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Reading "Syndicalism" by William Z. Foster and Earl C. Ford, along with "Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice" by Rudolf Rocker are good starting points.
The first book is a good case of early syndicalism, influenced by the CGT in France and the IWW in the US, and is quite anti-social democracy.
The second book is better and more-detailed. It was written during the Spanish Civil War, when the anarcho-syndicalist CNT-FAI held major strongholds in Spain (see: Anarchist Catalonia). They were very influential. The book makes a lot of cases against Marxist-Leninist (and in general, Communist) parties.
Both are relatively short reads and easily accessible.
I saw millions of people working.
Not for themselves but for someone else.
I saw millions of people doing.
Not what they themselves want to do.
But what someone else wants them to do.
- One-Eyed God Prophecy
That's bollocks, because Trotsky is writing in order to "come clean". His writings on Stalin come from the same position. Left Communists criticize USSR from ortodox Marxist position from position of Marx's Capital, because USSR was a capitalist society.
I know, my comment was intended as an ironic observation that the comparison is defective, because the relationship between Trotsky and Makhno and that between left-coms and the USSR is of an entirely different sort. Left-coms had never ordered the wholesale butcher of Soviet Bolsheviks, so they lack the need to rationalise their behaviour through polemics, and are free to engage with the USSR on a political rather than personal level. As Kontrra says, Trotsky was writing, to whatever extent, self-apologism; Bordiga or Pannekoek were not.
And that subject we should leave for some other thread.(was the USSR capitalist or not)
But just as a side-note,didnt Bordiga himself always considered himself a Leninist?If left-communists considered Stalins USSR to be capitalist,do they have the same opinion about the USSR before Stalin?
Last edited by Omsk; 29th December 2011 at 21:15.
It could hardly go backwards.
Left Communists criticize Soviet Union right from the begining. For example, left opposition in Bolshevik party. Even other communists such as Rosa Luxemburg did that. They criticize certain aspects of Lenin's Soviet Union and with Stalin's reforms they go on rampage.
The Leninist Soviet Union was built on ideas which you support.So what do you have against it other than the NEP,Brest-Litovsk?You say you are against SiOC,which was introduced by Stalin in 1924,and finished by Bukharin.(Who you personally support???)
Your opinions are a bit incoherent.
Being built on the right "ideas" doesn't mean that it was built on the right material basis, and, if we're going to go around pretending to Marxists, that's a tiny bit more important.
This.
Aslo, the fact that something is build on right "ideas" doesn't mean that realisation is according to these ideas.
Regarding Bukharin, I don't support him but his ideas. He was internationalist communist until Brest-Litovski and later he left his positions and created Marxism-Leninism. He also made good ciritque of early USSR. Alexandra Kollontai and her Workers Opposition also.
@Kontra, what's your critique of Goldman's book?
Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.-Leon Trotsky
A revolution without dancing is not worth having.-Emma Goldman
The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall. -Che Guevara
The wise thing to do is simply to skip the bosh and twaddle and vulgarity and untruth, and get the benefit out of the rest. -Teddy Roosevelt
I dont know why are you so hostile,but you should know that English is not my first language,and that sometimes i cant express myself in the best possible way while writting in English,and you dont have to understand everything literally.The vanguard party,democratic centralism,dictatorship of the proleteriat,were followed in the USSR while Lenin was one of the leading figures.
During the USSR until Stalin,those ideas and plans were realised.
Well,he didnt follow his ideas.And later,he made a complete turn.And if you are not a Bukharinist while supporting Bukharins ideas,why are some people automatically called Stalinists on this board by non-Marxist Leninists if they support some of Stalins ideas while not supporting the man himself?
What plans? Creation of capitalism? Reduction of workers rights? Sending workers to labour camps? Stakhanovists? Market? Commodity production? Revisionism of Marxism? Banning political economy from universities because students who read Capital recoqnised capitalism in USSR? Famine? I can go forever.
Marxism-Leninism has only one point - to defend every shit Stalin did. I don't defend Bukharin. I believe he ended up his life as a wanker. Same goes to Iron Felix. Still, I support both of them before 1918 and their actions and ideas. Why? Because they were internationalists!
Well dont be so rude and disrespectful toward other tendencies,dont be so blunt.
You give people the right to say something like:" Left Communism is a pure fantasy and Left Communists wont ever actually succede in anything because they expect too much."
You mentioned defending.I said supporting.
What an evading manouver.
And btw,i said,"the USSR until Stalin consolidated his role as the leader.
And i support Stalins actions during the GPW.Why?Because he lead the country successfully.And made a lot of right decisions.
This has nothing to do with language, and everything to do with theory. Plans, principles and good intentions do not make a mode of production, and that includes the points you list. So the Bolsheviks self-conceptualised as a vanguard party? Meaningless until they fulfilled that historical function! So they had (or claimed to have) a system of democratic centralism? So can any petty bourgeois Green Party! So they upheld the principle of dictatorship? Mere rhetoric when their concrete political activity worked to deny it!
Communism is not a program, it is not a principle, it's not even an ideal; it is, as the grand old man himself said, "the real movement which abolishes the present state of things". If the Bolsheviks did not act as the agents of that movement, then their program, however sincere, is not and could not be anything but Blanquism by another name.
But how can you say they were not "agents" of that movement?When they were,they completely changed Russia and a good portion of Eurasia.And if you cant accept that they changed it (I wont be specific) ,for the betterment of workers and people generally,than i really dont know how can we even discuss over this matter.
So you can stop discussing. Many of us see the years 1921*-1989 as being no better than any of the years since 1989 or any of the years before 1917. If that means you don't want to talk to us, that's fine.
*I'm not going to claim that 1921 is the only possible date of counter-revolutionary victory in the Soviet Republic but I'm damned sure that after 1921 if not before the counter-revolution was gaining the upper hand. There were healthy groups in the Bolshevik party up until 1921 for sure (though they were small minorities and they were purged after the banning of fractions, and the more-or-less healthy reactions outside of the party were crushed by the Red Army even before 1921 sometimes), and there were healthy currents in the CI after 1921; and even Trotsky had some valid criticisms, and the Trotskyists were purged after 1924, though I see Trotskyism as the last, the weakest and most confused - in other words the least healthy - of those reactions to the degeneration of the revolution.
In short, if you want to claim the revolution was lost in 1918, or 1919, or 1920, I'm not going to argue too much. But anyone who claims that the Russian revolution was healthy after 1921 (limping along as it did until perhaps 1924), or the world revolution after 1926 (and it dies in 1927), is a supporter of the counter-revolution. 'In my opinion'.
Critique of the Gotha Programme, Pt IV: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm
No War but the Class War
Destroy All Nations
Lucius Accius (170 BC - 86 BC): "A man whose life has been dishonorable is not entitled to escape disgrace in death."
Yay, we're getting somewhere.This is what I mean lol.
[FONT=Trebuchet MS]Politics For Dummies (Brainwashed Capitalist Edition)[/FONT]
[FONT=Trebuchet MS]Socialism: any country providing free healthcare for its citizens.[/FONT] [FONT=Trebuchet MS]
Communism: a dictatorship providing free healthcare for its citizens.[/FONT] [FONT=Trebuchet MS]
Anarchism: a system involving no government, invented by the Sex Pistols.[/FONT]
Political compass:
Social: -957 million
Economic: -55 billion
There were about four posts with texts for you to read, and the rest is a tendency war about to boil over. These threads rarely get three pages long without someone calling someone else a revisionist or a reactionary. You probably should have made separate topics.Yay, we're getting somewhere.
Kontrrazvedka, saying a book is utter bullshit does not constitute an argument, nor is it relevant, as the OP was requesting books from both sides of the brawl and not what ones you like and don't.
First, before I recommend more sources to this guy, I will have to address the tendency arguments.
Kontrrazvedka, I'd like to point out that in order to make a valid argument, you MUST give sources and examples.
You cannot just make claims without evidence, and expect people to take you seriously. Revisionism? Besides the post-Stalin era, where was there revisionism of Marxism? And when specifically did they ban "Capital" from Universities? In the USSR, the wage structure was substantially different than what you would see in an average capitalist society.
"The new class of state managers, or "red directors" of factories, who have replaced the former capitalist owners, are mostly Communists and former workers. But by the very nature of their position they must look at industrial life from a rather different angle from that of the workers. Although they make no personal profit out of the enterprises which they manage, they are supposed to turn in a profit for the state."
Chamberlin, William Henry. Soviet Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930, p. 174
You can call that capitalism if you are honestly that desperate to just implement a communist society without taking into consideration the material conditions of class society. I call that socialism.
Commodity production will exist in socialism. The PROFIT motive will exist in socialism. It's just that in socialism, society as a whole benefits from the profit, and not the bourgeoisie.
And famine, for heaven's sakes, when are you left-coms, lib-coms, and bourgeois democrats going to come up with EVIDENCE that the famine was caused by the STATE? And which specific famine are you talking about? Most of the famine that happened in the east was due to poor weather, the refusal of the Kulaks to cultivate the soil, or wrong reports to the central committee. Those miscalculations could be solved by using technology and computers.
To the OP:
If you are interested in some M-L anti-revisionist literature, here it is.
"A Wrong Conception of the Dialectical Dying Off of Commodity-Money Relations in Socialism or a Concealed Theory of Market Socialism"
http://revolutionarydemocracy.org/Rdv3n2/inter.htm
"The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism - V.I. Lenin"
http://www.marxists.org/archive/leni...13/mar/x01.htm
"The Foundations of Leninism - J.V. Stalin"
http://marxists.org/reference/archiv...nism/index.htm
"Socialism: Utopian and Scientific - F. Engels"
http://marxists.org/archive/marx/wor...utop/index.htm
Last edited by Comrade Hill; 30th December 2011 at 09:30.
As I think you're trying to be reasonable about this I'm going to extend to you the same courtesy.
You have to realise that for Marxists who are not Leninists, even those from tendencies that supported the October Revolution (such as the Left Communists), Lenin was a revisionist of Marxism; his notion that the dictatorship of the proletariat was the same as the lower stage of Communism and that both could be equated with socialism were a revision of Marxism; the idea that communism was 'the soviet system plus electrification' was a revision of Marxism; his fusion of party and state was a revision of Marxism that led to the massacre of Kronstadt, on the anniversary of the Paris Commune no less - Lenin became Thiers, leader of a country that massacred its own revolutionary workers; his idea that 'socialisation' could occurr in Russia without the world revolution was a revision of Marxism; his institution of the NEP was a revision of Marxism; his call for a 'democratic republic of the workers and peasants' was a revision of Marxism.
Now, some of these revisions were due to trying to apply Marxist method in a situation unseen by Marx - the proletarait overthrowing the state in a large, majority peasant country but the revolution failing to spread. But we - non-Leninist Marxists - argue the majority of these revisions could be argued to be mistakes - massive tragic mistakes committed in a time of turmoil while the way ahead was not clear - and this is what the Left Communists tend to argue. But the point about mistakes is that one makes them once and never again, one does not hold up the mistakes as a great new policy.
Of course the greatest rivisionism of Marxism was by Stalin with the theory of 'socialism in one country'. This seals the counter-revolution in the eyes of Left Communists; there is no way back from the adoption by the CI of 'socialism in one country' in 1927. Of course, the Bolsheviks had already lost the other Marxists, for instance the SPGB, long before that. Even the Trotskyists, who generally are regarded by Left Communists as far too tied to the Soviet state, regard 'socialism in one country' as a betrayal of Marxism.
On to some of your assertions, there will be no 'profit motive' in socialism if your understanding of socialism is a Marxist one; Marx does not distinguish between socialism and communism, but Lenin does (and he doesn't distinguish between the lower phase of communism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, which Marx does). So if you argue there will be 'profit' and 'commodities' under socialism, you aren't arguing as a Marxist, because 'profit' and 'commodities' are defining characteristics of capitalism. Capitalism is not socialism and vice versa. If you think that the state will control the economy as a giant industrial combine, then you are arguing for state capitalism, as Engels outlines in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, chapter 3: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx...-utop/ch03.htm (1880) and Wilhelm Liebknecht argues in 1896 that 'state socialism' is really state capitalism - http://www.marxists.org/archive/lieb...r-congress.htm - so again, we have here a problem of Leninst revisionism of Marxism. Yes, we do refer to the Soviet Union as capitalism, as the working class in the USSR had their labour expropriated by a capitalist combine - the state capitalist USSR itself. It makes no difference if control of the combine is entrusted to a bank, a board or the state - if the working class is working for its labour to be expropriated it's capitalism, not socialism. That is a fundamental difference between Leninist and non-Leninist interpretations of Marxism, in which Lenin quite obviously used the word 'socialism' in a manner different to Marx, whereas Left Comms, SPGBers, Luxemburgists and other non-Leninist Marxists use 'socialism' in the same way Marx and Engels did.
Last edited by Blake's Baby; 30th December 2011 at 13:55.
Critique of the Gotha Programme, Pt IV: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm
No War but the Class War
Destroy All Nations
Lucius Accius (170 BC - 86 BC): "A man whose life has been dishonorable is not entitled to escape disgrace in death."
