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This is predicated on the (wrong) assumption that the most successful political work is done by ideologically pure small parties/sects, which is generally not the case. The greatest expressions of class war, by the working class, in recent years in Britain came in the 2011 riots and the Occupy movement, both of which drew from a far more heterogeneous political/social grouping than a trotskyist/marxist-leninist sect.
That's a problem with the sectarian nature of the left, and your desire for everyone to belong to an 'ism' wouldn't change that - people would still belong to different 'isms'. The point isn't to have as many discrete 'isms' as possible, but for people to see that whatever abc or xyz parties think, people do not need to pigeon hole themselves as this or that 'ism'. In fact, I think it's extremely unhealthy and leads to the sectarianism noted above, and the lack of organisation and cooperation amongst leftist sects.
Huh, didn't even notice the "A" there actually (tbh it looks more like a weird compass or something). Still, isn't all Communism stateless anyway? I don't really get why people get so riled up about the means of getting there. It seems ridiculous to suggest that this would happen instantly. people's collective perception of a state is not going to vanish into thin air even after a revolution. I never understood that part of Anarchism.
You mean aside from the fact that all revolutions which used the state to demolish the state...all degraded and degenerated into brutal repressive capitalist systems which were as far removed from communism as fascism is?
The shining example of course being the USSR. Just because that regime collapsed doesn't mean that the immediate removal of the state would have worked instead (not to mention the myriad of other problems that arose in the Soviet Union). That's like curing a tumour in the brain by cutting the whole head off - no anarchist society would survive with the influences of Capitalism bearing down upon it. I see no issue with a Socialist nation if its primary goal is the ultimate abolition of the state once the proper conditions exist. People don't have enough faith in their own power for an immediate transition to stateless Communism from Capitalism, Socialism should be a bridge between them that empowered the workers.
Honestly I think that Communists of all kinds should detach themselves from any cold war Socialism. History does not prove that Socialism fails it proves that totalitarian dictatorship fails - men like Stalin did not rise to power simply because there was a state (if anything the idea of a vanguard party had more to do with it).
How about every other state that used this model? DKPR, Vietnam, Cambodia, The entirety of Eastern-Europe, Everytihng that happened in the free territories, in Spain, etc.
untill now we would never actually know since Anarchist experiments that did seem to work were betrayed by the system and ideology you are defending here.
Not to mention of course that just about every system you are defending here never actually passed the stage of capitalism itself...and went immediately about to actually implement it further...so I suppose you are right,.
Yes...you say that correctly: once the proper conditions exist. And since the state is a self perpetuating entity those conditions won't ever exist. But pretty please with sugar on top...DO kindly explain what these conditions are exactly?
O so people are idiots? They can have a revolution and create a mass movement t overthrow capitalism but they are too stupid to lead and organize themselves, is that it?
They require a glorious...what exactly? To run the state for them? Since you said you don't believe in a Vanguard.
Cold war socialism? The revolution failed in 1917.
Stalin didn't fall from the sky. Stalin didn't single handedly ruin the revolution. Do NOT come up with "omg one man ruined it fof the rest of us". There were spcific circumstances that led to Stalin and the bureaucracy he represented. This would however NEVER have occured without the state apparatus and these developpments were already being discussed within the Bolshevik party in 1918-19.
DPRK, along with the USSR and all those nations were state capitalist not Socialist. and Eastern Europe were just puppets of the USSR anyway.
sigh.
Yes. And what have I been saying about trying to implement the idea of the state?
Detailed example please. Tell me why it is the perception of the state is the inherently damaging trait.
Yes. All the examples that capitalists love to cite were no more Socialist than they were Anarchist.
Workers owning the means of production. Citizens themselves having a greater participation in political discussion than any party. The abolition of money. Global revolution. The state is only a perpetuating entity when government and people are kept separate through Vanguardism.
Democracy maybe? if there is a mass revolution then there should be enough support to maintain rule through democratic discussion as well. People themselves being able to take part in a democracy until the point that they have become self-sufficient doesn't necessarily mean hat there is no government at all.
What? You seem to think that post-revolutionary Socialist states form totalitarianism anyway. So you are admitting that there was no Socialist state after 1917. If so, what evidence do you have that a Socialist state would not work?
The fact that Stalin alone didn't ruin the revolution does not mean that Socialism did.
What evidence do you need when it's contradictory? Socialism is classless therefore stateless. Or is it you're on about the revolutionary period when the proletariat creates its own organs of power that are immediately identical to the class itself and seeks to destroy the conditions of class society and the means of its reproduction? The proletariat's own organs will be in direct conflict with the state.
Why would a classless society have to be stateless? This assumes that people in government would form an elite class. This is only true of undemocratic dictatorships.
I'm guessing you're not familiar with Marx then.
States exist to maintain class society. They are an organ of class rule. There has never been a state that did not exist within class society.
There is no singular defintion of socialism. The definition of socialism you are using is socialism in terms of a transitorial state after the revolution.
Actually no. This is impossible. The state by its logical means is the minority entity to which the majority delegate their rights and souvereignity. It is in fact minority rule of either a vanguard, party or certain political faction or factions which then proceed to sway political and economic power over the majority.
While Marxists define the state as an entity of class rule in which one class dominates the others.
What we are dealing with here is two very distinct notions of the state. Both however exclude the possibility of the state as an instrument of abolishing the state. The state by its very nature will centralize power and perpetuate and in fact create a new social elite and class because it merely changes the ones who own the means of production to a small segment of the working class.
This in fact was what clealy happened in every country which claimed to be implementing state socialism.
The Anarchist idea of immediate abolition of the state and the rejection of the DotP beyond the direct convines of the revolution is absoolutely essential because the state is excluding by its very nature the majority of the masses from the decision making process.
Your notion here therefore directly contradicts the notion of the state being this instrument. Or as Bakunin put is: "Where all rule there are no more rules and therefore there is no state."
Anarchists want to replace the state with the free democratic association of the workers. Or...to quote again Bakunin: "The future social organisation must be made solely from the bottom up, by the free association or federation of workers, firstly in their unions, then in the communes, regions, nations and finally in a great federation, international and universal."
This is exactly how Anarchists define socialism.
My point exactly. These examples failed to actually implement your definition of socialism not because they didn't try but because it is a factual impossibility to use the state to do so.
What I am saying is that your definition of socialism (state socialism) will most definately by its very nature devolve to totalianiarism, state capitalism or will degenerate into deformed or whatever worker states.
Actually...yes it does. Your version of socialism (state socialism) will always utterly fail to bring about both socialism and/or communism (if you make the distinction between these two)...in fact state socialism will create Stalin and Stalinism by its ver nature.
The main criticism levelled against Leninism and Marxism way before the Russian revolution was a possibility even, this was the general warning of Anarchists of all tendencies and some left-communists as well.The development of the USSR after 1917 was simply predicted as a logical outcome of the ideological traits of state socialism.
However Marx did not claim that its immediate destruction was advisable, he instead said that it would be put in the hands of the workers in a socialist society after which point it would gradually decay. The state is only an instrument of oppression in a class-oriented society. Under socialism it (along with parties and politicians) would become more and more pointless as the revolution spreads and people become more and more self-sufficient.
Under Socialism, the state would be an instrument of allowing all workers (who would collectively control the state rather than vice versa) to have a voice in the decision making process. With the advent of the internet, this does require mass centralisation and would be much more effective. The state would become a tool of preventing totalitarianism by using modern technology to allow as many people as possible access to politics in a large government forum or something.
Yes, except that is impossible and contradicts the nature of the state. Which is what I have been trying to tell you.
Here:
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/libra...-historic-role
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/libra...sm-and-anarchy
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/libra...nist-anarchism
You must surely see the irony of you ordaining this supposed democracy upon the workers, no?
1. This is a very ahistorical understanding of the raison d'etre of the state. The state, as we know it today, was borne out of the need to protect profit-seeking merchants during the early-modern period. Ergo you had the British state providing cover for those who wished to increase urbanisation within Britain, and later for those who wanted to go and 'explore' (i.e. exploit) the natural and labouring riches of countries that, until then, had been un-discovered by capital's rent-seeking pursuits.
2. Following on from above, this really means that the state is not an appropriate tool to either prevent totalitarianism (which itself is a concept that is positively related to the size of the state) nor allow people access to politics. The state machinery - the bureaucracy, the civil service, the professional political class, the military etc. - are not the right tools to achieve what you want to achieve.
I would call you either an Impossibilist or a non-doctrinaire communist.
Sometimes I gotta get down with my red self
"Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriations." - Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
All of the isms are useless, because none of them agrees on every point with me, and since I'm right, they must be wrong. QED.
Militaries have been around since waaaaaayyyyyy before the early-modern period. Classes with privileged access to political power too. Calling someone's view of the state 'ahistorical', claiming that the state as we know it only arose in the early-modern period, and then mentioning those as essential features of the state doesn't look particularly consistent.
"From the relationship of estranged labor to private property it follows further that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone is at stake, but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation – and it contains this because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and consequences of this relation."
- Karl Marx -
Capitalism is just an ism too. We are all people. Just be happy and smile.
☭ “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” - Karl Marx ☭
I was talking about "programmatic and theoretical agreement" (with programmatic agreement implicitly given precedence), not "ideological purity", whatever that means (to me it sounds like a derogatory term for refusing to compromise socialist principles). And it is an empirical fact that, while programmatically cohesive organisations have been able to meaningfully participate in the class struggle, "broad church" organisations have not.
The Occupy "movement" was petit-bourgeois and often explicitly anti-worker in nature. My knowledge of the 2011 riots is limited, but as far as I know they were linked to impoverishment and police violence - all commendable, but there was no clear class line, no split between the proletariat and the petite-bourgeoisie and so on.Originally Posted by Vladimir Innit Lenin
Do you think cooperation among the various leftist and "leftist" sects would achieve anything? Except forming a new TUSC or Left Unity perhaps, and we all know what bulwarks of the proletariat these are. And sectarianism means abstaining from the class struggle. It does not mean opposing other "socialist" groups when their line is idiotic.Originally Posted by Vladimir Innit Lenin
