Blake's Baby

So according to you, tootbrushes, etc., are common property? In any case, is personal property as exists in a market economy really a characteristic of capitalism?

In communism there is property also. Personal property. But the means of production are owned in common. The same for market socialism. But rather than distribution being based on sharing between producers and consumers (as in communism), it is based on exchanging between producers and consumers.

In a thread, regarding market socialism, you said: " expropriation of property, the smashing of capitalism and the state, worldwide, by the working class, and the reorganisation of the whole of human society."

But market socialism does not contradict any of these points. It aims at a classless society, it aims at overthrowing capitalism, it aims at expropriating private property, etc.

I'll get back to you in Xinjiang thread. Would do it it now but I think in order to formulate what I mean clearly I need to be less hungover. heh. Interesting discussion none the less.

Derogatory, i meant.

Oh, the calling of left communists "kids" in the thread on Karl Liebknecht wasn't meant do be deragoty or anything in that way. Sometimes, words and expressions sound a lot better in my head in swedish, and doesn't seem particularly smart or well placed when it comes to english...

(last bit now)

He sure was responsible for an awful lot of counter-revolutionary policies though. But I honestly believe that they (Lenin and Trotsky, at least in the early 1920s) thought that what they were doing was the best that could be done in the circumstances, which were not of their chosing.

The problem I have with both 'Marxist-Leninists' and 'Troskyists' now is that they haven't learned anything from the failures of Lenin and Trotsky - mostly because they don't admit there were any mistakes. But I think it's equally mistaken (though a whole lot more understandable!) to reject Lenin and Trotsky completely. There are lessons to be learned I think, but they're buried deep under layers of hero-worship on the one hand, and denegration on the other.

Don't throw the revolutionary baby out with the Trotskyist-Stalinist bathwater! is all I'm saying...

(here's the third bit)

He refused to let the Bolsheviks support the provisional government; because he opposed the war he wouldn't let the Bolsheviks even critically support the government after the Tsar abdicated, even though Stalin and Kamenev were manoeuvering to get Bolsheviks in the provisional government. He effectively turned down power-sharing several times because it would have committed the Bolsheviks to supporting the war, and he wouldn't do it. So I don't accept that his project was to run a capitalist state, he could have done that by takling a position in government and manouevering his way to the top from the inside, but he didn't.

(last bit coming up)