the Mensheviks in the primary importance of democracy in the communist movement.

Quite so - and therefore, like Kautsky and the Mensheviks he so adored, the SPGB places the democratic form above the class content of state power.


The Mensheviks and Bolsheviks split on the issue of Lenin’s centralised democracy or the leadership by the elite members of the party or in other words the ‘Bourgeois intelligentsia’/vanguard.

Please do yourself a favour and read "What is to be Done?" before embarrassing yourself further. "Elite" is a stupid reformist soundbite that should be expunged from serious discussions. The intelligentsia is not a bourgeois stratum. And, most importantly, the vanguard is the vanguard of the proletariat, the most advanced element of that class.


The SPGB position on Russia in 1918 was the same as Lenin’s in 1905 ie that an attempt to have a socialist revolution in Russia was impossible and any attempt would lead to disaster;

Which is blatantly incompatible with the original assertion of the group that left the BSP to form the SPGB that socialism was possible; unless of course you mean to say they were talking about some form of socialism in one country decades before Stalin and Bukharin.


You have not cited ‘cited numerous instances of Menshevik participation in the White movement’.

You have mentioned some right wing Menheviks (who against the party centre which was crippled by Bolshevik state oppression) participating in the various SR lead anti Bolshevik rebellions.

So, how is it that the Menshevik Central Committee was "crippled" enough to do nothing about "right" Mensheviks (who were the "left" Mensheviks? the only ones that fit the description - people like Sukhanov etc. - had left the Mensheviks long ago) participating in White rebellions (the Esers being one of the most numerous groups in the White movement), but not "crippled" to prevent them from a long political struggle in the trade unions. How convenient.


The SR’s were the most anti White organisation in Russia and had been assassinating the 'Whites' in terrorist operations from the early 1900’s.

Undoubtedly they used magic bullets that could shoot nearly two decades into the future, since the White movement dates back to 1918, to the Union for the Salvation of Russia, founded in part by Mensheviks and mostly staffed by Esers and Kadets.


The political program of the Socialist Revolutionaries (1905)

Yes, that was their political programme in 1905. The Esers who led the KomUch government might have had the same programme, but they never intended to carry it out, as indeed the history of the KomUch shows.

By the way, Dave, what would you say about a party that proclaimed its adherence to republicanism, democracy, freedom of religion, and a "socialisation" of the means of production by giving them over to the workers, explicitly in opposition to Bolshevik nationalisation?

[robbo203]

And the contents of the article are whiteguard nonsense! The article outlines the Menshevik position on the Bolsheviks, which led to their participation in the White movement.



You know what? Im gonna call you bluff here. I dont believe you have read any such article published by the SPGB and written by Martov. You are known for being a fantasist and inventing stories. But I will give you the benefit of the doubt. Prove me wrong

1) Let us have the date of publication of the article in question in the Socialist Standard (the SPGB's journal) and a link to the article in question

2) copy and paste the relevant part of the article which you consider to be "whiteguard nonsense" so we can judge for ourselves

I cant wait to see you wriggle out of this one. You remind of the "reds under the bed" paranoia in the McCarthy era. Anypne hostile to the broad strategic aims, and philosophy, of the good 'ol United States of America was obviously a "communist" In your case, anyone who opposes your beloved capitalist Bolshevik state is a "whiteguard".

In the meanwhile. as you ponder how to wriggle your way out of this one, your might care to peruse a 1967 article in the Socialist Standard "Martov: a Russian Social-Democrat"

Please note the following passages in that article since you are fond of blindly assuming the SPGB supported Martov (and therefore the Mensheviks and therefore the Whites and therefore the British blah blah blah ho ho ho)

When measuring up Martov’s contribution to the working class movement it is convenient to compare him with Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik fraction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. The Menshevik-Bolshevik split of 1903 was largely centred on different conceptions of how a social-democratic party should be organised. Lenin, with his Jacobin turn of mind, wanted (as Rosa Luxemburg put it) “the blind subordination of all party organisations and their activity, down to the least detail, to a central authority which alone thinks, acts and decides for all”. Martov, on the other hand, favoured an organisation roughly modelled on the German SPD. This then was not a controversy between Socialists – since both sides accepted the need for leaders and both were opportunists, prepared to ally themselves with, and support, anti-socialists if it seemed politically expedient.

......

This then is Martov’s value to Socialist theory. Even however when bitterly criticising the Bolsheviks, he still had no real alternative to offer – not, at any rate, in uncompromising, revolutionary terms such as those of the Socialist Party. But like other social democrats – Plekhanov, Kautsky, Luxemburg – despite all his errors, he made a contribution to the general body of Marxist theory. Lenin is a pale shadow at the side of him. http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1960s/1967/no-759-november-1967/martov-russian-social-democrat

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

"The State and the Socialist Revolution, by J. Martov" (http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1940s/1940/no-425-january-1940/state-and-socialist-revolution-j-martov) (SS425, January 1940)

On reviewing the article, I am not sure if the SPGB printed the pamphlet in question, but they recommended and distributed it. Again, the same criticism applies - recommending and distributing Martov's whiteguard pamphlet means supporting him politically, and supporting the White project of overthrowing the Bolshevik authorities.

Some excerpts:

"But bloodshed gives rise to more bloodshed. The political terror the Bolsheviks introduced in October has saturated the air above the fields of Russia with bloody fumes. The civil war is becoming ever more cruel, people are becoming ever more savage and bestial, and the great precepts of genuine humanity, which socialism always taught, are being increasingly forgotten. In those places where Bolshevik power has been overthrown by the masses or by armed force, the same terror is beginning to be used against the Bolsheviks as they had been employing against their enemies. The followers of Dutov, Semenov and Alekseev, the Ukrainian haydamaki, the troops of Skoropadsky and Krasnov, and Drozdovsky’s detachments are all hanging and shooting. Peasants and landlords, having toppled their local Bolshevik soviets, treat their members with the greatest cruelty.

People are becoming more bestial on both sides – and the full weight of responsibility for this rests on that party, which in the name of socialism blasphemously sanctified the cold-blooded execution of unarmed prisoners, which hypocritically protests against whiteguard executions in Finland while Russian soil is being drenched in the blood of the victims of firing squads.
The increasing cruelty of the civil war can already be seen in covert killings. The Bolshevik commissar Volodarsky was murdered – the unfortunate victim of the mutual hatred sown by government terror. [/URL]And two days later a Red Army soldier killed an old worker – the social-democrat [Menshevik] Vasil’ev [URL="http://www.marxists.org/archive/martov/1918/07/death-penalty.htm#n5"] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/martov/1918/07/death-penalty.htm#n4)who had given many years’ honest service to the workers’ cause. It is possible Vasil’ev was murdered by a man angered by the killing of Volodarsky, who wished to avenge it upon the first opponent he encountered.

The Social-Democratic Workers’ Party has always opposed political killings, whether carried out by state executioners or voluntary avengers. It spoke out against them even when revolutionaries killed Tsarist secret policemen. It taught the working class that it would not improve its lot by murdering people, even the worst enemies of the people, but by changing fundamentally the entire political structure, all the conditions which give rise to oppression and violence. And now the party warns workers and peasants driven to despair by the violence of the Bolshevik authorities: do not seek revenge against individual commissars and individual Bolsheviks, do not go down the road of killings, do not take the lives of your enemies, but content yourselves instead with removing power from them – the power you gave them in the first place!"


"The working class must cry “stop!” to this river of blood.
The working class must declare loudly and as one to the whole world that this terror, this barbarism of execution after trial, and this cannibalism of execution without trial has nothing to do with the Russian proletariat.

To your rulers, who lost your trust long ago and rely now on naked force, you must say that they are perjurors, who have violated their own solemn promises, that the working class rejects as outcasts all those involved in the business of death sentences, all executioners, executioners’ assistants and those that inspire them.

To those workers who still belong to the Bolshevik Communist Party – a party of judicial and extra-judicial murder – you must say that they have no place in the workers’ ranks, as they all bear responsibility for the blood shed by the executioners. Say that to them and show it in practice by cutting off all comradely relations with them and treating them as plague-ridden outcasts, just as you always did to the pogromists from the Union of the Russian People."

[Rugged Collectivist]

No, it doesn't follow. Class society is the material basis of the family, but the family is part of the process by which the capitalist mode of production is reproduced. To demand the end of the family - through the socialisation of all forms of domestic labour, the abolition of inheritance etc. - is to demand an end to the process that daily generates capitalism.

It is the same with the bourgeois state and capitalism - the former exists on the basis of the latter. But smashing the bourgeois state is not something that happens after the end of class society, but the first act in the destruction of the same.


I agree with this but I still think it's absurd to condemn the ad for not explicitly calling for an end to the family.

[robbo203]

"The State and the Socialist Revolution, by J. Martov" (http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1940s/1940/no-425-january-1940/state-and-socialist-revolution-j-martov) (SS425, January 1940)

On reviewing the article, I am not sure if the SPGB printed the pamphlet in question, but they recommended and distributed it. Again, the same criticism applies - recommending and distributing Martov's whiteguard pamphlet means supporting him politically, and supporting the White project of overthrowing the Bolshevik authorities.

Do you even read what you copy and paste? The excerpts you quote were in no way supporting the Whites against the Bolsheviks. Instead, they amounted to a scathing attack on the civil war itself and the brutality it engendered. As Martov put it "People are becoming more bestial on both sides" Not only is the terror employed by the Bolshevik authorities roundly condemned but also that of its enemies - the Whites: In those places where Bolshevik power has been overthrown by the masses or by armed force, the same terror is beginning to be used against the Bolsheviks as they had been employing against their enemies. The followers of Dutov, Semenov and Alekseev, the Ukrainian haydamaki, the troops of Skoropadsky and Krasnov, and Drozdovsky’s detachments are all hanging and shooting. Peasants and landlords, having toppled their local Bolshevik soviets, treat their members with the greatest cruelty

So you are completely wrong about Martov. Martov was not a supporter of the Whites. Here's what one site says

Martov supported the Red Army against the White Army during the Russian Civil War, however, he continued to denounce the persecution of liberal newspapers, the nobility, the Cadets and the Socialist Revolutionaries...

In 1920 Martov was forced into exile. He continued to criticize Vladimir Lenin and the Soviet government but refused to join other anti-communists exiles in calling for allied intervention in Russia (http://spartacus-educational.com/RUSmartov.htm - my bold)

Recall that your original ridiculous claim was that the SPGB supported the British during the civil war . You tried to justify this by asserting that the Mensheviks supported the Whites and as Martov was a Menshevik therefore the SPGB supported the Whites as well. Since the Whites were aided by British intervention this meant according to you that the SPGB must have supported that British intervention.

This crackpot and ludicrous argument has now completely fallen apart at the seams. If you were honest you would acknowlege this forthwith and desist from digging yourself into an ever deeper holethat you must by now be wishing you had never begun digging. Anyone who knows anything about the SPGB at all will know that it has consistently refused to take part or take sides in any military conflict anywhere throughout the entire history of the organisation's existence (it was founded in 1904). Its members were imprisoned for their anti-war beliefs during both World Wars or fled abroad. Why you imagine that it would suddenly want to take sides in Civil war, I have absolutely no idea


These are the stark facts of the matter and you have not produced a single shred of direct evidence to suggest otherwise. You have relied completely on a patently ridiculous process of inference - guilt by association - and in this repect too you have fallen completely flat on your face and have not even been able to get beyond the first hurdle. The SPGB, as I demonstrated, had mixed feelings regarding Martov but they did endorse his searing exposure of the Bolshevik dictatorship and its thoroughly anti working class character. And why not? For Martov spoke the truth about this brutal state capitalist regime and no communist who was a communist would disagree with what he said in that respect.

[Hit The North]

It is abolition of private property, not the family, that will end the hereditary principle. Capitalism has already effectively abolished it for millions of workers by leaving them nothing to hand down to their children.

It is abolition of the relations of production based on private property that is the real precondition for socialism. As others have pointed out, it is the mode of production that shapes the family. There is no reason to suppose that a family form will not grow out of socialism corresponding to its relations of production.

[PhoenixAsh]

Yuliy Osipovich Martov

Down with the Death Penalty!

(June/July 1918)

Source: http://www.uea.ac.uk/his/webcours/russia/documents/.


With these words, comrade workers, you took to the streets on many occasions in the accursed days of Tsarism. These words were written on your glorious red flags. These words resounded during the great days of February 1917, when the yoke of age-old oppression was broken and the government of the revolution first pronounced: the death penalty is abolished.

In July 1917, when an attempt was made to restore the death penalty for the worst offenders against the people – for deserters from the battlefield, marauders and spies for foreign states – you protested against the restoration of the death penalty. You did so not out of sympathy for deserters or marauders, but because you realised the full extent of the danger to the people posed by the resurrection of the death penalty, even if only for the worst and proven criminals.

And when you protested in 1917 against the restitution of the death penalty, at your head stood those very people who are now ruling Russia. The Bolshevik party at that time called upon you not to allow the restoration of the death penalty even for spies, even for traitors, deserters and marauders. At that time that party told you that the death penalty, under all circumstances, for whatever crime, was savage barbarism which brought shame upon humanity. That Bolshevik party told you that socialists reject the death penalty, they reject the cold-blooded killing of unarmed criminals no longer capable of harm, they reject turning civilians into executioners, carrying out on court orders the foul business of depriving human beings, albeit criminal ones, of that greatest gift – life.

That Bolshevik party told you then: so the Christian church, professing a religion of love for thy neighbour, hypocritically justifies the murder of a person by the state authorities and the state courts when it suits it. Socialism will never stoop to such hypocrisy, and will never use its religion, the religion of fraternity of working people, to sanctify the cannibalistic principle of the death penalty.

Thus spake the present rulers of Russia. And, on taking power in October, at the Second Congress of Soviets they decreed:

The death penalty is abolished – even at the front!

These were their words, comrade workers, which you applauded, with which they bought your affection and your trust. You saw in them bold revolutionary fighters, ready to die for their ideas, and ready to kill their enemies in open battle for these ideas. But they could not be executioners, killing neutralised, already defeated, disarmed and defenceless criminals after a mock trial.

Such were their words, comrade workers. Now you can see their deeds.

* * *

As soon as they had taken power, on the very first day after they had announced the abolition of the death penalty, they started to kill.

They killed prisoners taken after battle in a civil war, just as all savages do.

They killed their enemies who had surrendered after battle on the promise that their lives would be spared. This is what happened during the October days, when the Bolshevik Smidovich gave a written promise to spare the lives of those Junkers who surrendered, and then allowed the prisoners to be beaten to death one by one. [1] Thus it was in Mogilev, where General Dukhonin surrendered to Krylenko, who in turn offered Dukhonin no protection as he was torn limb from limb before his very eyes. [2] The murderers remained unpunished. Thus it was in Kiev, in Rostov, and in many other towns as they were taken by Bolshevik troops. Thus it was in Sevastopol, in Simferopol, in Yalta, in Evpatoriya, in Feodisiya, where gangs of thugs massacred supposed counterrevolutionaries on the basis of lists, without any investigation or trial, not sparing even women or underage children.

After all these lynchings and reprisals, organised either at the instigation or with the connivance of the Bolsheviks, killings began to take place on the direct orders of the organs of Bolshevik power. The death pealty had been declared abolished, but in every town, in every province various “Extraordinary Commissions” [Chekas] and “Military-Revolutionary Committees” were ordering the shooting of hundreds upon hundreds of people. Some were killed as counterrevolutionaries, others as speculators, and yet others as robbers. No court established whether those sentenced were really guilty, nobody can tell whether the person executed was really guilty of conspiracy, speculation or robbery, or whether somebody ordered him killed in order to settle personal scores and satisfy a desire for revenge. How many innocent people have been killed like that all over Russia! With the silent approval of the Council of People’s Commissars, nameless individuals are sitting in Chekas passing death sentences. Among these individuals we sometimes discover criminals, bribe-takers, people themselves on the run from the law, and former tsarist provocateurs. Often, as in the case of the six Petrograd students executed by firing squad – we cannot even discover who precisely pronounced the death sentence.

Human life has become cheap. It is cheaper than the paper on which the executioner writes the order to destroy it. It is cheaper than the increased bread rations, for which a hired murderer is ready to send a person to the next world on the orders of the first villain who seizes power.

This bloody debauchery is being carried out in the name of socialism, in the name of that teaching which proclaimed the brotherhood of working people the highest goal of humanity.

This debauchery is being carried out in your name, Russian worker!

* * *

Having massacred tens of thousands of people without trial, the Bolsheviks have now resorted to passing death sentences in court.

They created a new Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal to try enemies of Soviet power.

At its very first session this new tribunal passed its first death sentence, which was carried out 10 hours later.

When they established this tribunal, the Bolsheviks did not declare that it would have the right to pronounce death sentences in spite of the decision of the Congress of Soviets to abolish the death penalty.

They hid their vile plan from the people. This plan was to create a court-martial, which, like Stolypin’s, was supposed to send those who displeased the Bolshevik party into the next world.

Like thieves in the night, they smuggled in the death penalty, abolished by the Second Congress of Soviets.

Sensing that shootings on Cheka orders and mob law were earning them the hatred of the entire people, they decided to precede executions by a pretence at a trial, supposedly to consider the guilt of the accused prior to execution.

But it is all a pretence, comrades! These courts do not exist.

Look at how they judged Captain Shchastny.[3]

He was accused of conspiring against Soviet power.

Captain Shchastny denied his guilt.

He asked to call witnesses, including those Bolshevik commissars who were supposed to be keeping an eye on him. Who could know better than they whether he was really intriguing against Soviet power?

The tribunal denied him the right to call witnesses. It denied him the very right that any court, apart from Stolypin’s courts-martial, grants to even the most serious criminal.

And this was a question of a man’s life or death.

It was a question of the life or death of a man who had earned the trust and love of those who served under him – the sailors of the Baltic Fleet, who protested against his arrest.

This man had rendered the people a great service by accomplishing a difficult feat: he withdrew all the ships of the Baltic Fleet from Helsinki, thereby saving them from the Finnish whiteguards.

But it was not the Finnish whiteguards, nor the German imperialists, who shot this man in anger: he was executed by Russian socialists, or by people who like to call themselves such: Messrs. Medvedev, Bruno, Karelin, Veselovsky, and Peterson – the judges of the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal.

Shchastny was denied the right granted to any thief or murderer – the right to call witnesses to court. Not one of his witnesses was allowed to appear. But the court heard a witness for the prosecution.

And that witness was Trotsky.

It was that same Trotsky who, as Commissar for Army and Naval Affairs, had arrested Shchastny.

It was that same Trotsky who, as a member of the Council of People’s Commissars, had ordered that Shchastny be tried by this Supreme Tribunal, created for pronouncing death sentences.

And in court Trotsky behaved not as a witness, but as a prosecutor. As a prosecutor he declared: this man is guilty, condemn him! – having first gagged the man by forbidding him to call witnesses able to refute these accusations.

One does not need to be very brave to fight one’s enemies like that – already bound and gagged.

Nor does one need to be very honest or honourable.

No, that is not a court, it is a mockery of a court.

It is not a court, when sentence is passed by judge-bureaucrats who are dependent upon the authorities.

In the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal there are no jurors from the general public, there are only state officials, drawing their salaries from the state treasury, which is in the hands of Trotsky and other People’s Commissars.

It is not a court, when the accused is not allowed to call witnesses in his defence.

It is not a court, when a representative of the highest authorities appears, masquerading as a witness, and orders the judges as a member of the government: crucify him!

And this non-court pronounced the death sentence, which was speedily carried out before people, revolted and shocked by this order to murder, could do anything to save the victim.

Under Nikolay Romanov it was sometimes possible, by pointing to the monstrous harshness of the sentence, to prevent it being carried out and rescue the victim from the executioner’s clutches.

Under Vladimir Ulyanov even that is impossible. The men and women at the head of the Bolshevik party were sleeping soundly, while somewhere, in the quiet of the night, the first person condemned by their court was being killed.

Nobody knew who was doing the killing or how. As under the Tsars, the names of the executioners are hidden from the people. Nobody knows whether Trotsky, having personally conducted this entire juridical comedy from beginning to end, turned up in person to observe and direct the execution.

Or maybe he too slept soundly, dreaming that the world proletariat was lauding him as the liberator of humanity, as the leader of the world socialist revolution?

Because it was in the name of socialism, in your name, proletarians, that these blind lunatics and vainglorious idiots carried out this blood-drenched comedy of cold-blooded murder!

* * *

The beast has tasted warm human blood. The murder machine has been started up. Messrs Medvedev, Bruno, Peterson, Veselovsky and Karelin have rolled up their sleeves and set to work as butchers.

We have already seen the first example, and now the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal will be dispatching to the next world anyone that the Bolshevik party wishes to deprive of their life. It will turn as many people into corpses as conscientious bureaucrats working an eight-hour day can manage.

It has begun with an officer, who can be presented to the ignorant masses as an enemy of the people, as a counterrevolutionary. Soon it will be the turn of everyone who tries to open the masses’ eyes to the criminal and ruinous nature of the order the Bolsheviks have created.

There are already hundreds of workers and peasants, hundreds of socially-useful workers, numerous social-democrats and socialist-revolutionaries languishing in Bolshevik prisons and torture-chambers. For a word of criticism, for a word of protest, for openly expressing their convictions, for defending the interests of workers and peasants these people are locked up under guard. Sometimes, in a display of savage mob law, they have been killed without any cause. Now every one of them can pass through the courtroom of the Supreme Tribunal on their way to the next world.

For reprisals against all opponents of the Bolshevik party, to eliminate socialists and recalcitrant workers and peasants, the Stolypin courts-martial and the death penalty have been reintroduced.

But bloodshed gives rise to more bloodshed. The political terror the Bolsheviks introduced in October has saturated the air above the fields of Russia with bloody fumes. The civil war is becoming ever more cruel, people are becoming ever more savage and bestial, and the great precepts of genuine humanity, which socialism always taught, are being increasingly forgotten. In those places where Bolshevik power has been overthrown by the masses or by armed force, the same terror is beginning to be used against the Bolsheviks as they had been employing against their enemies. The followers of Dutov, Semenov and Alekseev, the Ukrainian haydamaki, the troops of Skoropadsky and Krasnov, and Drozdovsky’s detachments are all hanging and shooting. Peasants and landlords, having toppled their local Bolshevik soviets, treat their members with the greatest cruelty.

People are becoming more bestial on both sides – and the full weight of responsibility for this rests on that party, which in the name of socialism blasphemously sanctified the cold-blooded execution of unarmed prisoners, which hypocritically protests against whiteguard executions in Finland while Russian soil is being drenched in the blood of the victims of firing squads.

The increasing cruelty of the civil war can already be seen in covert killings. The Bolshevik commissar Volodarsky was murdered – the unfortunate victim of the mutual hatred sown by government terror. [4] And two days later a Red Army soldier killed an old worker – the social-democrat [Menshevik] Vasil’ev [5] who had given many years’ honest service to the workers’ cause. It is possible Vasil’ev was murdered by a man angered by the killing of Volodarsky, who wished to avenge it upon the first opponent he encountered.

The Social-Democratic Workers’ Party has always opposed political killings, whether carried out by state executioners or voluntary avengers. It spoke out against them even when revolutionaries killed Tsarist secret policemen. It taught the working class that it would not improve its lot by murdering people, even the worst enemies of the people, but by changing fundamentally the entire political structure, all the conditions which give rise to oppression and violence. And now the party warns workers and peasants driven to despair by the violence of the Bolshevik authorities: do not seek revenge against individual commissars and individual Bolsheviks, do not go down the road of killings, do not take the lives of your enemies, but content yourselves instead with removing power from them – the power you gave them in the first place!

We social-democrats are opposed to all terror, both from above and from below.

For this reason we are also against the death penalty – this extreme weapon of terror, to which all rulers resort to frighten people when they have lost their trust.

The struggle against the death penalty was inscribed on the banners of all those who struggled for the freedom and happiness of the Russian people, all those who struggled for socialism.

The history of the Russian people, so filled with suffering, sanctified the gallows and the scaffold, surrounding them with an aura of martyrdom. The best people in Russia climbed the steps of the scaffold or faced the rifles of the firing squads. Lev Tolstoy, Korolenko, Maksim Gorky and countless artists denounced the soulless business of killing a bound and unarmed man in the name of the law.

And now we have a party which calls itself revolutionary, workers’ and socialist, which has encroached upon the Russian people’s sacred loathing for the death penalty! It has the impudence to restore the executioner to his place among the highest officers of state power! It has inherited from Tsarism the bloody religion of judicial murder – in the name of state interests!

Shame on revolutionaries, whose executions justify those carried out by Nikolay and his ministers, and which were cursed by generations of the Russian people!

Shame on people, whose quick-firing courts erase the mark of shame from Stolypin’s vile, hateful courts-martial!

Shame on a party which uses the title “socialist” to sanctify the foul trade of the executioner!

The International Socialist Congress in Copenhagen in 1910 resolved to fight against the barbarous death penalty in all countries.

International socialism recognised that socialists should never, under any circumstances, reconcile themselves to that cold-blooded murder of unarmed people on state orders, known as the death penalty.

This resolution, comrades, was signed by all the current leaders of the Bolshevik party: Lenin, Zinoviev, Trotsky, Kamenev, Radek, Lunacharsky. I saw them there, in Copenhagen, raising their hands in favour of a resolution declaring war on the death penalty.

Later, in July last year, I saw them in Petrograd protesting against the application of the death penalty, even in wartime, even against traitors.

I see them now using the death penalty right and left, against bourgeois and workers, against peasants and officers. I see them demanding that their underlings do not stop to count the victims, but that they should use the death poenalty as widely as possible against the opponents of Bolshevik power.

I see how, like thieves in the night, they have crept in to set up a special court for pronouncing death senternces – a machine for murder.

And I say to these Bolshevik judges:

You are vile cheats and perjurors.

You deceived the Workers’ International. You supported the demand to abolish the death penalty everywhere, but you reintroduced it once power had fallen into your hands.

You are deceiving the workers of Russia when you bring in the death penalty, hiding from them the fact that it was condemned by the Workers’ International as savage barbarism and foul bestiality arising from the bourgeois order. You are deceiving those unfortunate Latvians and Red Army men when you send them to execute people tied hand and foot, concealing from them that the Workers’ International, in whose name you claim to rule, forbade such foul deeds.

You, Rakovsky and Radek, deceived the Western European workers when you told them that you were travelling to Russia to struggle for the socialist cause, a cause of the highest humanity. You deceived the Western European workers when you told them you were taking the lantern of socialism to backward Russia.

In reality you came here to cultivate that ancient barbarism fostered by the Tsars, to burn incense on the old Russian altar of human sacrifice, to increase contempt for other human lives to an extent unheard of even in our savage country, to organise executions all over Russia.

You, A. V. Lunacharsky, you who love to stand before the workers and extol in ringing terms the magnificence of the socialist ideal and the universal humanity of socialist teaching; you who roll your eyes to the heavens and sing the praises of the brotherhood of man in the socialist order, you, who denounce the hypocrisy of the Christian religion for sanctifying murder and who evangelise the new religion of proletarian socialism – you are thrice a liar, thrice a Pharisee when you take a rest from the intoxication of your vulgar phrases and join Lenin and Trotsky in organising judicial and extra-judicial murder!

All of you who signed up to the International’s agreement on the struggle against the death penalty, all of you who beat your path to power with promises to the working class to abolish the death penalty once and for ever – all of you are vile bankrupts, worthy of nothing but contempt!

* * *

“I cannot remain silent!” declared that grand old man Lev Tolstoy when he heard of the daily executions carried out on the orders of Stolypin’s courts.

Russian workers! Lev Nikolaevich [Tolstoy] did not call on you to remain silent at this time, when the executioner is once again a central figure of Russian life! Karl Marx, whose memory you recently honoured, did not call on you to remain silent. The great teacher of socialism was a sworn enemy of all that barbarism we had inherited from ages past. The executioner’s bloody work, carried out in the name of socialism, in the name of the proletariat, is a desecration of his memory.

We must not remain silent!

As you judge, so shall you be judged. Tomorrow the insanity of Bolshevism will have exhausted the democratic forces and will be replaced by that very counterrevolution it has been preparing. Tomorrow the same horrors may begin in Russia as have been happening in Finland, where any workers, any socialists can be slaughtered like wild animals. And woe to us if we protest about violence against workers and demand that the workers’ lives and honour be defended against tyranny, only to be told by the bourgeoisie: you, workers, approved the same sort of violence, the same sort of executions! You kept silent about them!

But we need not wait long for that moment. At this very moment counterrevolution, protected by German bayonets, rules the roost on the Don, in the Crimea, in the Ukraine, and in the Baltic provinces. And every volley from Bolshevik rifles, shooting the opponents of Bolshevik power here, will be echoed tenfold by other rifles executing local revolutionary workers and peasants. And both the local counterrevolutionaries, and the German commanders will say in reponse to workers’ protests: “We are doing it the Bolshevik way.”

The execution of one Captain Shchastny by the Bolsheviks will pave the way to the murder of tens of workers and peasants in the South and West of Russia. Because bloodshed breeds more bloodshed.

The working class must cry “stop!” to this river of blood.

The working class must declare loudly and as one to the whole world that this terror, this barbarism of execution after trial, and this cannibalism of execution without trial has nothing to do with the Russian proletariat.

To your rulers, who lost your trust long ago and rely now on naked force, you must say that they are perjurors, who have violated their own solemn promises, that the working class rejects as outcasts all those involved in the business of death sentences, all executioners, executioners’ assistants and those that inspire them.

To those workers who still belong to the Bolshevik Communist Party – a party of judicial and extra-judicial murder – you must say that they have no place in the workers’ ranks, as they all bear responsibility for the blood shed by the executioners. Say that to them and show it in practice by cutting off all comradely relations with them and treating them as plague-ridden outcasts, just as you always did to the pogromists from the Union of the Russian People.

The party of death sentences is as much an enemy of the working class as the party of pogroms.

Let all those ignorant, blinded, and debauched sons of the working class who have been bought see, that the family of the proletariat will never forgive them their participation in the business of execution!

Let all those who have not yet lost their socialist outlook make haste to distance themselves from the Medvedevs and Stuchkas, the Krylenkos and Trotskies, Dzerzhinskies and Sverdlovs, from all those who are in charge of wholesale and individual murder!

We must not remain silent! For the honour of the working class, for the honour of socialism and the revolution, for our duty to our motherland and the Workers’ International, for the principles of humanity, for our hatred of autocracy’s gallows, for the beloved memory of our martyred fighters for freedom – let the mighty call of the working class resound across all Russia:

Down with the death penalty!
Let the people judge the executioner-cannibals!

Yu. Martov

[Proteus2]

I sometimes think that the left is an awful state. No less than the future of our species is at stake and all we have for hope is the possibility of a few more votes in Wales.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I agree with this but I still think it's absurd to condemn the ad for not explicitly calling for an end to the family.

Perhaps. I think ads in general are absurd - socialism is not something you sell. But the ad was criticised for not mentioning gay people, and the SPGB in general for not raising slogans related to gay liberation, the smashing of the family etc.

Then the spamgbots had a fit because they post these threads with the expectation that everyone will tell them how clever and revolutionary they are. Criticism is forbidden - we wouldn't want to endanger socialism by turning away some voter in Wales after all.


Do you even read what you copy and paste? The excerpts you quote were in no way supporting the Whites against the Bolsheviks. Instead, they amounted to a scathing attack on the civil war itself and the brutality it engendered. As Martov put it "People are becoming more bestial on both sides" Not only is the terror employed by the Bolshevik authorities roundly condemned but also that of its enemies - the Whites: In those places where Bolshevik power has been overthrown by the masses or by armed force, the same terror is beginning to be used against the Bolsheviks as they had been employing against their enemies. The followers of Dutov, Semenov and Alekseev, the Ukrainian haydamaki, the troops of Skoropadsky and Krasnov, and Drozdovsky’s detachments are all hanging and shooting. Peasants and landlords, having toppled their local Bolshevik soviets, treat their members with the greatest cruelty

I did read the article, did you? Of course, it is obvious from your contributions on this topic that you tend to take things at face value - if someone says they're not a whiteguard, then they're not a whiteguard. I wonder why, then, you don't accept the self-description of SPEW as socialist. Now, if you read between the lines, it is clear that:

(1) Martov blames the Bolsheviks for White violence; that

(2) Martov advocates taking away the most powerful weapon of the proletarian state against its enemies; and that

(3) Martov advocates that the Bolshevik authority be overthrown in favour of some kind of "democracy", which means that his programme coincided perfectly with that of other Whites.


So you are completely wrong about Martov. Martov was not a supporter of the Whites. Here's what one site says [...]

The one site that spends almost the entire article about Purishkevich talking about Rasputin, a footnote in the bloody history of the Black Hundreds? That, indeed, doesn't mention the Black Hundreds? That slanders Rosa Luxemburg by treating her one unfinished article she never intended to publish as her final word on the October Revolution? That amnesties the SPD? Great source you've found.


Its members were imprisoned for their anti-war beliefs during both World Wars or fled abroad. Why you imagine that it would suddenly want to take sides in Civil war, I have absolutely no idea


Why did the American SWP, who hated Reagan with a passion, suddenly line up behind his anti-communist jihad in Afghanistan? Because these petit-bourgeois sellouts hated proletarian power more than they hated Reagan. Likewise with the SPGB and the British.


The SPGB, as I demonstrated, had mixed feelings regarding Martov but they did endorse his searing exposure of the Bolshevik dictatorship and its thoroughly anti working class character. And why not? For Martov spoke the truth about this brutal state capitalist regime and no communist who was a communist would disagree with what he said in that respect.

Yes, if "communist who was a communist" means "social-democratic whiteguard".

[robbo203]

In any case, the point is that robbo made a statement - that "a more detailed and nuanced analysis" of the question of homosexuality can be found in the SPGB material. So, where is it? He is avoiding the question because he knows damn well that the SPGB has kept mum about the subject.


No thats not true. I grant there has not been much material published in the form of articles or pamphlets that I am aware of but if you scour through their archive section you will no doubt be able to come across the odd article. Here's the link http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/archive. Neverthleless the point Im making is that the SPGB is opposed to homophobia just as it is opposed to racism and sexism and if I am not mistaken - you will have to confirm with this with the SPGB members on this site as I am hazy on the details - there was a conference resolution passed some years ago making this stance explicit. The point I was making in relation to this thread is that you cannot include everything that you feel needs to be said in a very brief party political broadcast and if individuals had a particular point to raise that is when a more detailed and nuanced analysis would follow - after contacting the organisation. The purpose of the SPGB is not about lobbying for legal reforms or agitating for more equal rights in capitalism - its sole purpose is to work for socialism - but it does clearly recognise that attitudes such as racism, sexism or homophobia seriously impede that that work and divide the working class and it does clearly attack such attitudes





That is simply not the case - inheritance is explicitly mentioned in the analysis of what Engels, following Morgan, calls the punaluan family, although not as a right of inheritance (which presupposes the emergence of the state):

"In the very great majority of cases the institution of the gens seems to have originated directly out of the punaluan family. It is true that the Australian classificatory system also provides an origin for it: the Australians have gentes, but not yet the punaluan family; instead, they have a cruder form of group marriage. In all forms of group family it is uncertain who is the father of a child; but it is certain who its mother is. Though she calls all the children of the whole family her children and has a mother’s duties towards them, she nevertheless knows her own children from the others. It is therefore clear that in so far as group marriage prevails, descent can only be proved on the mother’s side and that therefore only the female line is recognized. And this is in fact the case among all peoples in the period of savagery or in the lower stage of barbarism. It is the second great merit of Bachofen that he was the first to make this discovery. To denote this exclusive recognition of descent through the mother and the relations of inheritance which in time resulted from it, he uses the term “mother-right,” which for the sake of brevity I retain. The term is, however, ill-chosen, since at this stage of society there cannot yet be any talk of “right” in the legal sense."





You completely miss the point. Whether inheritance is explicitly mentioned in connection with the punaluan family is neither here nor there. The point is that Engels was speaking of different forms of the family that existed prior to the emergence of private property and "civilisation" [B]and therefore could not be explained in terms of private property - namely, the consanguine family, the punaluan family and the pairing family. He then analysed another specific kind of family formation - namely the monogamous patriarchal family which he quite clearly states emerged out of the pairing family which, as it were, contained the seeds of its own destruction. It merely required other factors to push the pairing family, which he regarded as a characteristic form of the family in the stage of "barbarism" ,towards the monogamous famity which was the characteristic form of the family in "civilisation" i.e. class society





Generalised scarcity due to insufficiently developed means of production, resulting in the institution of inheritance, and the relations that prevailed when it came to domestic labour (i.e. domestic labour being preformed by one sex in several family-units).

And what would be the material basis of the family in socialism, pray tell? Are you going to tell us fairy-tales about how the family is "natural"?




I asked you "what was the "material basis" of the family prior to the emergence of private property?" and this was your reply: "generalised scarcity due to insufficiently developed means of production, " . I dont accept this argument at all. How would it apply in the case of so called primitive hunting and foraging bands which Marshall Sahlins dubbed the original affluent society (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society). What you are doing is retrospectively interpreting such a society from the standpoint of capitalism and projecting capitalist motives and capitalist values onto such a society. A far more plausible explanation in my view is that the specific form that the family took in hunting and foraging societies was governed by the very exigencies of these activities themselves. Band societies frequently fission into a small nuclear family units in one part of the year and coalesce again into multi-family units in another part of the year. Marcel Mauss classic work Seasonal Variations among the Eskimos is a good illutation of this

Do I consider the family to be "natural". Well, I dont consider the particular form that the family takes to be natural but as far as I am aware there have always been what are called family units through human history. A fundamental factor in this is parent-child bond, the nurturing and upbringing of children, providing the child with a sense of identity and ensuring the transmission of culture between generations. Of course it is quite true that all this need not solely undertaken by the biological parents and that the responsibility for such things can be shared on a group basis. But that does not mean the disappearance of the family as such , it is merely to extend the definition of what is meant by the "family"

In socialism people will continue to live in households - obviously - and while the concept of a household does not exactly, and need not, coincide with that of a family - I think in practice there will be a strong tendency for them to coincide. Thats is to say the consanguineal factor will continue to exert a strong underlying patterning influence on household formation in a socialist society. And why not? Whats the problem with that?

This has always been the case throughout human history to a lesser or greater degree and the onus is on those who dogmatically assert that the family will completely disappear in socialism to show why they imagine things will be different. My suspiciion is that when they attack the family they are attacking only a specific form of the family such as it exists in contemporary capitalist society. That is not unreasonable but it is not in any way an argument for saying the family will disappear in socialism

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

No thats not true. I grant there has not been much material published in the form of articles or pamphlets that I am aware of but if you scour through their archive section you will no doubt be able to come across the odd article. Here's the link http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/archive.

No, just no. You made the claim, you provide the evidence. I am not going to dig through the archives to find some meagre support for your point. If you claim something, be prepared to back it up or retract it.


You completely miss the point. Whether inheritance is explicitly mentioned in connection with the punaluan family is neither here nor there. The point is that Engels was speaking of different forms of the family that existed prior to the emergence of private property and "civilisation" [B]and therefore could not be explained in terms of private property - namely, the consanguine family, the punaluan family and the pairing family. He then analysed another specific kind of family formation - namely the monogamous patriarchal family which he quite clearly states emerged out of the pairing family which, as it were, contained the seeds of its own destruction. It merely required other factors to push the pairing family, which he regarded as a characteristic form of the family in the stage of "barbarism" ,towards the monogamous famity which was the characteristic form of the family in "civilisation" i.e. class society

You claimed that inheritance is characteristic of the monogamous family, which is not what Engels claimed at all. In any case, as you can verify I never claimed that the family originated at the same time as private property, but that it will be destroyed along with class society.


I asked you "what was the "material basis" of the family prior to the emergence of private property?" and this was your reply: "generalised scarcity due to insufficiently developed means of production, " . I dont accept this argument at all. How would it apply in the case of so called primitive hunting and foraging bands which Marshall Sahlins dubbed the original affluent society (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society).

That's just pseudo-primmie nonsense, though. The point is that the means of production had not developed to the extent that there was no scarcity. Objects could not be easily produced, necessitating the inheritance of objects through several generations.

That, and you ignore my other point, that is that the individual nature of domestic labour is one of the material basis of the family.


A far more plausible explanation in my view is that the specific form that the family took in hunting and foraging societies was governed by the very exigencies of these activities themselves. Band societies frequently fission into a small nuclear family units in one part of the year and coalesce again into multi-family units in another part of the year. Marcel Mauss classic work Seasonal Variations among the Eskimos is a good illutation of this

An interesting point, but in the context of this debate, it is irrelevant. Obviously these conditions will not obtain in socialism; there will be no seasonal variation or economic activity centred on small mobile groups etc.


Do I consider the family to be "natural". Well, I dont consider the particular form that the family takes to be natural but as far as I am aware there have always been what are called family units through human history.

So you do consider the family natural, just like every "family values" idealist.


A fundamental factor in this is parent-child bond, the nurturing and upbringing of children, providing the child with a sense of identity and ensuring the transmission of culture between generations. Of course it is quite true that all this need not solely undertaken by the biological parents and that the responsibility for such things can be shared on a group basis. But that does not mean the disappearance of the family as such , it is merely to extend the definition of what is meant by the "family"

In socialism, labour, meaning also domestic and reproductive labour, is social, it is not limited to small groups. Why should the biological parents or some group associated with them have any kind of prerogative when it comes to the socialisation of children?


In socialism people will continue to live in households - obviously - and while the concept of a household does not exactly, and need not, coincide with that of a family - I think in practice there will be a strong tendency for them to coincide. Thats is to say the consanguineal factor will continue to exert a strong underlying patterning influence on household formation in a socialist society.

Why? What will be the material basis of that? That's the question you're trying to avoid with hand-waving about "naturalness".


And why not? Whats the problem with that?

Because the family rests on the subjugation of women, unpaid domestic labour, and is one of the most potent sources of anti-woman, anti-transsexual and anti-homosexual violence in society.

[robbo203]

Perhaps. I think ads in general are absurd - socialism is not something you sell. But the ad was criticised for not mentioning gay people, and the SPGB in general for not raising slogans related to gay liberation, the smashing of the family etc.

As repeatedly explained to you a very brief party political broadcast could not include everything that needs to be said. Perforce it has to be selective and focus on the fundamentals. That apart , to sloganise about "smashing the family" is dumb and theoretically questionable. This too has been explained to you but you haven't heeded a word, have you?



Then the spamgbots had a fit because they post these threads with the expectation that everyone will tell them how clever and revolutionary they are. Criticism is forbidden - we wouldn't want to endanger socialism by turning away some voter in Wales after all.

Dont be daft. Who is forbidding criticism? You are criticising and I am responding to your criticism. I am not saying you should not be allowed to criticise




I did read the article, did you? Of course, it is obvious from your contributions on this topic that you tend to take things at face value - if someone says they're not a whiteguard, then they're not a whiteguard. I wonder why, then, you don't accept the self-description of SPEW as socialist. Now, if you read between the lines, it is clear that:

(1) Martov blames the Bolsheviks for White violence; that

(2) Martov advocates taking away the most powerful weapon of the proletarian state against its enemies; and that

(3) Martov advocates that the Bolshevik authority be overthrown in favour of some kind of "democracy", which means that his programme coincided perfectly with that of other Whites.


You are doing exactly what the right wing nutjobs in the McCarthy era in America did: anyone who was not a loyal patriot was a "communist" (i.e. a supporter of soviet state capitalism). In your case anyone who attacks your beloved Bolshevik capitalist state is, or was, a White. You live in a world in which everything is either white or black (if you will excuse the pun) and your whole approach to politics grotesquely, not to say, childishly simplistic

The fact that Martov blamed the Bolsheviks for White violence does not make him a supporter of the Whites, does it? He was equal critical of White violence against the Bolsheviks which the very quotes you posted demonstrate


All this bluster on your part is merely an attempt to get round the solid, undeniable but, for you, very inconvenient fact that

1) Martov actually supported the Red army against the White army but opposed the brutality of the Bolsheviks (and the Whites too) in prosecuting the war

2) Martov in exile refused to support any foreign intervention in Russia to overthrow the government but urged that the Russian workers themselves to withdraw their support from the Bolshevik state and quite rightly so.

You persistently evade these points and decline to answer them because you know damn well they completely destroy your whole argument and demolish the tissue of lies you have fabricated






The one site that spends almost the entire article about Purishkevich talking about Rasputin, a footnote in the bloody history of the Black Hundreds? That, indeed, doesn't mention the Black Hundreds? That slanders Rosa Luxemburg by treating her one unfinished article she never intended to publish as her final word on the October Revolution? That amnesties the SPD? Great source you've found.


Listen, the site I posted a link to was just one of many many sites I could have posted a link too - all of which reached much the same conclusion, all of which expose the falsehood of what you are saying. Whether or not the site is a "great source" is neither here nor there and citing other articles on the site rather than the one I linked to smacks of underhand diversionary tactics. The real point is was what the article I posted saying the truth about Martov's attitudes towards the Whites? If so then you are obliged to acknowlege that you have made a grave error in your assessment of the man




Why did the American SWP, who hated Reagan with a passion, suddenly line up behind his anti-communist jihad in Afghanistan? Because these petit-bourgeois sellouts hated proletarian power more than they hated Reagan. Likewise with the SPGB and the British.


FFS. The Marxist analysis of the Bolshevik state is not that it is was an expression of proletarian power but, on the contrary, that it was the means by which proletarian power was smashed and destroyed in the interests of emerging state capitalism. What do you think Lenin's top down "one man management" policy was all about? What do you think the crushing of the factory committees and the subordination and transformation of the trade unions into a mere arm of the state was all about? What do you think the obnixious "militarisation of labour" programme was all about? Why do you think the Bolsheviks bannned all opposition to their capitalist dictatorship both with the so called communist party and without?

And dont dare raise again your stupid claim about the SPGB supporting the British in the civil war. This has been more than adequately demolished already and I still wait to hear how you imagine an organsation that throughout its long history has consistently refused to take sides in any capitalist conflict would suddenly opt to support the British against the Bolshevik state. But I dont expect I will ever get an answer from you

Plain fact is you are a complete and utter fantasist

[The Idler]

The fact that every single debate on modern issues inevitably turns into a fuckfest about people's rigid, ever unchanging position on events in early 20th century Russia.
You might want to see who first mentioned Lenin on page 1. Or who first turned the discussion to early 20th Century Russia on page 2 by making up the following "Of course, during the October Revolution, the SPGB supported the worst elements of the Second International, the Mensheviks, objectively placing them on the same side as Kerensky, Kolchak and the British interventionists. To this day the SPGB mourns their beloved Constituent Assembly with an intensity that would have shocked the most committed Kadet."

[The Idler]

The fact that not mentioning LGBTQ rights explicitly directly makes you homophobic ....
I can't think of a group that wouldn't be "homophobic" by this criteria.

[PhoenixAsh]

I can't think of a group that wouldn't be "homophobic" by this criteria.

Exactly.

This whole thread has basically degenerated to cherry picking.

[The Idler]

There can be no unity between revolutionaries and opportunists, and if having principles and carrying on the political struggle by criticising other groups disrupts this false "unity", well, so much the better for those who have principles.

why should we treat the October Revolution as some minor footnote in history? So we can "focus on the now" and unite with opportunists? But we'd rather not.
This wasn't Lenin or the Bolshevik's view who urged CPGB members to join Labour, despite it being in his words "a bourgeois party led by reactionaries".


the only correct, point of view, the Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers with the aid of the British Noskes and Scheidemanns.


...at the Labour Party Conference, the British Scheidemanns were obliged to openly raise the question of affiliation to the Third International, and that all party branches and sections were obliged to discuss the matter. In such circumstances, it would be a mistake not to join this party.


… If the British Communist Party starts by acting in a revolutionary manner in the Labour Party, and if the Hendersons are obliged to expel this Party, that will be a great victory for the communist and revolutionary working class movement in Britain.

Trotsky added to this


The struggle of the trade unions to debar unorganised workers from the factory has long been known as a manifestation of ‘terrorism’ by the workers – or in more modern terms, Bolshevism. In Britain these methods can and must be carried over into the Labour Party which has grown up as a direct extension of the trade unions.

[robbo203]

I see there have been a few more SPGB forays on the media front in connection with the euroelections. Some of these are listed below

Danny Lambert from the SPGB at the European Election Hustings at Southhampton University, 07/05/14
[Go to 36 minutes in for the main contribution]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyNKbuo_4T4

Danny Lambert from the SPGB at the European Election Hustings at Southhampton University, 07/05/14
[Segment from the above]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Qhjp3PbV8

Danny Lambert from the SPGB on BBC South East Today, 09/05/14
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKlILdLWrFg

Brian Johnson from the SPGB on Jason Mohammad's show on BBC Radio Wales, 14/05/14
[Go to 2 hours 51 minutes for the contribution]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b043njyl

Howard Moss from the SPGB on The Wales Report, 14/05/14
[Go to 52 minutes 30 seconds in for the contribution]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b042yvgx/the-wales-report-14052014

Howard Moss from the SPGB on The Wales Report, 14/05/14
[Segment from the above]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4VON1Oab8M

Havent gone through them yet but maybe some of these might have filled in the blank spaces that various bods here complained of in respect of the SPGB euroelection broadcast...

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

As repeatedly explained to you a very brief party political broadcast could not include everything that needs to be said. Perforce it has to be selective and focus on the fundamentals. That apart , to sloganise about "smashing the family" is dumb and theoretically questionable. This too has been explained to you but you haven't heeded a word, have you?

Don't big yourself up too much, you haven't "explained" anything, although you have asserted quite a few things (over and over and over and...) without anything resembling a supporting argument. In fact you have evaded answering direct questions - such as the question about the material basis of your supposed "socialist" family.

(It is increasingly becoming apparent to me that the "communism" or "socialism" most people on this site are talking about is not even remotely like anything a revolutionary might imagine - it is, for all the r-r-revolutionary rhetoric of its supporters, a barracks "socialism" with socialist or people's police, prisons, mental hospitals and now the family. There really is no point in carrying on.)


The fact that Martov blamed the Bolsheviks for White violence does not make him a supporter of the Whites, does it?

"The fact that X blamed the victim of a rape for rape doesn't make him a supporter of rape, does it?" Yes it does.


All this bluster on your part is merely an attempt to get round the solid, undeniable but, for you, very inconvenient fact that

1) Martov actually supported the Red army against the White army but opposed the brutality of the Bolsheviks (and the Whites too) in prosecuting the war

Listen, Mr. Socialist Family Values, I have cited numerous examples of the official Menshevik organisation, the Organising Committee and its successors, with Martov in the Central Committee, participating in the White movement. One token declaration, made while inside Bolshevik territory, to the effect that Mensheviks should support the Red Army (but "fight for democracy" - what was it that Engels said about all of the opponents of socialism rallying around the watchword of democracy?), which was never enforced, does not mean anything.

In fact I am slightly pissed off that I went to the trouble of combing through actual published, academic sources, for nothing. Shows what I know.


2) Martov in exile refused to support any foreign intervention in Russia to overthrow the government but urged that the Russian workers themselves to withdraw their support from the Bolshevik state and quite rightly so.

"...and quite rightly so." - and therefore you are a whiteguard, as was Martov, and we will call you, quite rightly so, a whiteguard and an opponent of proletarian power.

You know what, I give up. Fighting ignorance, philistinism and bigotry might sound good on paper, but all it does is bore and tire me for no good reason. So I'll leave you to shit this site up with more of your interminable announcements about interminable SPGB campaigns to get an SPGB arse to sit in a parliamentary chair. I remember how it was when some of the IG sympathisers posted an article from the Internationalist every few months - most of the reactions were negative. Whereas the spamgbots slowly turn every section of the site into an announcement board for the SPGB's parliamentarian attempts - seriously, there's a group that might as well be called "The Idler Informs Us About SPGB Campaigns And Publications". The difference, I suppose, is that the Internationalist Group are genuine socialists and not parliamentary windbags. And genuine socialism is highly frowned upon on this site.

As for the rest, I think that your championing of the family, along with your defence of the gay erasure the SPGB preforms, the homophobic slur you used against TAT, and your defence of your friend Manic Impressive and, indirectly, a member banned for homophobia, says it all. I would say that you relics of a bygone era are on the way out - but this only really applies to revolutionary groups, not societies for debating with fascists and campaigning for parliament.

[Red Deathy]

Careful now, if you indulge in any more hand-waving you might just be the first person to fly without mechanical assistance. Obviously the "necessity for cooperation" does not necessarily extend to any single group - it is more than possible to exclude gay people from society. And it's possible to exclude blond people, short people, fat people, etc. but with no economic incentive to do so, and every incentive not to do so, I would suggest it is unlikely. If it did continue to occur, with the abolition of class society, people, like myself and thyself, would continue to campaign to stop such exclusion. Socialism isn't a cure all, it's a cure for class society and the wages system.



It is possible to kill people without the state.
It isn't possible to have the "Death penalty" (upper case) as a formal and accepted and enforced practice. However, that's as far as I pursue your "When did you stop beating your wife" fallacy...

The point is that just as the RSPB, Save the Wale, The Society for the Preservation of Historic buildings, etc. the SPGB is an organisation set up for a specific task, abolishing the wages system. To then criticise it for not doing something other than campaigning for that is a otiose as writing to those other societies asking why they didn't collect your bins.

Incidentally, debating with you, and rebutting you (and asking you to sabtantiate your claims) is no no way a sign of disliking criticism, but, rather a willingness to defend ourselves and to engage in debate.

[PhoenixAsh]

I absolutely LOVE Bolsheviks accusing other factions of being anti-proletariat. So far the only faction which has a proven trackrecord of being anti-proletariat are the Bolsheviks who managed to single handedly degenerate a proletarian revolution to an absolutist non-worker elitist state alienating the proletariat from the very start of the revolution.

Some of these members here seem to be perfectly willing to gloss over the very anti-proletariat mass murders which were committed (executing striking workes who opposed the absurd privileges of the Bolsheviks, the direct and specific targetting of women and children (killin, murder and rape) by their institutions (which incidentally was "justified" or waved away).

Awesome.

[PhoenixAsh]

What I would really like to know is from the Bolshevists/Leninists what they are going to do about the inherent flaws in their conversion from theory to practice and how they are going to solve the problems which were fundamental in the degeneration/breakdown of their own ideology and system.

We can pretend everything was hunky-dory up until "the Evilz of Stalin" but that of course raises the question how Stalin could ever actually happen if the system worked. Of course I know all the excuses of "infiltration" and "counter revolutionaries" taking over the party....and we all have heard the excuses of "war communism" and the "NEP" but the fact remains that the system failed, the ideology failed in preventing this exploitation and infiltration from happening and subsequently Stalin is just another expression stemming from a lack of actual proletarian control and alienation which happened way before that era.

So what are they going to do about it? What is the repair?

[PhoenixAsh]

Because....you know....if there is one thing the proletariat is fond of and what will definitely turn them to your cause is when you specifically target their daughters, neighbors, children and rape, torture and execute them....you know....in their name....and: "really....it was unavoidable to kill all those striking and hungry workers who opposed our privilege....that privilege was to their benefit....yes, yes...we know they were starving, but we were fighting a war in their name. Which is why we killed their sons, daughters, wives and lovers. Plus of course there is no need to actually have any real political power. No worries. Everything will be ok. Just leave it to us and our system of repression which will make your world such a much nicer place. Just don't think or do something we don't like....and most of all: don't be gay, Jewish or any other ethnic minority group. Plus dress your hair to the regulation haircut and smile and don't mind the corpses"

[The Idler]

"...and quite rightly so." - and therefore you are a whiteguard, as was Martov, and we will call you, quite rightly so, a whiteguard and an opponent of proletarian power.
Earlier you were saying 'support' or 'take the side of' the Mensheviks so I'll put this one down to you getting pissed off or hyperbole as it's unlikely robbo203 is literally a white guard unless someone very elderly was continuing the Russian Civil War in 2014. I have visions of an old man in a faded full uniform with a rusty bayonet and a map of Russia sitting at a keyboard getting into a revert war over the result of the Russian Civil War on wikipedia.

[robbo203]

Earlier you were saying 'support' or 'take the side of' the Mensheviks so I'll put this one down to you getting pissed off or hyperbole as it's unlikely robbo203 is literally a white guard unless someone very elderly was continuing the Russian Civil War in 2014. I have visions of an old man in a faded full uniform with a rusty bayonet and a map of Russia sitting at a keyboard getting into a revert war over the result of the Russian Civil War on wikipedia.


I think what it is is that our Mr West has finally buckled under the strain of trying to square the circle , poor chap, and has now completely lost the plot. There is only so much blatant lying through one's teeth that one can humanly do afterall. All that wriggling and squirming and evading the point tells in the end

As for his silly jibe about "Mr. Socialist Family Values", I will take up his and Queervanguard's crackpot claim later that "smashing the family" has something to do with socialism. Not just the "bourgeois monogamous family", mind, but The Family as such. Any kind of "family". In other words there would be , according to these individuals , no such thing as people living in families at all. Nada de nada. Zilch. Presumably , couples who chose to live together and to have a kid or two would not be allowed to do so by Commissars West and Queervanguard. One wonders what kind of living arrangements our merry duo have in mind for the citizens of a future socialist society, anyway? Barracks for the masses or "one person, one cell"? Perish the thought that a kid might actually chose to live with its biological parents and vice versa

As I say, Ill deal with this argument later. For the moment, and after a back-breaking day's work, bed beckons ;)2

[PhoenixAsh]

http://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-family.htm

Working mothers have no need to be alarmed; communist not intending to take children away from their parents or to tear the baby from the breast of its mother, and neither is it planning to take, violent measures to destroy the family. No such thing! The aims of communist society are quite different. Communist society sees that the old type of family is breaking up, and that all the old pillars which supported the family as a social unit are being removed: the domestic economy is dying, and working-class parents are unable to take care of their children or provide them with sustenance and education. Parents and children suffer equally from this situation. Communist society has this to say to the working woman and working man: “You are young, you love each other. Everyone has the right to happiness. Therefore live your life. Do not flee happiness. Do not fear marriage, even though under capitalism marriage was truly a chain of sorrow. Do not be afraid of having children. Society needs more workers and rejoices at the birth of every child. You do not have to worry about the future of your child; your child will know neither hunger nor cold.” Communist society takes care of every child and guarantees both him and his mother material and moral support. Society will feed, bring up and educate the child. At the same time, those parents who desire to participate in the education of their children will by no, means be prevented from doing so. Communist society will take upon itself all the duties involved in the education of the child, but the joys of parenthood will not be taken away from those who are capable of appreciating them. Such are the plans of communist society and they can hardly be interpreted as the forcible destruction of the family and the forcible separation of child from mother.

There is no escaping the fact: the old type of family has had its day. The family is withering away not because it is being forcibly destroyed by the state, but because the family is ceasing to be a necessity. The state does not need the family, because the domestic economy is no longer profitable: the family distracts the worker from more useful and productive labour. The members of the family do not need the family either, because the task of bringing up the children which was formerly theirs is passing more and more into the hands of the collective. In place of the old relationship between men and women, a new one is developing: a union of affection and comradeship, a union of two equal members of communist society, both of them free, both of them independent and both of them workers. No more domestic bondage for women. No more inequality within the family. No need for women to fear being left without support and with children to bring up. The woman in communist society no longer depends upon her husband but on her work. It is not in her husband but in her capacity for work that she will find support. She need have no anxiety about her children. The workers’ state will assume responsibility for them. Marriage will lose all the elements of material calculation which cripple family life. Marriage will be a union of two persons who love and trust each other. Such a union promises to the working men and women who understand themselves and the world around them the most complete happiness and the maximum satisfaction. Instead of the conjugal slavery of the past, communist society offers women and men a free union which is strong in the comradeship which inspired it. Once the conditions of labour have been transformed and the material security of the working women has increased, and once marriage such as the church used to perform it – this so-called indissoluble marriage which was at bottom merely a fraud – has given place to the free and honest union of men and women who are lovers and comrades, prostitution will disappear. This evil, which is a stain on humanity and the scourge of hungry working women, has its roots in commodity production and the institution of private property. Once these economic forms are superseded, the trade in women will automatically disappear. The women of the working class, therefore, need not worry over the fact that the family is doomed to disappear. They should, on the contrary, welcome the dawn of a new society which will liberate women from domestic servitude, lighten the burden of motherhood and finally put an end to the terrible curse of prostitution.

[PhoenixAsh]

^ debate about family in communism ended. Family will continue in other form.

Time saved :)

[robbo203]

^ debate about family in communism ended. Family will continue in other form.

Time saved :)

Exactly PhoenixAsh! That is precisely what I was trying to tell messrs West and Queervanguard. But did they listen? Nope. For them , the family began with private property and will end with private property ....because it is the product of private property. Therefore it is incumbent upon communists to mindlessly sloganise about "smashing the family". But that is not only completely misguided, it is factually wrong. The family long predated private property as Engels showed - not to mention,the whole discipline of modern anthropology itself - and therefore you cannot attributed its existence to private property.

What happened is that the form of the family changed with private property - to that of the monogamous patriarchal family. One can reasonably argue that this particular form will disappear in socialism but in no way does that mean the family as such will disappear

I would love to know what these two individuals imagine a familyless socialist future would actually look like? How would people live together? What would be their living arrangements?

It depends on how you define the family, I suppose. If you mean by "family" the genealogical sense of the term then of course not even messrs West and Queervanguard would be so stupid as to deny the family's continuation in socialism. That would be tantamount to saying there would be no more mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles and aunts. In short no more human race. Last I checked, you cant have socialism without human beings

So we are talking about the family in a socioloigcal sense - as a social institution - that is , two or more individuals who live in a particular household and are connected through consanguineal or affinal ties (which means incidentally that even a gay couple living together could constitute a family insofar as they connected through affinal ties). Literally speaking, to "smash the family" means, for example, that a mother could not live with her infant child; the latter would have to be confiscated from her. Ironically West suggested I was trying to naturalise the existence of the family while at the same timne acccusing me of "idealism" in respect of the family which goes to show just how muddled his thinking is on the subject. It would be interesting to hear from him how he views the mother-infant bond . That is if he can be bothered to respond now that he has seemingly withdrawn from this debate in a big petulant sulk.

So what would a familyless socialist future look like according to these people? The options seem to boil down to

1) Barrack socialism a la Edward Bellamy's Looking Backwards - where large numbers of individuals live in big insititutions of some kind

2) Atomistic socialism where each individual lives on his/her own

3) Household socialism where individuals continue to live in households much like today but are not connected through consanguineal or affinal ties

Now each of these particular forms might well exist in a socialist society but alongside the family household and not at the expense of the latter. I maintain that the family in the sense defined above will continue to exist in a socialist society and, for all sorts of reasons, will continue to exert a strong patterning influence on the living arrnagments of people in such a society. I have yet to hear a single plausible explanation as why this should not be so.

This is why talking about "smashing the family" is just mindless and counterproductive sloganising. Of course the SPGB should not have included such a slogan in their election video - it would simply make them look downright stupid and not only that , throughly authoritarian and idealistic in prescribing how people in a future socialist society should live together

[Dave B]

Sex and Marriage



Before I could answer, Lenin continued:

“Your list of sins, Clara, is still longer. I was told that questions of sex and marriage are the main subjects dealt with in the reading and discussion evenings of women comrades. They are the chief subject of interest, of political instruction and education. I could scarcely believe my ears when I heard it.



The first country of proletarian dictatorship surrounded by the counter-revolutionaries of the whole world, the situation in Germany itself requires the greatest possible concentration of all proletarian, revolutionary forces to defeat the ever-growing and ever-increasing counter-revolution. But working women comrades discuss sexual problems and the question of forms of marriage in the past, present and future. They think it their most important duty to enlighten proletarian women on these subjects. The most widely read brochure is, I believe, the pamphlet of a young Viennese woman comrade on the sexual problem. What a waste!


http://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1920/lenin/zetkin1.htm


“Besides, the question of prostitutes will give rise to many serious problems here….



Including getting soldiers drunk!

Lenin 160, To: G. F. FYODOROV

August 9, 1918

Comrade Fyodorov,


It is obvious that a whiteguard insurrection is being prepared in Nizhni. You must strain every effort, appoint three men with dictatorial powers (yourself, Markin and one other), organise immediately mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes who are making drunkards of the soldiers, former officers and the like.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/aug/09gff.htm

[robbo203]

Sex and Marriage

What I would like to know from Messrs West and Queervanguard is what is their attitude is towards gay marriages which have recently been formalised and legalised in a number of countries. Personally I'm all for it; its one in the eye for homophobes everywhere. But these two individuals have asserted repeatedly that the SPGB was completely remiss in not including the slogan "abolish the familiy" in their party political broadcast on TV.

What, then, do they say to a gay couple who would like to marry and formalise their relationship by constituting themselves as a familiy unit bound together by affinal ties? Is this a good thing in their view or not and ,if it is, how do they square it with their (frankly untenable) idea that the family per se - not just the patriarchal monogamous bourgeois form of family - would disappear in socialism?