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There's no point to anything The Idler does. He's just a troll. I would ignore him.
Yep you asked 'membership of these organisations entailed attending meetings, marching in protests and paper selling/leafleting. Would my membership of the LCI and my activity within it be different in this respect?'
I'm saying there would be more social insertion and specifism in the LCI.
What's your position on anarcho-syndicalism and autonomism?
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.-Noam Chomsky
Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters.-Rosa Luxemburg
There are no formal positions on it, but LCI members are encouraged to join Plan C, which is essentially an autonomist Marxist organisation. Autonomism in particular is something that is reflected in the LCI statement of intent. In terms of anarcho-syndicalism, LCI's predecessor Collective Action were pointedly opposed (due to its mass union orientation) and gave a fairly in depth critique of SolFed's Fighting for Ourselves. The critique can be found here: A review
Well I already knew that, having read the statement of intent. My question asked what that would entail in terms of day to day membership and activity.
It seems you did not read my first post properly.
It probably depends which concentric circle in LCI you are in.
Diagnostic:
The left is a failure.
Proposed treatment:
Let's start yet another leftist organisation!
Luís Henrique
I don't think they are a leftist grouping as far as I can tell. I'd have to ask TFU though.
"I'm not interested in indulging whims from members of your faction."
Seeing as this is seen as acceptable by an admin, from here on out when I have a disagreement with someone I will be asking them to reference this. If you want an explanation of my views, too bad.
As per usual, Luis, is wrong on both counts. We're not leftists and we didn't start a new organisation, we started a faction in the AF that was essentially expelled. Also, LCI's form is fundamentally different to anything that exists on the left. I could understand and agree with the criticism if we were some mass union or party, but we're not, so it doesn't really hold in my view.
Indeed, it may not be a mass union or party, but it is yet another substitutionist organisation. Which is something more common than dust. And much more common than mass unions or parties, though quite probably much less populous.
Luís Henrique
How can a minority organisation that advocates class autonomism be substitutionist? I suggest you read the OP.
What is the alternative to forming new organisations whose content AND form is different to the existing top-down vanguardist model? Criticising a new organisation for being a new organisation is a cop-out.
Because the working-class can't be autonomous of the ruling-class, the working-class have to engage the ruling-class in hostilities and defeat the ruling-class in class struggle. Anything less is just self-aggrandising (especially from a minority organisation) abstract propagandism, and to be told this by an SPGBer is something a lot of users here might find ironic.
None of what you're saying has anything to do with autonomism. If you're going to participate in a discussion it might be wise to have some basic understanding of what's being spoken about.
Substitionism is the idea that an organisation's political activity substitutes the classes. Autonomism is the idea that the working class doesn't require participation in political organisational forms to engage in class struggle in an organised way -- that the class is the organisation and acts independently and autonomously of political formulations (i.e. the opposite of substitutionism -- see signature). That's why the statement of intent says, "The proletariat is the motor of social change and does not require being anything but itself, acting in solidarity against all forces which harass and undermine its interests."
Once again I am having to hand-hold you through terms and ideas because you're too ignorant to learn about them yourself. Instead of harking into discussions with your half-witted opinions as if you're imparting some wisdom, you might want to actually educate yourself a little bit.
Last edited by The Feral Underclass; 11th September 2014 at 21:49.
I'm interested. Is there any presence in Newcastle that you know of TFU? I've emailed the LCI via the website but thought I'd express an interest on here too
Well, the content OR the form would have to be different in that case.
But here we only have declarations of intention: we will be different, because we want to be different; and we will be different by making the exact same things that have lead the left to a state of failure.
In other words, the problem is not that our class hasn't been up to the tasks of the moment, but that it lacked a proper direction - ie, it lacked us.
In other words, there is a difference between the masses (who merely have a consciousness of antagonistic class relations), and its proposed direction (us, who have a consciousness of political direction).
And of course, we are going to be that pole of attraction. Just like every other anarchist, Trotskyist, Maoist, left-communist, whateverist organisation think they are.
In other words, the "new" organisation is the oldest, most stale kind of old, stale pseudo-Leninist response to any crisis: a proto-party, which will become, by accretion, a revolutionary party.
Which is nice and fine and pretty, but is also merely a declaration of intentions. Organisations will always have the nasty tendency to autonomise themselves from class struggle - particularly under conditions where class struggle is already weak and faltering. How does any organisation manages to avoid such fate, that is the problem, which cannot be solved by mere voluntarism.
If so, it doesn't require any organisations at all, in which case we shouldn't be creating new organisations. But of course the proletariat isn't anything except its own organisation, which precisely is the problem now, and can't be solved by the multiplication of petty bourgeois cliques who pretend to have, or to be, the solution of this organisational crisis.
Lenin would be proud! but I don't think it will work now any better than it has worked in the past.
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So, unless we can see where this "new" model is anyhow effectively new, and not a mere rehashing of flawed, defeated (top-down, vanguardist) models, the predictable future of this "new" initiative is very similar to the present of any given "anarchist" or "Marxist" organisation in the UK...
Luís Henrique
My question is what the position of this group is on the national question because I didn't notice anything on that.
"Communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution." - Karl Marx
Pale Blue Jadal
Libertarian Communist Initiative
There isn't an official position. But you know me somewhat personally and I wouldn't be part of a group that supported national liberation struggles.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Libertarian Communist Initiative
Doesn't this point towards an activity by communists as communists vis-a-vis the rest of the class? Is any such activity substitutionist?
And what, to you, is the proletariat's own organisation? If this is the main problem, what do you view as a viable strategy towards building it - and what are communists' role in this?
Last edited by Zukunftsmusik; 12th September 2014 at 21:24.
"What is necessary is to go beyond any false opposition of programme versus spontaneity. Communism is both the self-activity of the proletariat and the rigorous theoretical critique that expresses and anticipates it."
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"...Stalinism is eternally condemned to govern capital, and the ideological dynamics of Stalinism are tied to this peculiar type of capital management; it is locked within this framework, reproducing the logic of capitalism under the veil of communism. For this reason, Stalinism, and its various derivatives, cannot accurately be regarded as communist if we choose to define it in materialist terms." - Tim Cornelis
Once again form fetishism takes centre stage...
The class lacks political direction, that is correct. If communists are not providing that political direction within struggle then we are failing in our task.
The proposed direction is communism. To forward revolutionary struggle, communists must be involved in those struggles building solidarity, unity and autonomy through escalatable conflict, and giving specific communist content. That is the task of communists.
Your critique is very obviously based on a false premise when you say these things. The passage you quoted very clearly says: "... to create a pole of attraction to regroup existing pro-revolutionary militants and tendencies." We are not talking about the class!
I never had you down for an anti-organisationist. I'm afraid to say that communists require organisation and infrastructure in order to operate effectively. Organisation is necessary unfortunately.
That tendency exists because organisations that exist don't understand the purpose of their task, or operate without confidence, unity and direction. If it is the case that there is the tendency to "autonomise" from class struggle, it is because the organisation is badly organised.
No, the class doesn't require organisation, but communists do.
And the response of the left in the UK to this problem has been to distance itself, criticise the class, attempt to build mass organisations and attempt parliamentarianism, rather than organising where the class is.
Building class solidarity, autonomy and unity is the fundamental task of communists. That should be the basis of discussion. Attempting to turn any discussion about this initiative down to how this group of people choose to organise themselves is just petty and reductive.
LCI isn't the solution to organisational crisis. To attempt to imply that is to misunderstands the entire basis for its existence, since it doesn't actually consider its organisational form of any particular importance, except to themselves. For LCI to think it is "the solution" would imply it believed organisational form was its essential goal.
LCI isn't an organisational solution to any one other than communists who agree with this form. We're not interested in endless discussions about how we choose to organise or what terms we use, we are interested in how communists engage in struggle.
Luckily the future of communist organisation in the UK is not predicated on what you think.
I noticed you have only criticised our organisational form, rather than the political content of LCI's intentions. The organisational structure of LCI is absolutely irrelevant to any real discussion about how we move forward in the UK...
