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How would stopping the bailouts and austerity to show how capitalism is unsustainable without them not transitional? You all say that anything not with the literal verbage of "Revolution now, overthrow the government" is not worth supporting. You think that people will spring up when you communist messiahs come around and enlighten them about how there needs to be a revolution, which is a pipe dream i've had myself on several occasions, however people who actually organize these things and participate in demonstrations don't respond so well when you say that "your struggle isn't worth fighting for because capitalism can survive, so get over it."
For student organizing in california, join this group!
http://www.revleft.com/vb/group.php?groupid=1036
http://socialistorganizer.org/
"[I]t’s hard to keep potent historical truths bottled up forever. New data repositories are uncovered. New, less ideological, generations of historians grow up. In the late 1980s and before, Ann Druyan and I would routinely smuggle copies of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution into the USSR—so our colleagues could know a little about their own political beginnings.”
--Carl Sagan
For fuck's sake Broody, learn who you're shouting at. The Idler is not a Left Comm, he's an Impossiblist. I may consider The Idler a comrade and you as a counter-revolutionary tool, and think that Left Comms and Impossiblists are all part of some amorphous but intransigent 'Ultra-Left', but honestly, to The Idler, you (as a Trot) and me (as a Left Comm) are both 'Leninists'. He really really isn't a Left Comm.
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."
He has an ultra left sectarian position which is similar to what you guys say, so in this situation I couldn't really tell.
Labels are bad though; you have that right.
For student organizing in california, join this group!
http://www.revleft.com/vb/group.php?groupid=1036
http://socialistorganizer.org/
"[I]t’s hard to keep potent historical truths bottled up forever. New data repositories are uncovered. New, less ideological, generations of historians grow up. In the late 1980s and before, Ann Druyan and I would routinely smuggle copies of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution into the USSR—so our colleagues could know a little about their own political beginnings.”
--Carl Sagan
If by "established left" you mean the direct action left, the mass strike left, the council/assembly left, etc., along with the frontist left and coalitionist left, then I'm very tempted to agree with you.
"A new centrist project does not have to repeat these mistakes. Nobody in this topic is advocating a carbon copy of the Second International (which again was only partly centrist)." (Tjis, class-struggle anarchist)
"A centrist strategy is based on patience, and building a movement or party or party-movement through deploying various instruments, which I think should include: workplace organising, housing struggles [...] and social services [...] and a range of other activities such as sports and culture. These are recruitment and retention tools that allow for a platform for political education." (Tim Cornelis, left-communist)
What is your take on the influence of the voluminous Trotskyist sects who do not fit these criteria? Many Trotskyist groups are in fact quite visible and vocal, although they vary in their involvement in unions/strikes. It is impressive the number of students for instance that cycle through their ranks to emerge burnt out on the other end.
I think by many standards they are fairly considered part of the "established left" but the main point made by TB seems quite applicable - Trotskyists have at best an uneven track-record of contributing positively to contemporary (or last 20 year) leftist movements at least in the global north.
百花齐放
-----------------------------
la luz
de un Rojo Amanecer
anuncia ya
la vida que vendrá.
-Quilapayun
^^^ Comrade, those sects do fit into those criteria. The "transitional" sects vacillate between the mass strike left and the frontist left. I've stressed before and again the need for a revival of independent but institutional approach to class organization, updating the profoundly true and important lessons of the original Socialist ("Second") International to today's circumstances.
"A new centrist project does not have to repeat these mistakes. Nobody in this topic is advocating a carbon copy of the Second International (which again was only partly centrist)." (Tjis, class-struggle anarchist)
"A centrist strategy is based on patience, and building a movement or party or party-movement through deploying various instruments, which I think should include: workplace organising, housing struggles [...] and social services [...] and a range of other activities such as sports and culture. These are recruitment and retention tools that allow for a platform for political education." (Tim Cornelis, left-communist)
Is that the same Second International that cheerfully sent its members to die in the trenches, or a different Second International? Just, seems to me that any lessons such an institution has for today are of a primarily cautionary nature, rather than a matter of unearthing any "profound truths".
That's certainly an interesting take on history. The Second International brought us the 8-hour work day and the International Workers Day and when the first world war broke out it dissolved thanks to the disagreements amongst members towards the war. Yes, some of the members advocated nationalist participation in the war but many held the internationalist perspective including a certain dead russian who helped lead a revolution on the basis of putting a stop to the war altogether. Certainly we should learn from the mistakes of the organisation as well as the positive triumphs whilst always being aware that these happened in a differing context and avoiding nostalgia-goggles.
Modern democracy is nothing but the freedom to preach whatever is to the advantage of the bourgeoisie - Lenin
I disagree that the collapse of the SI in the face of European war was in some way its redemption, Rather, I think that it represent history's most damning critique of the entire social democratic movement. It showed that the SI wasn't merely a working class organisation with bad leadership (that would certainly have allowed for disagreements about orientation towards the war, and potentially even splits, but not the sort of catastrophic rupture we actually saw), but was a fully-fledged participant in capitalism, a structure by which workers were integrated into the social machinery of capital. When workers attempted to seriously resist that machinery, not merely to demand better terms within it but to actually disrupt it on a continental scale, it was shattered by its own contradictions
Workers are already integrated into the social machinary of capital by virtue of being the proletariat. It's pure fiction to presume that workers can simply extract themselves from capitalism whilst capitalism still exists. This is why factory-takeover movements like those in Greece and Argentina today, whilst fantastic evidence of the power of workers to organise themselves without bosses and the state, are nevertheless participants in capitalism.
I would also agree with you that the idea that its collapse being 'redeeming' as you put it is wrong and it wasn't my intention to convey that but I would say that it revealed the weaknesses of the tactics the SI employed and we can learn from that. By excluding trade unions, the SI limited themselves to struggle in the (capitalist) political spectrum. A mistake if there ever was one and, as you identified, lead to aspects of its leadership's disconnect from working class movements in opposition to the war. Indeed it's a lesson that limiting yourself to parliamentary action is detrimental no matter what huge gains can be achieved for the working class through agitation in these avenues (but not a lesson in abandoning parliamentary agitation altogether).
Modern democracy is nothing but the freedom to preach whatever is to the advantage of the bourgeoisie - Lenin
Some decent results for TUSC so far
TUSC candidate for Mayor of Doncaster secured 1,916 votes (3.1%) beating the LibDems.
Other results over 3.5%
[FONT=Arial]Derbyshire County Council [/FONT][FONT=Arial]Bolsover North [/FONT][FONT=Arial]247 (9.4%)[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Gloucestershire County Council [/FONT][FONT=Arial]Hesters Way & Springbank [/FONT][FONT=Arial]155 (8.1%)[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Leicestershire County Council [/FONT][FONT=Arial]Loughborough East [/FONT][FONT=Arial]170 (7.0%)[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Gloucestershire County Council [/FONT][FONT=Arial]Barton & Tredworth [/FONT][FONT=Arial]177 (6.7%)[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Cumbria County Council [/FONT][FONT=Arial]Upperby [/FONT][FONT=Arial]84 (6.1%)[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Lincolnshire County Council [/FONT][FONT=Arial]Lincoln East [/FONT][FONT=Arial]76 (5.3%)[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Hertfordshire County Council [/FONT][FONT=Arial]Shephall [/FONT][FONT=Arial]126 (5.1%)[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Cambridgeshire County Council [/FONT][FONT=Arial]Romsey [/FONT][FONT=Arial]118 (5.0%)[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Derbyshire County Council [/FONT][FONT=Arial]Bolsover South [/FONT][FONT=Arial]134 (4.8%)[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Leicestershire County Council [/FONT][FONT=Arial]Burbage Castle [/FONT][FONT=Arial]248 (4.7%)[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Lincolnshire County Council [/FONT][FONT=Arial]Lincoln West [/FONT][FONT=Arial]95 (4.3%)[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Derbyshire County Council [/FONT][FONT=Arial]Shirebrook & Pleasley [/FONT][FONT=Arial]87 (4.0%)[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Hertfordshire County Council [/FONT][FONT=Arial]Broadwater [/FONT][FONT=Arial]108 (3.9%)[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Essex County Council [/FONT][FONT=Arial]Harlow West [/FONT][FONT=Arial]270 (3.5%)[/FONT]
That's exactly the point, though: the worker as worker is necessarily integrated into capital, that's what defines them, so authentic communist practice has to mean the disintegrating of the worker from capital. That doesn't mean somehow stepping outside of capitalism anymore than it means affirming it, but rather means disrupting the reproduction of the capitalist social relation. The Second International, in contrast, actively reproduced and reaffirmed that integration, and so played an ultimately conservative role.
I don't think a merely strategic critique is sufficient to comprehend the implosion of the Second International, or its significance. Our critique has to be historical, means looking not just at the choices made by this-or-that leadership, but the social forces which their choices expressed. We have to understood the role that the Second International played in international capitalism pre-1914, the extent to which it challenged it and the extent to which it, reproduced it. To say "oh, they did that wrong" is to suppose all sorts of things about their nature of their activity, not least that they were in any position to act differently, none of which can be taken for granted.
The past, I think, does not offer us the sort of lessons you want to derive from it. There are no general mechanisms at work in history, and no way to derive the nature of such mechanisms from past events. The processes at work are too complex, the events too particular, to imagine even for argument's sake that we were running some sort of contrived experiment from which we can infer any general rules. The only knowledge of the future we can derive from the past with any weight to it, and that scarce enough, are trajectories, an idea of the direction in which things are moving, and it's foolishness to think that this movement is so stable or coherent as to permit us any sort of grand strategy.
I grant that most Trotskyist groups haven't embraced the approach of 2nd international groups. But I think that is a different thing from embracing the shortcomings you list, right? A group could not follow the approaches of the 2nd international but also be neither frontist nor "part of the established left".
I think the issue isn't so neatly dichotomous. Do you think that is an accurate characterization of trotskyist groups as they operate today? Some are frontist in part, sure, but I don't think most would characterize themselves as focusing on the mass strike as their primary means of overthrowing capitalism. Even the groups that employ fronts really shouldn't IMO be characterized as "frontist" I think in the traditional sense because they see the fronst they are involved in as one of many strategies (unlike, say, the American WWP whose entirely raison d'etre is based on a front).
百花齐放
-----------------------------
la luz
de un Rojo Amanecer
anuncia ya
la vida que vendrá.
-Quilapayun
A Left trade unionist break from Labour is very very welcome. Good on all involved.
So, because Stalinists think the Soviet Union wasn't capitalist, and you think the Soviet Union wasn't capitalist, you're a Stalinist, is that what you're saying?
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."
I don't see how supporting the TUSC necessarily implies anything about your wider socialist ideas. You're ultimately just trying to get working class trade unionists into local government, even if that goal in itself seems like an almost impossible struggle nowadays.
Arguing that their "transitional demands" for nationalising the height of the economy is "reformist" or even "counter-revolutionary" seems to me an exceptionally moronic pursuit, and a complete waste of time to boot. There is no possible way in which increasing the success of the TUSC is incompatible with the growth of any other left movement (which may have different views to it.)
for freedom and peace
Unless you really do see the TUSC as part of the capitalist apparatus. In which case, strengthening it is stupid.
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."
How is it part of the capitalist apparatus? (unless you mean in the trivial sense that we all are)
for freedom and peace
No, in the sense that seeks to manage capitalism rather than destroy it. Many of us consider Trotskyists and Stalinists as part of the left of capital. It isn't just an insult, it's a political evaluation of their theory and practice.
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."
In the sense that nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy is managing capital rather than smashing it?
for freedom and peace
