Yehuda Stern

Cheerss. Yeah I've found some decent stuff but I thought you might know of some other, less easily found articles, being from Israel and all...

Hey man do you have any good links about Hamas's role in repressing trade unions and workers struggle in Palestine?

They see socialism as some kind of idea that you only have to think and read about to understand, as opposed to a real movement going on in the real world. They measure socialism by the amount of Kapital reading clubs there are (see Robbo's posts in the thread, he literally said this), while Marxists measure socialism by class-struggle. Workers taking over means of production and overthrowing the capitalists is socialism to us. Starting a Kapital reading club is socialism to them.

This is the essence of petty-bourgeois socialism; don't dare act, just think. And when the time does come to act, do so in service of the bourgeoisie.

Luckily the petty-bourgeois impossibilist tendency is as dead today as it has been throughout the whole of its existence.

Yeah they're an off-shoot from the SPGB and are part of the WSM. I had never heard of them before and I wish I could go back to when I hadn't. These people are clearly insane.

If you have the stomach for debating them any further you could bring up the not so minor difference between merely "supporting socialism" and being a class-conscious communist. Where do you draw the line? Does the majority simply have to "support" socialism superficially, or do they have to start "Kapital reading clubs" and be well-versed in Marxist theory before they've proven themselves? If it's the latter, then at what level of "theoretical knowledge" is one fit to be a real supporter of socialism? When they've read Kapital and have written a conspectus of it as well?

Clinically insane.

I decided to read a little more into the party Robbo and Hydro are affiliated with and found some truly amazing stuff. Here are some gems:

The WSPUS maintains that the revolution must be carried out by a willing majority organized without leaders, capturing the state by means of delegates elected solely to carry out the wishes of the majority to destroy the state by replacing it immediately with democratic control of the means of production across the entire country, and indeed the entire planet.

Unlike much of the left, it does not take sides in wars, e.g. not calling for a victory for the Vietnamese against America.

They condemn other parties that call themselves socialist as actually capitalist and reformist. For instance, they criticize the Socialist Party USA for policies such as advocating full employment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_S..._United_States

Crazy stuff, but it explains a lot given their posts on here.

Just out of curiosity: how old are you?

"The idea that a revolution must have majority support before it can be implemented ultimately sends him in a reformist direction." That depends on how such support is gained, but your blanket rejection of Marx's dictum re. the class emancipating itself illustrates your attempt to con the masses into taking power, especially if they aren't well-organized beforehand.

The positions of Robbo are exactly those of Kautsky to which Lenin replied in his article The Proletarian Revolution And The Renegade Kautsky, for example:

"The argument that Marx in the seventies allowed for the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism in England and America[1] is completely fallacious, or, to put it bluntly, dishonest in that it is juggling with quotations and references. Firstly, Marx regarded it as an exception even then. Secondly, in those days monopoly capitalism, i.e., imperialism, did not exist. Thirdly, in England and America there was no militarist clique then—as there is now—serving as the chief apparatus of the bourgeois state machine."

Check out how Lenin destroys them if you haven't already: http://www.marxists.org/archive/leni...918/oct/10.htm

And to think that over half a century has passed and people like Robbo are still repeating that reactionary crap.

Hey, have you or your group worked with AATW before? We had someone from AATW come to speak at our uni (a small meeting, student politics isn't as popular as it used to be ) a while back. It must be hard being an anti-Zionist in Israel, or at least from what I've heard.

I saw that members like TAT and Debora, whose posts are either non-political or utter trash, have the highest reputation points and as a result the most "bars". Therefore I concluded that the entire concept is a joke here so I didn't want the bars to show up.

I believe you can still give reputation points though, I have received some (JR's for example, with his incomprehensible comments), I think you just have the click on the reputation link to give it.