- Mike, thanks for the response.
- Bob the Builder sums it up well.
Results 21 to 34 of 34
^^^ Bob, how do you personally define "reforms"? As I have argued in my Theory thread and in various article submissions, there's a huge spectrum of progressive reforms.
"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)
- Mike, thanks for the response.
- Bob the Builder sums it up well.
When advocating reforms, there is no reliable methods to determine which reforms to include, out of the thousands of possible kinds of cosmetic patches that could be added onto this strife-ridden system. In practice, the list of "demand" turns out to be a list of the pet peeves of whomever sat down and wrote it. Why should I have the same pet peeves as someone else? I see that the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party USA doesn't want garbage to be disposed of in landfills but neither does he want it to be taken to incinerators. That's his own peeve, but maybe I happen to like incinerators, and maybe I'm irritated by something entirely different.
What a wasted opportunity, when a socialist has what may be one chance in a lifetime to hand a passing person a leaflet on the street corner, but then, instead of making that leaflet a coherent explanation of a proposed structure for a new socialist system and an outline of the political and economic organization needed to establish it, to make it into a list of the author's peeves about the minor forms and details of things, and the author's wish that those external symptoms will go away.
All the more so, since reforms, instead of achieving the results that have been claimed for them, more generally backfire and have unintended consequences, which are sometimes worse than the problem that they were expected to fix. Then, in the rare cases where a reform does achieve something notable, it can often be repealed a few years later. So reformers forever pour limited resources into a bottomless pit.
And then the psychological effects: when a reform demand is unsuccessful, the conclusion that most people believe that conveys is that "nothing can ever change", it's "human nature", etc. On the other hand, if a reform demand is successful, the conclusion that most people believe that conveys is "this system has proven that it really works", "don't bash this great country." Either way, succeed or not, the working class is never "radicalized" by the experience.
If there is a single most important lesson that revolutionaries need to convey to others, it's that the wide variety of social problems stem from one common cause, class rule, and this cause can be removed in an instant as soon as the majority of the people accept this task. As H. D. Thoreau wrote, ""There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." This most vital concept that needs to be taught is just the thing that a platform of reform demands will obscure.
I suggested one such method in your forum: reform-enabling (as opposed to inhibiting the possibility of further reform) and keeping the basic principles "consciously in full view."
The SPUSA guy who wrote this probably clings to the typical interpretation of minimum demands that isn't reform-enabling. On the other hand, the 32-hour workweek isn't something that I came up with; it's been advocated before in the margins of the working class.
By "unsuccessful," I take it you mean "unsuccessful after implementation," right? In any event, I'll object to that last statement of yours, because it truly depends, like I said, on what kind of reforms are being put forward.
"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)
Are you sure you're not just getting a bit glass-is-half-empty here, Mike? Besides, this is a moot point since there haven't *been* any %#&@! reforms in the U.S. or counterparts in the past 40 years...(!)
I'm grateful that you have tried diligently to get thorugh to me, and yet I haven't understood you very well. Okay, maybe it's me, I'm just an idiot.
But I also told you how you can help me to understand you better. That helpful approach is when you define something using only plain everyday terminology that doesn't require me to recursively keep asking what another phrase means, and when your answers are self-contained sentences that don't tell me to go read some other document.
Okay, here we go again with the phrases -- I don't understand what does reform-enabling means.
I'm not a psychologist but I believe that the human brain can't do that. It's impossible simultaneously to plan improvements to something and also to plan its discarding. Do you know of anone who has ever been making arrangements to have a car painted and polished, and also, at the same time, decided to have the junkyard throw that car into the crusher? Have you ever heard of anyone who was installing new carpeting in a house, and, at the same time, planning to have the wrecking ball demolish that house? The human brain cannot do it. Whatever people are fixing they are also thinking about saving. If you encourage other people to get active in improving capitalism, you will be promoting in others the feeling that there is something worth saving in the capitalist system, not the idea of scrapping it.
I meant reform proposals that were not implemented, because not enough people were recruited to support them. This failure to persuade others makes most of the reform advocates become more conservative as they get older, due to hopelessness and burn-out. Progressive groups tend to have a huge turnover, with many enthusiastic 20-year-old members going on to develop in 40-year-old conservatives who look back on their own "youthful folly." The plan that activism and struggle are going to make people more revolutionary hasn't been working out as expected.
But the opposite is also true, if the radical organization's idea really does takes off and obtains mass support, then it becomes a standard feature of capitalism, so that Roosevelt's New Deal is often said to have stolen the ideas of Medicare and Medicaid from the Socialist Party. This produces a new generation of flag-waving people who are smug about how "flexible" and "self-correcting" capitalism has turned out to be. De Leon noted: "Every reform granted by capitalism is a concealed measure of reaction."
That SP-USA rant you had regarding garbage dumps: There are no progressive reforms that could come AFTER the dump question has been settled. Further more, what do garbage dumps have to do with socialist production?
On the OTHER hand, freedom of class-strugglist assembly and association, free from agents provocateurs and the like, as well as a loss of job (more important here), can mean many things. On the basic level, this can mean unionization efforts. On a higher level, this can mean political parties and even your SIUs.
On an even higher level, this means international class-strugglist parties. Comrade chegitz told me that it's illegal to personally belong to international leftist parties. However, he also told me that it isn't illegal for national organizations to affiliate with "internationals" - in other words, there's a legal fiction of less-than-ideal internationalism.
Perhaps you should note here than any such reform proposals should be pursued ONLY through both legal and illegal class struggle, and NOT through parliamentarism, NGO (non-government organization) lobbyism, and so on.
"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)
Reply to Jacob.
I believe we should all support demands for freedom of assembly and freedom of association, and civil liberties causes generally.
These things are NOT REFORMS. That is, it's not a scheme that keeps people busy expending effort in the hope that a system of private ownership of the means of production should no longer *behave* like a system private ownership of the means of production. It isn't a case of begging for a more compassionate economic exploitation.
Advancements in many civil liberties and certain democratic practices are already a part of the concept of government that capitalism wrestled from the arisocracy in an earlier era. These practices, including freedom of expression, separation of church and state, and, above all, the concept that disagreements are to be resolved by persuasion and counting votes, are permanent achievements of human civilization, which capitalism helped to introduce, in the days when capitalism was still in a progressive role, struggling to overthrow feudalism.
Likewise, fighting for higher wages and shorter work hours isn't a reform. It's already how capitalism works.
Huh? You've always stated that the 32-hour workweek proposal is a reform.
Are you now saying that my immediate demands section of the draft program isn't advocating reforms? [Just in case your memory needs specific refreshing from Dave's responses.]
"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)
My lack of clarity is _mea culpa_.
I don't say that the call for a 32 hour workweek is a reform. The wrestling over the division of the pie, the division of the work day into its paid and unpaid portions, the division of the product, trying to win the producers a bigger slice and give the expropriators a smaller slice, is a normal part of how capitalism has to work. It's business-as-usual for a capitalist society, just like going to work itself, and cashing our paychecks.
A reform is something that's not already part of the system, like the New Deal program once was -- a suggestion for a new "abnormality" to be tacked on like a patch.
What I say is, if a socialist leaflet or newspaper tells the readers that they are about to learn about what socialism means, and how to achieve it, it's would be a distraction to include a line item for the 32 hour workweek. It's irrelevant to the answer to the question.
Including reforms is also a distraction, but of a different kind. Including reforms promotes the misconception that socialism IS reform, to the end that the conservative working class already calls capitalism "socialistic" by virtue of its school system and its municipally owned sewers.
Including support for the 32 hour workweek isn't miseducation, it's just a separate subject. A document called "the socialist program" shouldn't give focus to something that's a separate subject -- even if it's a damn great idea that deserves the support of all of us.
Socialist literature should instead say: "Having now completed our description covered the socialist platform, we will go on to mention some additional noteworthy parts of the class struggle. Note carefully that the following objectives have nothing whatsoever to do with the implementation of socialism, and are recommended as short-term survival tactics." NOW, go on to inform everyone that we are struggling for a 32 hour workweek.
That's what "socialist" reformism fails to do. Try to find that kind of openness at a typical leftist web site. Try to find such a clarification in any leftist newspaper emblazoned with "we demand ...."
First off, let it be said that I think "Capitalism and other Kid Stuff" is a wonderful video...
but the WSM are more than sectarian, they're utopian. I have my personal criticisms of what happened in the Russian Revolution and the counterrevolution that followed (I am utterly opposed to Stalinism, and I think it can be argued that some of the seeds of Stalinism were planted before his rise to power - that's not to say that I believe that Stalinism was the inevitable outcome of October, I don't), but to denounce it from the outset is something else. "Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder" seems to apply here...
The current situation is characterized by the first half of my sentence, the working class being conservative because change can't be visualized, there is no more history, this is as good as it gets, we are limited by human nature, etc.
But my parents' generation was characterized by second half of my sentence, the post-FDR attitude, our system has been getting better and better all the time so you better not knock it.
And, no, it's not a moot point. The inclusion of reform demands into what is purported to be a revolutionary platform is based on a particular psychological theory. There's an objective truth somewhere -- either they're right and I'm wrong, or I'm right and they're wrong.
Hmmm... I'll double-post this on your board for further discussion.
"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)
Mike, in your first paragraph you've defined those who are conservatives. In your second paragraph you've defined those who are liberals. In your third paragraph you're coming back to the question of how do we approach regular people, or, perhaps, fence-sitters.
Yes, I'm open to meaningful reforms, but, no, I don't think we need to water-down our revolutionary position by hiding it in favor of fronting reforms.
The point of being a revolutionary is that it is *correct*, and that it jibes with the social condition that (most) people are in, regardless of whether they know it or not, or believe it or not.
Revolutionary politics, therefore, should be used as a strength in talking with people, because if we can use our theory correctly to address the issues-of-the-day or people's current situations, then we will have a better take on objective social reality than anyone else out there.
Last edited by ckaihatsu; 15th October 2008 at 23:24. Reason: missed a word
