Is this roughly what a dictatorship of the proletariat would look like?

[Red Star Rising]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/23/greece-solidarity-movement-cooperatives-syriza

[Diirez]

Well this certainly disproves the capitalist myth that citizen run programs wouldn't work.

[tuwix]

But the answer to the question "Is this roughly what a dictatorship of the proletariat would look like?" is no. The DotP is IMHO just direct democracy.

[Mr. Piccolo]

Maybe. I don't think we can know for sure what the DotP will look like, but I imagine citizen-run social services will be a big part of it. Most importantly, though, all formerly capitalist-own firms will be under democratic worker control. This is, in my opinion, the most crucial aspect of the DotP.

[ckaihatsu]

Yeah, what the article shows is how people can better organize to live hand-to-mouth -- necessary but not exactly impressive.

Think bigger. How *should* the world's productivity be organized, and for what outputs (to what ends) -- ?

[Tim Cornelis]

No, that's how a proletarian party should be organised. A centrist strategy that was so fruitful in developing mass socialist movements.

[Red Star Rising]

Of course there would be more to it than that, but would citizen run services be one of the primary functions? I only ask because win the case of greece we might have a new example to point to as opposed to mass state-control.

[Q]

No, that's how a proletarian party should be organised. A centrist strategy that was so fruitful in developing mass socialist movements.
This. It looks like SYRIZA is organising itself into a party-movement out of necessity (as opposed to programmatic considerations), but given the dire state Greek society is in today, it could only blossom further.

From the article:

As well as helping people in difficulty, Giovanopoulos said, Greece’s solidarity movement was fostering “almost a different sense of what politics should be – a politics from the bottom up, that starts with real people’s needs. It’s a practical critique of the empty, top-down, representational politics our traditional parties practise. It’s kind of a whole new model, actually. And it’s working.”
[...]
“If people don’t participate, we will be lost as a country. This is practice, not theory, a new social ideology, a new paradigm – the opposite of the old passive, dependent, consumerist, individualist model. And the solidarity projects we have now are its incubators.”
[...]
“One family, there are six people surviving on the grandmother’s pension of €400 a month,” said Mavronikolas. “Another, they’ve lived without running water for two months. We help them, yes, but now they are also involved in our campaign, helping others. People have become activated in this crisis. They are less isolated.”
[...]
“All these projects, it’s very important to me, are not just helping people who need it, but they represent almost the start of a new kind of society,” Katerini said. “They are run as direct democracies, with no hierarchy. They are about people taking responsibility for their lives, putting their skills to use, becoming productive again.”
A movement that is both politicised and seeks to activate people, organise them and give them a sense of purpose. If other left parties in Europe would take lessons from this and try to emulate it, undoubtedly on a much higher standard, it could revive the working class as a purposive class throughout the continent :)

[ckaihatsu]

Of course there would be more to it than that, but would citizen run services be one of the primary functions? I only ask because win the case of greece we might have a new example to point to as opposed to mass state-control.


Dude -- or whoever you are -- look: They're saying that they don't even have their own politics -- they're merely *rebuffing* the politics of the status quo by turning to a kind of rudimentary collective self-reliance:





The clinics in turn are part of a far larger and avowedly political movement of well over 400 citizen-run groups – food solidarity centres, social kitchens, cooperatives, “without middlemen” distribution networks for fresh produce, legal aid hubs, education classes – that has emerged in response to the near-collapse of Greece’s welfare state, and has more than doubled in size in the past three years.

“Because in the end, you know,” said Christos Giovanopoulos in the scruffy, poster-strewn seventh-floor central Athens offices of Solidarity for All, which provides logistical and administrative support to the movement, “politics comes down to individual people’s stories. Does this family have enough to eat? Has this child got the right book he needs for school? Are this couple about to be evicted?”

As well as helping people in difficulty, Giovanopoulos said, Greece’s solidarity movement was fostering “almost a different sense of what politics should be – a politics from the bottom up, that starts with real people’s needs. It’s a practical critique of the empty, top-down, representational politics our traditional parties practise. It’s kind of a whole new model, actually. And it’s working.”


And here it's noted that they're obviously still stuck in conventional market relations, so nothing about the intractability of private ownership or the euro currency has been addressed or superseded:





The local “without middlemen” market, one of 30-odd to have sprouted in Athens and several hundred around Greece, where farmers sell their produce for 25% more than they would get from the supermarkets and consumers pay 25% less, takes place only once a month, and the group wanted to set up a small neighbourhood grocery offering similarly good value, high quality foodstuffs directly from small producers.

Ninety per cent of the products the store sold were “without middlemen”, Katerini said, and about 60% were significantly cheaper than in the supermarket. Several come from other solidarity projects – the store’s soap, for example, is made by a collective of 10 unemployed people in Galatsi.

“All these projects, it’s very important to me, are not just helping people who need it, but they represent almost the start of a new kind of society,” Katerini said. “They are run as direct democracies, with no hierarchy. They are about people taking responsibility for their lives, putting their skills to use, becoming productive again.”

[Red Star Rising]

Dude -- or whoever you are -- look: They're saying that they don't even have their own politics -- they're merely *rebuffing* the politics of the status quo by turning to a kind of rudimentary collective self-reliance:

I said "Is this roughly what a dictatorship of the proletariat would look like?" Not is this what it actually is. Of course it is not an example of how a dotp would genuinely operate, but on the surface it can be a good example to point to for how a local anti-capitalist movement would be organised. I swear, some people on Revleft are so overwhelmed by their own pedantry that they won't ever be satisfied with anything that isn't absolutely by the book.

SYRIZA's work here has drawn attention to the crimes of capitalism and the importance of a movement against it both in Greece and the rest of Europe, how about we just focus on that positive rather than poking holes in giving basic necessities to those who need it at a time of political turbulence.

[RedKobra]

Its kinda funny (in a desperately tragic way) that this is almost exactly what Cameron's Big Society was supposed to look like. The state moving aside so charity could move in. In my mind the DoTP starts with the wholesale appropriation of the means of production and whatever private wealth we can stop disappearing abroad. Soup kitchens, aren't really what I had in mind.

[ckaihatsu]

I said "Is this roughly what a dictatorship of the proletariat would look like?" Not is this what it actually is. Of course it is not an example of how a dotp would genuinely operate, but on the surface it can be a good example to point to for how a local anti-capitalist movement would be organised. I swear, some people on Revleft are so overwhelmed by their own pedantry that they won't ever be satisfied with anything that isn't absolutely by the book.


What is it about my pedantry that you find to be lacking -- ? (grin)

You started the thread with this...





Is this roughly what a dictatorship of the proletariat would look like?


...And then basically *repeated* the question a little while later:





Of course there would be more to it than that, but would citizen run services be one of the primary functions? I only ask because win the case of greece we might have a new example to point to as opposed to mass state-control.


I happen to *agree* with most of this, of yours:





SYRIZA's work here has drawn attention to the crimes of capitalism and the importance of a movement against it both in Greece and the rest of Europe, how about we just focus on that positive rather than poking holes in giving basic necessities to those who need it at a time of political turbulence.


But I have to point out that I never 'poked holes' in the day-to-day work that people are doing on the ground, out of necessity:





Yeah, what the article shows is how people can better organize to live hand-to-mouth -- necessary but not exactly impressive.

Think bigger. How *should* the world's productivity be organized, and for what outputs (to what ends) -- ?





Dude -- or whoever you are -- look: They're saying that they don't even have their own politics -- they're merely *rebuffing* the politics of the status quo by turning to a kind of rudimentary collective self-reliance:




And here it's noted that they're obviously still stuck in conventional market relations, so nothing about the intractability of private ownership or the euro currency has been addressed or superseded:


---





[H]ow about we just focus on that positive rather than poking holes in giving basic necessities to those who need it at a time of political turbulence.


It's not *enough* to 'just focus on that positive' because all that's being done is finding a way to exist *outside* of the system -- politically speaking it's an elaborate kind of *escapism*, and is no challenge to the bourgeois status quo. This kind of 'grassroots' subsistence organizing is *very* glorified, as in consumer culture, for that reason -- it can be safely showcased as 'radical' and 'edgy' while those in privileged positions continue to laugh and sleep soundly at night.