What is Socialism, why do we want it and how should we argue for it?
In PART TWO of a 2-part article, Socialist Platform supporter John Tummon argues for a neglected part of the socialist tradition to pave the way for Left Unity to put together a compelling alternative to capitalism which can win the battle of ideas in the long-term, by focusing on issues the Left has too often ignored but which matter a great deal to people. In this second part, the article looks at how socialism will effect how work is experienced by people, why the market can disappear without creating problems, the importance of the social wage, how law will change and how liberty will be emphasised. The socialist approach to the environment and to imperialism are outlined before a final section looking at a third alternative to the traditional dichotomy between reform and revolution.
Work under socialism would be reviewed, by workplace organisations and by external support from democratic bodies in society, to ensure that tasks involving undue monotony and repetition are eliminated or shared, that workers have task discretion and enough control and autonomy, that there is an appropriate balance between the efforts that workers make and the rewards that they receive and that skill-enhancement and training is adequately and fairly provided for. Casual work, agency work and other insecure types of employment contract would be unlawful under socialism; socialism is dedicated to wiping out the exploitation of workers.
Unpaid voluntary work, though, involves a wide range of working activities aimed at improving some aspects of the quality of life for a group of people or a community and this would be encouraged, particularly by drastically reducing the number of hours people have to spend in paid work. Socialists aim to progressively reduce the working day and expand leisure time for all without detriment to the standard of living.
Housework carried out for the well-being of its members – including cooking, dishwashing, clothes washing, shopping, ironing, managing financial resources, car or bicycle repair, house maintenance, gardening, and so on will no longer be linked with gender and, where some can be performed better on a neighbourhood basis, this will be encouraged and provided for. Schooling, public information and the organisation of women would encourage the elimination of gender as a determinant of who is expected to do which household tasks.
Caring for other members of the household, including full-time care for pre-school children, involves emotional and psychological work, where it usually matters a lot who will give the care, in order to build secure psychological attachments to responsible adults among young children which enable them to develop self-confidence and thrive. Under socialism, advice and support to and respite for carers would be supported through the design of social housing and time off work for such caring responsibilities would also be funded out of taxation. Caring work and voluntary work would be given a higher value under socialism than it receives at present.
Socialism implies a restricted market. Without a price mechanism regulated by supply and demand, it has been thought to be extremely difficult for a producer or planner to know what, how much and what variety to produce, but the Internet and the computer software enabling 21st century supermarkets to track individual consumption profiles means that sensitive and accurate ways of non authoritarian overall planning of production and distribution can be found and the market eliminated altogether. Under socialism, there will be no “money market” bringing together private savers and private investors, and therefore no interest rate or usury and no basis either for credit-based purchases. The currency will serve only as the means of exchange, not as something to be speculated with.
In the interim, until all forms of the market are abolished, enterprises under socialism would buy raw materials and buy or rent machinery from other enterprises and sell their products to other enterprises or consumers. Prices would be largely unregulated, except by supply and demand. Selective price controls or price supports will be applied in this interim period, by democratic decision, to prevent the emergence of monopolies and support enterprises in temporary difficulties.
Under economic democracy, labour would be de-commodified: when a worker joins a firm, s/he becomes a voting member of a jointly-owned enterprise, and is entitled to a specific share of the net revenue and to a say in what these shares should be compared to investment. The revenue generated by each enterprise would not come from exploiting workers; minimum wage levels will be set nationally and reviewed democratically and each enterprise will set its own wage levels in the same way, with a steady movement towards complete equality of income.
The social wage is important under socialism. Free public services, including education, housing and health provision, ensure people of a basic, civilised standard of life that does not depend on their income and is really the social part of that income. With the support of the social wage, wages for work will be more than enough to buy what people want, since many of the things that cost so much today will be free‹not only education, including college and other kinds of special training, housing and some health care, but transportation, communication and some entertainment. All these and basic items of food and clothing will be subsidised out of taxes. Money’s role in society will gradually diminish, creating more space for non-commercial transactions between people and the new cultural forms that can grow from that.
Under capitalism, welfare services exist on top of this social wage and this involves the ability to compel non-users of a service to subsidise its cost a cause of division under capitalism. These welfare services are there to compensate people for being less well off, discriminated against or disadvantaged – to deal with the inequalities and social problems caused by capitalism. Under socialism, high levels of equality, job satisfaction, education and the ideological emphasis on caring for each other should substantially limit the need for welfare services to issues such as disability, incurable and lifelong illnesses and old age.
The social wage reduces what people need in wages to make ends meet. Over time, as other incentives, such as pride in a job well done, the praise of one’s co-workers, and the satisfaction in serving the community, will replace the desire to get rich and the fear of being poor. For a time, though, wage differentials, though greatly reduced, will exist as long as there are some people who require this kind of incentive to do their best and so long as other workers tolerate this. Changes will not happen overnight or by diktat, but the direction of travel under socialism will be clear and people will be given time to adapt to it. Bringing an end to all inherited privilege and drastically reducing income inequality will come quicker than most changes. ‘From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’ will become the general guidance during this process.
Law under socialism will be decided through thorough democratic consultation and individual legal decisions made via participatory processes, with no secret courts and no judges for life. The core purpose of law is purely to prevent people from injuring one another but under capitalism it is also there to protect privately owned capital assets; small-scale private property, such as personal possessions, would still be protected under socialist law, but land and capital assets would be owned in common, so we would have far fewer and much simpler laws than at present.
Socialists believe that when human beings become violent, anti-social or aggressive it is not our natural condition and that this can mostly be prevented through an educational system which focuses significantly on teaching and modelling the simple practice of respecting and being kind to one another, as well as on parenting skills, and through a just society with a well-organised economy offering a rewarding job with a fair reward for everyone, and a decent affordable home in a pleasant environment with space for exercise and relaxation. A just society with high levels of equality and participation is rarely prone to violent crime, high rates of obesity, child abuse or escapist drug use; recent research shows that the most unequal societies also have the highest rates of crime and social problems. Crime may be an individual’s choice and responsibility, but crime rates reflect society and can be changed by changing that society.
There will be fewer laws under socialism, fewer courts, fewer police and far fewer prisons.
Liberty is important to socialists. While socialism is generally argued for in the language of equality, it is every bit as much about freedom. Its freedom lies in making it possible for the first time in history for each person to develop his or her full potential as a human being, rather than facing barriers.
Socialists believe that no persons or groups, either individually or through government or the media, should impose their will, their way of life, their judgments or their brand of wisdom on the private lives of others, no matter how correct they might think their own way of life to be and how wrong they think that of others. The true concept of Liberty and the laws that reflect it respect the individual’s right to do things that might be considered foolish or unwise, provided they do not harm others.
Under capitalism, liberty is understood to include the right of the individual to act economically in a self-interested way, even if this involves making money out of the work of others, gambling on the Stock Exchange or investing in factory production abroad based on slave-like conditions. To socialists, the common good must come first, so this version of liberty would be eliminated. No others would be. The same applies to the so-called liberty to own huge media outlets and be able to use them to manipulate opinion by putting forward some ideas and denigrating others, often through picking on individuals held up to the public as figures of ridicule or as evil demons. Printed newspapers are, in any case, unlikely to last long once 100% Internet access is achieved, so their days of selective scapegoating and rabble-rousing are numbered anyway, but television and radio is another area where monopoly media ownership distorts what we see and hear in ways that hardly ever serve the common good. Socialists aim to develop society’s capacities to use reason to address social problems, but we cannot expect this to develop with a rabble-rousing media still in place, so it will be dismantled. We see media as one of the key areas to democratise through mass participation along with education, communication and cultural provision and artistic expression, in order to provide the best possible human awareness capacity for progressive change.
A state broadcaster like the BBC would not exist but be replaced by the licensing of not-for-profit radio and TV stations run as cooperative enterprises; in the same way as the USA currently does not allow broadcasts from Al-Jazeera and some other channels, signals from foreign broadcasters and internet sites hosted abroad would be blocked or allowed on the basis of the will of the national legislature, guided by whether they supported or de-stabilised the pursuit of the common good and the values supporting it.
The advertising industry would no longer exist. The spurious basis on which most products are presented to potential consumers through advertisements has little or no connection to the kind of information consumers need in order to make rational rather than emotional decisions. Strictly-regulated public information presentations about products, focusing on performance specifications, build quality, reliability, functionality, ease of use, ease of repair, after-sales service and durability is entirely different and would be the approach taken under socialism, shifting the balance fundamentally from consumers having the responsibility to ensure that they are not deceived by retailers to producers having to ensure that they do not deceive consumers. Creative people who are in advertising under capitalism would be able under socialism to help design TV and radio programmes, public art installations and public information presentations, write literature and songs.
The environment is important to socialists. We believe that natural resources are natural – they are not the product of human creativity or labour, and are therefore not naturally attributable to any individuals as “private property”. Land ownership in Britain arose from conquest and force of arms in medieval times and a few rich landowners still own most of the land. Private ownership of land gives rise to land speculation, the purchase of land or property not for use but as a speculative investment and to unearned income, sometimes on a huge scale for those who own the land on which our big cities are built.
Under socialism, land would not be owned in this way at all. Much of our land-use today fails to foresee consequences. We plan suburban developments without considering transport, we develop areas of scenic beauty before we realise that we are spoiling the irreplaceable, we satisfy present needs while causing long-term environmental damage or imbalances. Rising land prices tend to favour sprawl, as homes, shopping malls and businesses naturally seek to move out to areas of less value. Sprawl in turn generates more traffic because people have farther to travel, which means more private cars, because sprawl, by its nature, cannot economically or satisfactorily be served by shared public transport.
Of the world’s 6bn people, one billion already live in slums and hundreds of thousands are dying each year from the consequences of climate change – malaria, dysentery, malnutrition and sudden ecological disasters like Tsunamis. Billions of others will face disaster from flooding, desertification, water shortage and other environmental consequences of global warming – unless there is a radical reversal of humanity’s production and consumption consequences; this takes us to question the mantra of ‘growth’, dutifully advocated nowadays by all mainstream political parties.
Prior to neo-liberalism, it was widely expected that, with the application of computerisation, productivity would grow massively, leading to a rapid decline in the need for human labour. Yet, the intervening 3 decades have shown, on the contrary, that there are more workers on a world scale than ever before. Even in countries with high levels of employment like Britain, people are working longer and harder. Average hours worked have gone up since 1981. The paradise of short working hours combined with affluence never happened. Why not?
Marx pointed out that the commodification of nature under capitalism led to the ‘practical degradation of nature’. Huge swathes of production under capitalism are socially useless, and either redundant or directly harmful. Why are they still made?
The profligate waste of the planets resources in pursuit of an unending cascade of commodities; artificially created ‘wants’ generated by the advertising industry only exists because that¹s the way that capitalism functions. The constant stream of ‘new’ commodities is vital to maintain profits and, crucially, to fight off rival firms. Huge inputs of socially useless labour time are put into the design of competing yet near identical models of single products, including into their advertising and sales, in order to take over more of a market in such products from rivals.
This never-ending competition between capitalists is also why capitalism’s ‘solutions’ to ecological crisis are measures like carbon-trading and the Clean Development Mechanism, which colonise the poorest continents with carbon sinks and biofuel plantations, enabling the rich part of the world to carry on polluting without changing its lifestyles or its ecological profligacy, with consequent catastrophe in the South.
Capitalism’s politicians encourages consumerism by measuring a Country’s economy by its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the amount of goods and services it can produce, so a growth in GDP inevitably means a greater strain on natural resources, as more commodities are being produced for the Capitalist. GDP growth, fueled by capitalism’s unquenchable thirst for more and more production of goods, cannot exist in a world of finite resources. That thirst explains why no amount of regulation could tackle greenhouse gas emissions or prevent another Bhopal, so long as private interest dictates production. This can only fully be addressed when decisions about production are no longer taken by a few self-interested private owners but by society as a whole, democratically and with full participation. Socialists aim to reconfigure the economy so that it is sustainable and does not destroy the natural basis on which human life depends. That is why we are for a unilateral reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, an international treaty to cap global carbon emissions, the international rationing of air travel, and a massive expansion of renewable energy. Under socialism, we would gradually replace the use of cars by providing cheap, accessible and frequent public transport and reconfigure the built environment to encourage and reward public transport and cycling.
Housing design affects the sense of and level of community involvement, people’s sense of security, children’s opportunities for safe outdoors play and the extent to which old people are segregated from or integrated into society. Tenure affects how people see themselves as investors in their own inheritable wealth or as secure stewards of something that is there for the whole community. Finally it affects people’s disposable incomes and has a massive ecological footprint. Designing ‘new towns’ in line with a vision of socialism was common in the nineteenth century; such was people’s horror at the slums, squalor and degradation brought on by capitalism’s earliest growth. Twentieth century socialists never really got back to looking at how a socialist environment would differ from what we have now in the west – the network of traffic jams, petrol fumes, shopping malls, sprawling suburbs, supermarkets, sink estates, motorways, advertising boards and endless fields undivided by hedgerows.
Imperialism, global capitalism and world poverty can only be properly responded to by socialists if we are very clear on how they affect each other. Leninists claim that the lever for international revolution and therefore for the achievement of socialism lies with the working class in the advanced, industrialised world. This is substantially different from Marx’s own thinking: ‘The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. This is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general’. Leninism offers to people struggling in poorer continents only a largely eurocentric analysis of something capitalism that consigns them to peripheral roles in a drama scheduled to unfold elsewhere. Imperialism, to Leninists, is merely a stage in the history of capitalism.
Social democrats, on the other hand, have nearly always taken a nationalist view of the world. Both the Labour Party and British trade unions have a terrible record on international issues. The Atlee government they see as the epitome of what they want to return to was dedicated to the furtherance of the British Empire, used its bombers to hold off the Greek revolutionaries and played a key role in starting the Cold War and the nuclear threat. No meaningful internationalism is possible from a Left Reformist perspective, because their political philosophy is thoroughly nationalist and has always been so.
Socialists who are neither social democrats nor Leninists recognise not only that imperialism shapes the world order in its economic, political and cultural aspects, but also that people in the imperialised countries struggling against it affects our ability to achieve socialism here. We cannot win unless they win.
If socialism is set up in some countries but not in the majority, poverty and imperialist exploitation will still be the international norm. Where there is little to share, socialism will have difficulty working, but where material abundance already exists and is simply badly distributed or expatriated by imperialism, socialism can flourish. Socialism cannot work without industrialisation, but where it has occurred, it can. Socialism can’t work if complex organisations for producing and distributing goods have not already been created, but where they have, it can. All the experiences of backward nations, such as China and the Soviet Union, where these conditions never existed, simply have no relevance to what we could do in the 21st century.
Even so, socialism has to be international if it is not to become national socialism. The long-term and fundamental interests of working people are, ultimately, the same everywhere, but the divisions between us under imperialism are material and ideological. Socialists reject the idea that there is a national solution to the problems of capitalism and stand for solidarity and cooperation between the people in Britain and elsewhere. We will work with others who support the struggles of people in other parts of the world against their exploitation and domination by our rulers. If we fail to make this a key part of political practice and campaigning work, Left Unity will become an essentially nationalist party.
Reform and Revolution are the stark alternatives offered by Leninism and social democracy. We either submit ourselves to the illusion that we can radically reform capitalism in the interests of working people to a point from which it cannot spring back to what it is now and has been for all of its history, or else we commit ourselves to the need for a violent seizure of power along the lines of Petrograd in 1917 and to the tightly-disciplined vanguard party model developed by Lenin which went on to monopolise political power thereafter! In both cases, it is a case of a self-appointed elect doing things over the heads of and in the name of the working people.
Is this really true? Are there just these two dismal alternatives?
Real history shows more variety than either the reformists or Leninists would have us believe. The Cuban revolution involved hardly any violent overthrow of the existing order; large-scale social change, including the expropriation of land and factories, was well underway in Spain in 1936 with the existing central state in place. Workers’ Councils in Europe, as the First World War came to a close, brought about a situation described as ‘dual power’, in which the regime’s opponents were organising many of those aspects of life and work that concerned them most, quite independently of the regime and its state apparatus. We saw a more localised example of this in the Paris Commune and in Free Derry during the ‘Irish Troubles’ of the 1970s and the same has long since been true of the Zapatista stronghold in Chiapas in Mexico.
All these situations of Dual Power happened when the struggle against the regime was able to exercise partial political power, a power that emerged incrementally, either in the form of geographical ‘liberated zones’, as in post-war guerrilla struggles in Africa or else in the form of liberating various economic and societal functions from the monopoly of the state. Of course, such a Dual Power situation cannot remain unresolved forever, although there are some examples of it going on for years rather than months. The point is that there is no reason to assume that it is always going to be resolved in the manner of Petrograd in 1917 or Santiago in 1973, by a frontal attack on the key state institutions and their military defenders, followed by a war against a counter-revolution. Rulers can flee and have done so on many occasions, compromises have been negotiated and held until the Balance of Power changed fundamentally and one side moved to crush the other. Such times are muddy and messy and the Leninist argument for fundamental blueprint does not stand up to the historical variety.
We need to stop conflating revolution the wholesale transformation of society with the seizure of state power. Revolutionary change usually happens both before and after the change in formal political control and that is the process the big picture – that needs our attention, far more than the unrelenting focus on preparing a ‘vanguard’ of the elect for an imagined set-piece confrontation that hardly ever happens in anything like the way it is depicted in the Leninist imagination.
Dual Power assumes that a substantial degree of disintegration of existing state power is taking place in response to the people demanding and organising an alternative way of running society, but strategical thinking based on the theory of pushing this forward incrementally until the existing state’s writ no longer runs within most or the most crucial areas of organised life is seriously undeveloped. This theoretical underdevelopment has occurred not because the proposition is naïve but because of the straightjacket imposed on the western Left by the Leninist-social democratic dichotomy, which has been loud and tribal for such a long time that thinking outside the box has not really happened.
The time has come to re-examine what we mean by socialism, how we want to counterpose it to capitalism and what strategy we intend to adopt for achieving it. So long as there are socialists within Left Unity, this is a debate we have to have. I hope this is a beginning.
26 comments
26 responses to “What is Socialism, why do we want it and how should we argue for it?”
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John,
By & large a nice attempt to show how much better life under socialism will be.
However, I think you have a misunderstanding of Lenin & Leninists, perhaps understandably given the history of the 20th century.
Firstly, you’ve got it completely wrong that Lenin put his faith in revolution happening in the advanced, industrialised countries. Russia, after all, wasn’t this, & although he hoped that revolution would follow in Germany, he knew that imperialism (the exploitation of weak countries by strong countries) created an ‘aristocracy of labour’ that meant workers in Europe were more likely to follow social democratic parties like Labour, than support revolutionary ones. That revolutionary prospects were better in the colonies, hence the ‘national question’ debate.
China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc proved him right. There was no revolution in any industrialised country.
You also need to be careful not to fall into the left-wing communism/anarchist trap that Leninists are all about seizing power & then being the ‘co-ordinator class’ bossing everyone about.
Lenin’s basic argument was that those with class-consciousness should organise together & independently from social democratic parties. That doesn’t mean sometimes within broad, mass parties, but as WWI expose the nationalism of many in the Second International, being in a broad, mass party with others who don’t see capitalism as the problem, & who care first & foremost about getting votes to be elected, can result in the abandonment of socialism as a goal. The Labour Party demonstrates this quite clearly & this is the reason why I ask for a platform that is first & foremost anti-capitalist.
It counter-revolutionary times when class-consciousness is low, this naturally leads to small numbers identifying as revolutionaries & therefore demoralisation & splits & numerous revolutionary ‘sects’ semi-detached from the working class. This is the history of the revolutionary left in Britain in the post-war period.
But now that we’ve had the crisis & people no longer see capitalism offering improvements, & indeed being the cause of the problems, the desire & the realisation that we can actually do something is focusing minds & bringing revolutionaries, & the wider ‘left’, together – Left Unity, People’s Assembly, even some elements of the revolutionary left trying to come together (ACI/SR/ISN).
Lenin’s book, State & Revolution, shows his commitment to workers’ councils (Soviets). Events in Russia never allowed all power to go to the Soviets though. It would have needed at least Germany to have had a revolution. Faced with isolation & a peasantry not naturally inclined to socialism, either the revolution collapsed or an attempt was made to impose ‘socialism from above’ through a one-party dictatorship. Unsurprisingly, this was a disaster & still casts a huge shadow over those trying to argue for genuine socialism. Unfortunately, that’s history.
What’s making history at the moment is Egypt, where the clear need for a revolutionary organisation stands out a mile. Without organisation the workers are not going to defeat capitalism. And that’s not the end of it. Organisation also requires strategy & tactics. The Paris Commune may have had some kind of organisation that was based upon the will of the people, but without this being refined into a clearer theory of, dare I say it, what needs to be done? there was a much greater chance of taking the wrong strategy & failing, indeed, being slaughtered.
Again as Egyptians are finding out, the ruling class doesn’t give up power without a fight. That doesn’t mean we need to arm ourselves & storm parliament. It does mean having the numbers. Remember even the police & army are made up of people who have to sell their labour to survive. They have relatives who will suffer from capitalism’s crises & who will be attracted to a better alternative.
Leninists are not your enemy, the ruling class is.
John
In case you didn’t see it, I posted this in response to you on the thread about the first part of my article:
‘The corners I have cut on Lenin probably are in greater need of putting right than those on Leninism. It is the latter that concerns me most. One illustration: In Party & Class, the founding document of the SWP’s turn to Leninism, Chris Harman is interested only in what Lenin said and did either side of the long years of co-existence with the Mensheviks: “Not until the First World War and then the events in 1917 gave an acute expression to the faults of old forms of organisation did Lenin begin to give explicit notice of the radically new conceptions he himself was developing”.
The 14 years between Lenin’s 1903 ‘What is to be done?” pamphlet and this go unremarked. This is the only way Harman manages to stand up his idea that Lenin consistently advocated “a vanguard organisation, membership of which requires a dedication not to be found in most workers”.
Harman goes on to produce the thoroughly ahistorical claim that “This argument is not one that can be restricted to a particular historical period”, a view which signifies dogma, not theory grounded in understanding contemporary reality. This astonishing claim immediately begs the question – why did Lenin himself do the exact opposite for the next 14 years if he thought he was setting down a self-evident, transhistorical truth in the same manner of Harman?
In short, I think there was a lot more to Lenin than to Leninism’.
I think this counters not only Harman’s argument in support of a vanguard party but your own (“Lenin’s basic argument was that those with class-consciousness should organise together & independently from social democratic parties) is also ahistorical and in need of recognising that he did the exact opposite for 14 years, which hardly equates to ‘sometimes’.
If you don’t agree with what Lenin did rather than what he said either side of this, then why are you in Left Unity, which is precisely the embryonic broad mass party you seem to say Lenin warned against? The social democrats in Left Unity are, after all, vigorously stating their case against having any truck with the revolutionary transformation of society (see Fred Leplat’s new thread today).
I am intrigued by your view that “events in Russia never allowed all power to go to the Soviets”. Since the soviets were a purely urban form in 1917, the peasantry would have had to be confronted anyway, irrespective of the form of urban organisation – dictatorship of the party or workers control – adopted by the revolutionary forces in the cities. Do you really believe that the smashing of the physical vanguard of the revolution – the peasants in uniform in Kronstadt – was a better way of taking the struggle from the cities to the peasants, or did it just alienate the peasantry even more and make it even easier for Kornilov and the whites to organise among them? Ditto the closing down of the constituent assembly, which meant that the peasant-based party he has worked with for 14 years – the Socialist Revolutionaries – were alienated and therefore unavailable to the urban revolution as a foothold within the peasantry with which to combat the whites!
For these reasons, I struggle to agree with you that there was just a stark choice between “Socialism in one country” via the rule of a party fused with the state or the collapse of the revolution. Yes, the externally-imposed situation for the Bolsheviks was horrendous, but they still had choices. The Anarchist militias in the Spanish Civil War showed that workers’ self-organisation is entirely compatible with taking forward a pressing military struggle, with the added advantage that the soldiers are able to recruit and campaign politically alongside military manouevres. So did the Mozambiquan liberation forces 40 years later.
You can’t compare the Paris Commune with Petrograd in the way you have! The Parisians eventually faced a still fully-mobilised French army, which had not suffered massive casualties, based only 20 miles from the city in Versailles, which moved against it with the complicity of the Prussian army, based even closer. In terms of proportionality of numbers and weaponry and the ability to strike without travelling vast distances, the counter-revolutionary forces in 1871 had everything the white armies and their western capitalist allies lacked. The Commune was defeated militarily, not politically, so their alleged lack of Leninist clarity would have made no difference whatsoever to the outcome.
If you could point me to where Lenin wrote about revolutionary prospects being greater in the imperialised parts of the world than in the advanced capitalist countries, I would be grateful, because I have read widely around this and never heard this argument before.
I don’t think Leninists are my enemy at all and I am more than happy to be in the same organisation, provided it is not ‘democratic centralist’, but if we ever got near a revolutionary situation, I am aware that they could repress me at that point if the situation got very tight and they had another failure of political imagination!
John,
Thanks for your response.
I’ll resist the temptation to debate the history of the Russian Revolution as we’ll be here for a very look time. But when I come across Lenin passages that emphasise the revolutionary prospects of the colonies over the imperialist countries, I let you know.
I’ll try & address the key point that is relevant to today – that Leninists organising together in a ‘democratic centralist’ way is a problem.
Many of us who have been in revolutionary organisations have had bad experiences. I was in the SWP & only expected to sell papers. I felt no involvement in the democratic process. The election by slate of the central committee, usually the same old faces, demonstrates the undemocratic nature of the party. I think this is the root problem of their current crisis.
This lack of democratic participation applies to many other Leninist organisations. So I recognise the issue you are tackling. What I’ve tried to argue is that a lot of this can be explained by their ‘semi-detachment’ from the working class in the post-war period, due to the counter-revolutionary times, i.e. the fall in class-consciousness. I don’t think this invalidates the need for revolutionaries to organise together. As we are seeing now, class is becoming a more recognised issue, & the prospect of actually being able to achieve something is bringing revolutionaries & the wider left together.
This is Lenin’s opening up of the party in revolutionary times. This is why an anti-capitalist party is needed today, not a social democratic party. But even in an anti-capitalist party, where there will be socialists who foolishly, in my opinion, believe socialism can be attained through parliament, there will be a need for the revolutionaries to work together.
Because of the history, & the misrepresentation of history, revolutionaries have to work extra hard now to emphasise the emancipatory nature of socialism. This means incorporating participatory decision-making into party structures. Those with more experience & a better understanding of the theory will still have more influence, but they will have to prove it rather than relying on a permanent position on the central committee.
Socialism is all about direct, participatory democracy as exemplified by the Paris Commune. I’m all for promoting that, as I know you are.
Thanks, John, that shows me we are working from very similar assumptions and aspirations. I think a lot of work needs to be done on fleshing out “incorporating participatory decision-making into party structures” between now and November, and I would feel more confident in this if a group of people who had been through and learned from the problems of internal structures in the SWP and other organisations got together, perhaps by starting a DIscussion Board thread, to take this forward.
One aspect of this – the right of factions to organise inside LU and what this means and does not mean in practice – is particularly important if LU is to become a broad anti-capitalist party.
I haven’t got the same impression as you, that “class is becoming a more recognised issue”; I still hear the same old sociological and cultural definitions of class being circulated in discussion. I think the use of the phrase ‘the 99%’ is indicative of the low level of debate on class among anti-capitalists, while ‘Chavs’ and ‘Underclass’ designations are rife at a more popular level. Neither do I think either the Leninist or Libertarian Left has coped well at an analytical level with the massive changes in class composition over the past 30 years.
Whether these two issues should be linked – as Harman attempted to do back in ’68 – or dealt with separately is something to think about, too. You would imagine that the structure and programme of a new party of the Left would benefit if we root these in a re-worked understanding of class relations within 21st century capitalism, particularly if we want LU to be able to recruit people who are outside the 9,000 originals.
Interesting piece John T…..the “dual power” concept seems pretty much like the line of thinking reflected in several of my posts to the ongoing LU debates …and I agree that this area of strategic thinking is under developed and the processes involved in establishing dual power need serious attention.
I think you have nailed something very important to the mast with your concluding paragraphs John.
You might like to read the manifesto I wrote independently of any political organisation as a contribution to the independence debate in Scotland (“Building a New Scotland”)….I think it is fundamentally a “dual power” based model of transition….not written with the concept of dual power anywhere in my head at the time but now you have described that concept it seems to fit what I wrote. If you want me to send it to you email me at jim.osborne@talk21.com
I am involved in some community based initiatives which have potential to evolve into dual power type scenarios and these will provide some interesting learning opportunities on building dual power, the challenges, the limitations and maybe also identify strategically important issues which must be resolved to take the process further.
Do the people who have to live in this theoretical construction have any say in the matter? Or will this all be imposed like Thatcher-Blair policies?
David, I don’t think I could have made it any clearer in the course of 8,000 words that popular power runs through my conception of socialism like Blackpool through rock. If you are still in doubt about this, then either my powers of communication have degenerated massively or you haven’t read it.
Again a very well written thought provoking piece that I can think has many points that are relevant to today. But David’s small but important question is relevant. If a party were to come together and pushed for an election campaign eventually using the analogy of both your pieces, how does one take on the culture of capitalism and the general social excepted existence demographically as well as politically.
No plan of action, no “first steps”. 150 years of this has got us here. I will say AGAIN, How can you define the ‘end point’ in a Democracy? You can campaign on the direction, but the destination must be negotiated during the ‘journey’. This is more religion than politics.
Democracy is about pluralism and the free wishes of people or at least freely determined. i expect that socialism should be better than what we have now. the people will decide about the kind of society not work place committees! we have already agreed that all utilities and essential services including the production of basic goods and necessities will be socially owned or not profit orientated. Essentially we should committing ourselves to proposals that improve the lives of ordinary working people and their liberty. I really cant see that non politicos will accept the teachings of marxist leninists as being anything that should influence our direction and future.
I really don’t get David’s question, nor Paul’s support for it…..John’s proposition regarding “dual power” completely depends upon the direct involvement of the people in building the alternative power that forms the “dual” in “dual power”.
Ray and John
I am not as you are aware from various points of interruption on your debates, theory’s and ideological analysis and conversations on these I have mentioned,. An intellectual or versed in various political viewpoints and not as yet swung towards a political or theory stroke ideological viewpoint that I can call my exact fit. However John you have said I am sounding more socialist.
I do not disagree with any points of part one and two of your socialist posts, in fact I find it very agreeable, but the sceptical side of my nature always needs clarity. Therefore my point is even though dual power answers David’s initial point. It’s just.more than dual power argument. For instance in a democracy all intentions were and are based on the people. But in reality how did we come to this with the majority not voting and feeling betrayed and with the masses never mounting a challenge towards the corruption that implemented and actually caused the mess we find ourselves in today. If democracy can be stolen why should we believe socialism cannot be stolen also just as in the past and present in general. That’s the point we are trying to make. We were not attacking your ideas and theory, I was more interested in the reality.
Another point we must not forget
We have always strived to better our lives and tried to build more secure futures for our children, through education which cultural belief leads to a better lifestyle better financial security and escaping the traps parents the children escape from. Ask any man or woman what they want for the next generation, they do not mention socialism or capatilism.
History has a way of telling stories good and bad of struggles and achievement, but we learn from them and try to do better.
I have found that that no matter what the public need to believe in a cause that gives those assurances that have substance and meaning. But without the worry of being led by higher intelligence that uses the public for its own idealistic future that has no bearing on the here and now. Dual power the same as democracy just does not give me that assurance.
Paul
Hi everyone, John Tummon has asked me to pass on his apologies but he has been blocked from accessing the LU website by some technical problem. He has asked the LU website administrator to try and sort it out bu at present he is unable to continue to contribute to this debate and others he is involved in. JIM OSBORNE
To respond to Paul’s point (my response not JT’s)…there is NEVER any guarantee of democracy…it is completely dependent upon the continuing vigilance of the people….if apathy takes over democracy dies, its as simple as that. That is how democracy has been stolen in our country now. There won’t be any sort of “dual power” or any other peoples’ power unless the people can be energised and motivated. Democracy needs both mass participation and leadership but the required type of leadership is selfless, visionary and humble, not dogmatic, over bearing and bossy. Provide the right leadership and vision and we can start to build the “dual power” John T has talked about.
The concept of “dual power” is not the same as Lenin’s use of the term which described a particular juncture in the course of the Russian Revolution…. I think the meaning of the term is “counter-vailing” power…..an alternative power to the dominant one, co-existing with the dominant power and eventually replacing it as the masses become involved in increasing numbers.
Thank you Jim I except your point.
I am 86, so all I say needs a pinch of salt, my grasp of electronic communication is so weak that I can’t even maintain my own website, and my legs are no longer any use for marching. However, I’ve been involved one way or another in the labour movement since my dad went off to be a surgeon in the International Brigade in 1936, and have a rich experience of how essential it is to combine faith with doubt, theory with practice, and start always from where we actually are, with the people we actually have.
In my field, the NHS, where we actually are, and the people we actually have, already provide much sounder foundations for progress toward a democratic socialist society than all but a very few people recognise – and I’m afraid that still includes most of what still remains of the Left, in or out of the Labour Party.
I think John’s two articles provide a pretty good potential consensus summary of where most people who think of themselves as socialists now stand. Lenin was wrong, but he was no fool. The rightest thing he ever said was that people truly learn only from their own experience. So to be effective, ideas about socialism must not only start from the current problems people have already experienced in their own lives, but virtully reach completion within that narrow frame. History is enormously important, but it must come later, when people already understand that they need it, that they won’t get anywhere without it.
Health is important to everyone, virtually everyone has enough personal experience of a care system based on solidarity, and created by the labour movement, to understand that the NHS created a system of value production not based on commodity trade for profit. This needs to be explained, but we can do this entirely in terms of material experience.
I’ve written several books about this, the most generally useful is The Political Economy of Socialism (2nd edition, Policy Press, £16.99 – make sure you get the 2nd edition, it’s much better than the first).
I plan to attend the conference on November 30th, but I have yet to be convinced that, as yet at least, a serious movement can be built completely outside the framework of the Labour Party. But time is certainly running out.
Julian Tudor Hart
John Tummon and johnkeeley, I don’t know if you will agree with my interpretation of Marxism and Leninism as opposed to Marxism-Leninism with added reference to Josip Tito, and my attempt to bring it up to date with developments post-Keynesian welfare-capitalism and post-Soviet Union.
Leninist theory:
Imperialism is the highest stage within the development of the capitalist system, the product of monopoly capitalism. Capitalist imperialism is not just political, but is the final stage of development of capitalism. This stage is reached when the concentration and centralisation of capital, which is inherent in the capitalist system, creates a situation where competition within the nation-states needs to expand outwards as there is insufficient demand for goods within the country to allow for its economy to grow.
Economic competition tends to lead to military conflict between richer nations from the desire to control resources. As the result of uneven development, developed countries are rich and powerful and the undeveloped are held down and exploited. Capitalist Imperialism is the result of capitalism’s tendency towards the centralisation of capital and creating monopoly power. This shows that Marxist-Leninist theory is still true in the capitalist world today in 21st century globalization.
Exploitation, militarism, repression and violence are central features of capitalism today just as they were at the beginning of the 20th century, The violent, repressive predatory elements of capital accumulation are still with us today, as we can see in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the USA and Britain are trying to control the oil supplies.
Marx identified accumulation by dispossession as central to primitive accumulation of capital, such as the displacement of peasant and indigenous populations, and the proletarianisation of the petty bourgeoisie, the swallowing up of small businesses by larger ones, bringing things as commodities into the market.
The Imperialist monopoly stage that we see today with privatisations and marketization enforced by the IMF and the World Bank constitute the last phase of this accumulation. The primary force of this accumulation by dispossession is enforced by international financial system, by the USA exploiting resources of the developing economies of countries such as South Africa, Argentina and Mexico, the IMF and World Bank forcing cuts in welfare and privatisations.
American Imperialism is doing what British Imperialism did at the end of the 19th century; the robbery that made the first accumulation of capital possible must be repeated to keep capitalist accumulation expanding. After the world economic crisis of the 1970s, accumulation by dispossession has become critical to global capitalism. Asset stripping through mergers and acquisitions, asset destruction through inflation, indebtedness of whole populations, corporate fraud, the appropriation of pension funds and credit and stock accumulations are central features of 21st century capitalism.
The Marxist-Leninist theory of imperialism shows the link between the nation state and capital in its monopoly stage. The state works within a fixed space and can be subject to democratic processes. The capitalist operates over space and time, and can, shift location, move resources and make decisions in private without any democratic accountability.
The strategies of the nation-states are shaped by the interests of capital. Imperialism is the product of capitalist expansion. The military activities of the United States are driven by the political needs and economic needs of capitalist imperialism. The war in the Middle East is a strategy of political control and acquisition.
Globalization in the 21st century can be seen as the Highest Stage of Capitalism. The drive to invest in more and more consumption and over production leading to deeper and longer periods of economic and social crises within the global capitalist economy using up more and more of the planet’s resources as it tries to continually expand its markets, will eventually lead to economic failure.
Tito said when talking to Nye Bevan in 1953 that we mustn’t forget that the Soviet Union is, despite Stalin’s despotism home to the October revolution. He was in my view correct also when he said the darkest period in the Russian peoples history and the international workers movement was the Stalinist period and that he would support Khrushchev against the bureaucratic Stalinist elements in the Soviet Union. Tito saw de-Stalinization as essential to the survival and success of socialism.
I think historical and geographic material-dialectics of the last thirty years bears out Lenin and Tito’s theoretical argument and their practices and shows the error in Stalinist theory and practices. Tito’s model of socialism remains the most popular model of actually existing socialism, Stalin’s model is the most despised and has done the most harm to the cause of socialism.
I hope this makes sense, it’s a no-doctrinaire interpretation of what Marxism is about and what was implied/intended in Imperialism and the State and Revolution.
Lenin’s analysis: the 1914-18 War as an imperialist war for dominance of global resources, Lenin’s theoretical analysis of neo-colonialism, semi-colonialism and Imperialism ‘the highest stage of capitalism’, globalization of world politics and economy, are most closely connected with ‘… finance capital’, and the world is completely divided up, so that in the future only redivision is possible, territories pass from one ‘owner’ to another, instead of passing as ownerless territory to an ‘owner’.
During the rise of industrial capitalism European powers took colonies for the control of trade, for providing essential raw materials, and for the export of surplus labour and capital. The more developed capitalist countries are able to exploit the less developed regions perpetuating uneven geographical development.
Lenin saw the fight against imperialism as an important part of the proletarian struggle for socialism, He argued that colonial political independence would weaken the imperialist powers, as the possession of colonies is central to the capitalist need for expanding markets and labour and material resources to exploit.
The USA has emerged as the major global power since the Second World War; its economic growth has been facilitated by the expansion of its financial and political control of the global economy through institutions such as the IMF and World Bank and backed up by its military superiority, which has allowed it to control the Middle East, South America and parts of Asia.
Lenin discovered the connection between the colonies and the big banks of Europe by looking at how finance capital worked. Lenin restated as Marx had in Capital that as capitalism developed it moved towards the creation of monopolies and then towards finance capital, the ‘highest stage’ of capitalism.
Banks and business entered into the new relations established by capital. The British banks financed trade across the globe, and the building of infrastructure like the railways of India. The German and French Banks invested their money in Russia to develop its armament factories and railways. Banks became the means through which world trade was extended.
The financial institutions remained separate from the state. In fact forging links with one another, through extended families like the Rothschilds and interconnected boards of directors. They were used to fund state institutions, such as the army and the armament industries. Banks became the cornerstone of the new states, and of their drive for expansion. Lenin concluded that this was the highest stage of capitalism.
The crises of capitalism and the realization crises can only be solved by replacing the class power of capital with labour over the state, if inequality is to be challenged in the post-Keynesian (welfare-capitalist) phase of capital. The question is how we get there, and this is why both positions held in these discussions have their merits.
To quote from Left-Wing communism an infantile disorder by Lenin, Penguin Press 1920, ”He who wishes to be useful to the revolutionary preliterate must be able to sift the concrete causes of such compromises…which stand for opportunism and treachery…. ‘There are compromises and compromises, it is necessary to be able to analyze the situation and the concrete facts”(Lenin p23). As he says ”to refuse co-operation and compromise with possible allies is not this an infinitely laughable thing”, ”to go sometimes in zig-zags, sometimes retreating our steps, sometimes giving up the course once selected and trying others” (Lenin p52), ”The whole point lies in being able to apply these tactics to raise and not lower the general level of proletarian class-consciousness” (Lenin p53-54)
”It is not sufficient….to renounce the crying absurdities of ‘national-bolshevism’ which has talked itself into a bloc with the bourgeoisie…one must understand those tactics to be fundamentally wrong” (Lenin p56). ”It is for communists to build up the forces which will overthrow the social-patriots” (Lenin p64), ”mistakes on the part of left-communists are now all the more dangerous” (Lenin p66). Lenin saw social-chauvinism and left-dogmatism both as fundamentally wrong and holding back the class struggle and that such fundamental errors of social-chauvinism and left-dogmatism are as damaging to the class struggle as those of social-democratic reformism.
”An International does not mean sitting at the same table and having hypocritical and pettifogging resolutions written by people who think that genuine internationalism consists in German socialists justifying the German bourgeoisie’s call to shoot down French workers, and in French socialists justifying the French bourgeoisie’ call to shoot down German workers in the name of the ‘defence of the fatherland’! The International consists in the coming together (first ideologically, then in due time organisationally as well) of people who, in these grave days, are capable of defending socialist internationalism in deed, i.e., of mustering their forces and ‘being the next to shoot’ at the governments and the ruling classes of their own respective ‘fatherlands’.” (V I Lenin, Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1974, Moscow, Vol. 21, p94-101)
”Three currents exist in international socialism: (1) the chauvinists, who are consistently pursuing a policy of opportunism; (2) the consistent opponents of opportunism, who in all countries have already begun to make themselves heard (the opportunists have routed most of them, but ‘defeated armies learn fast’), and are capable of conducting revolutionary work directed towards civil war; (3) confused and vacillating people, who at present are following in the wake of the opportunists and are causing the proletariat most harm by their hypocritical attempts to justify opportunism, something that they do almost scientifically and using the Marxist (sic!) method.” (V I Lenin, Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1974, Moscow, Vol. 21, p94-101)
Lenin argued that nationalist and chauvinistic patriotism isn’t the correct Marxist strategy unlike the developing nations which in included Eastern and Southern Europe. (Lenin’s Collected Works Vol. 23 p38 cited in N Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought Vol. 2 p65, 66) Lenin was arguing that where capitalism hasn’t consolidated itself internally by destroying feudalism, national liberation movement are an appropriate political and economic part of the strategy towards socialism, defending native cultures and freedom from exploitation by the developed nation states of capitalist imperialism. What Lenin was arguing was (is) that in the developed nation states national unity should be replaced by class unity. (Lenin’s Collected Works Vol. 23 p59 cited in N Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought Vol. 2 p67)
The reactionary ethos of capitalism becomes (has become) manifest in both the developing and developed nation states in the highest stage of capitalism as ‘foreign and home policy as imperialism strives towards violations of democracy and towards reaction’. (Lenin’s Collected Works Vol. 23 p43 cited in N Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought Vol. 2 p67)
He who wishes to be useful must be able to ‘sift through’ the material-dialectics as to ‘which stand for opportunism and treachery’. There are compromises and its necessary to analyse which are evolving internationalism. (”Left Wing” Communism An Infantile Disorder by Vladimir Lenin, Communist Party, Pelican Press London 1920, p23) According to Lenin ”to refuse co-operation and compromise with possible allies_is not this an infinitely laughable thing” and ”to go sometimes in zig-zags, sometimes retracting… sometimes giving up the course once selected and trying others” (Lenin pp52-53) Marxism is a theory of dialectical-materialism not a dogma, the purpose is to be able to deduce tactics which raise and not lower the level of class-consciousness. ((”Left Wing” Communism An Infantile Disorder by Vladimir Lenin, Communist Party, Pelican Press London, 1920 pp53-54)
As a basic rule, practices which move in the direction of class-consciousness and internationalism are theoretically correct practices. Those which move in the direction of social-chauvinism and towards nationalism fall into the category opportunist left-communism. Lenin wrote ”it is not sufficient…..to renounce the crying absurdities on ‘national-bolshevism’ which has talked itself into a bloc with the bourgeoisie…one must understand those tactics to be fundamentally wrong”. (Lenin p56) Lenin’s argument was Marxists must evaluate all the economic, political and social forces nationally and internationally. His overriding assessment and conclusion was that capitalism is an international force and therefore socialism has to be international rather than national in its theory and practices.
‘‘It is not sufficient….to renounce the crying absurdities on ‘national-bolshevism’ which has talked itself into a bloc with…bourgeoisie…one must understand those tactics to be fundamentally wrong” (Lenin p56) Lenin agues Marxists must evaluate all the forces ”It is for communists to build up the forces which will overthrow the social-patriots” (Lenin p64) ”mistakes on the part of the left-communists are now all the more dangerous” (Lenin p66) ”British communists must…unite all their four parties and groups (all of them very weak, some very, very weak…)”. (Lenin p66)
Lenin saw social-chauvinism and left-doctrinarianism as a fundamental problem holding back the class struggle. He argued that there isn’t a single model of practices and tactics applicable to all nation states, that’s the fundamental error of left-doctrinarism. (Lenin pp71-72) Lenin argued that the transition from bourgeois democracy to a proletarian revolution cannot be achieved by the vanguard party alone. He said propaganda and agitation alone isn’t enough. This was true in both the developed and developing world. (Lenin p73)
In Britain Marxists need to work with social-democrats and socialist inside the Labour Party, also at this historic and geographic stage of the dynamics of globalized (imperialist) monopoly finance capital the priority work of the Marxist vanguard is to build a Left Front of the AGS, CPB, SP and SWP like the CAP, GU, PCF, PG and PCOF in France. And that this should like the Front de Gauche be a part of the EL and GUE/NGL led by Pierre Laurent national secretary of the Parti Communiste Français and Gabi Zimmer of Die Linke.
Lenin acknowledged the differences between nation states culturally and in levels of development, but saw the general crisis of capitalism as a result of the contradictions that result from a system based on creating surplus-value for profit as opposed to a system based on use-value to satisfy human needs. He argued that those Marxists and I add Marxist-Leninists who follow national-bolshevism and sectarian dogma show themselves to be ”un-dialectic” and ”incapable of reckoning with the rapid changes” so ”they continue to repeat the simple, and at first glance self-evident truth once learned by rote”.
The mistakes of left-communists must he argued be corrected, the idea that there is only one road to socialism and ”not admit manoeuvres, co-operation, compromise is a mistake which is….in fact has brought and is bringing the most serious harm” to the cause of socialism. (”Left Wing” Communism An Infantile Disorder by Vladimir Lenin, Communist Party, Pelican Press London, 1920, p81) WTO and EU directives increasingly demanding privatization and marketization of public utilities, health care and education as well as austerity cuts to solve the realization crisis post-2008 therefore the broad left must unite across the EU, this is the bottom line and overrides all others in the globalized higher stage of international monopoly capitalism.
It’s not just EU rules and directives, leaving the EU Britain would still be obliged by WTO agreements to privatise an introduce the market into health and other services. It must be easier to resist the forces of global finance capital and the political and economic elite that govern if the working class is united. If unity is strength and divided we are weaker then it must make sense for the working class and labour movement that we stay part of the EU and unite with the left across Europe and Scandinavia.
WTO general agreement on trade and services (Gats) article 1.3 says the WTO can rule on services provided on a “commercial basis” or those supplied “in competition with one or more service suppliers.”
A WTO committee has argued for an interpretation that could bring all public services under GATS and be settled by a WTO disputes panel.
These WTO agreements also call for universal public services to break up trade restrictive public-provider monopolies and substitute commercial competition.
WTO rules already require member states to apply such rules to the telecom industry and the WTO secretariat calls for similar tests to apply across all public services including health care.
Gats article 6.4 will force governments to open up their public services to foreign investors and markets.
Gats article 6.4 requires member states to show that they are not employing trade-restrictive policies and outlaws the use of anti-competitive non-market mechanisms making national governments’ domestic policies subject to WTO rules.
As the AGS, CPB, SP and SWP seem incapable of forming a Left Front like the CAP, GU, PCF, PG and PCOF (Front de Gauche) in France then it’s down to Left Unity to form a party like Die Linke in Germany as part of the EL and GUE/NGL led by Pierre Laurent Gabi Zimmer.
This is an important piece by John because the concept of people participation is woven into the proposal for Socialism. Even trade unions with an ‘awkward squad’ leadership have missed the key point about workers control. We know such control needs a political and economic shell as Richard Hyman reminded us in the 1970s when discussing workers control but for Left Unity this radical democratic and empowering dimension may be a defining element and allow us to outflank the myopic left and social democratic hierarchy politics. As the intervention says ‘Under economic democracy, labour would be de-commodified: when a worker joins a firm, s/he becomes a voting member of a jointly-owned enterprise, and is entitled to a specific share of the net revenue and to a say in what these shares should be compared to investment.’Lets build on these interventions a utopian vision based on practical ideas.
Julian….where could I get hold of your book?…..nothing listed on the Policy Press website.
John Tummon asked me to post the following question….can anyone offer him some advice about how to restore his access to the LU website? JIM
I have just sent my third email about this to Kate Hudson and still not even an acknowledgment. If it turns out she’s on holiday, maybe that will explain it but someone else should be delegated to pick up here emails, surely?
Do you or any other supporters know any other emails than content@leftunity.org, which is the one Kate uses to communicate with me?
Thanks for your help
John
I am now back, thanks to the efforts of the volunteers who run LU and this website.
Wolfie, it is a shame that you have, on two or three occcasions, repeated the same passages from Lenin in the same postings, as ithis makes it difficult to see the flow of your argument or its relation to the thread. Neither do you bring this full circle by trying yourself to relate it to the question of what is socialism and how we argue for it. It seems to rely on implicatioin, which is not enough.
On Lenin’s contribution to the analysis of Imperialism, you have presented this as well as it can be, but I think the analysis was faulty at the time and remains a problematic starting point when extrapolated to the early 21st century. You have yourself referred to several new factors in the post-war reconfiguration of capital, but not to the way the western side of the Cold War served to eliminate the competition between nation states for a continuing redivision of global resources, by placing them all within two overriding hegemonies – the USA and USSR – only one of which survives. If inter-state competition was an automatic result of the coming of monopoly finance capitalism, as Lenin argued, then how come the political realm trumped it in practice in this way? No capitalist state challenges US hegemony, militarily, politically, culturally or in terms of the Washington-based deformed Bretton Woods instruments you cite.
I’ve been researching for 4 years now for a book on imperialism in the twentieth century that I want to write, so I am very interested in what you have to say on this, but I don’t think this thread is the place. Why don’t you start a Discussion Section thread on Leninism and Imperialism by copying your postings here, and I will contribute to that subject there?
I think the person who wrote this article in places is deluded not just in some of the unrealistic proposals but in some of the assumptions about what constitutes socialism and how things might be in the future. We want ordinary working people to be involved in the party.
Pension off the old marxist leninists and fight for a radical transformation of society one based on reality starting from where we are.
Tony, I have not presented a blueprint but fleshed out some basic principles, which most people on here seem to want to be an important part of what we are aiming towards. We all want the “radical transformation of society” you do but no major transformational movement in history – Christianity, Islam, Fascism – has enthused its followers without a vision of what it wanted to create instead of the status quo.
Yes, the dots between the present and the socialist future need to be plotted, and Wolfie is right that zig-zagging will be part of that as we engage with changing reality along the way, but no-one gets on a bus without some kind of idea of its destination.
I come from what I assume you call an ordinary background – I have lived in rented accommodation for 35 years of my life – but, like most questioning people, I am also extraordinary. I don’t like the idea of ‘ordinary’; it is too close to stereotyping and the vast majority of people I have known in my life, from all sorts of backgrounds, have lots about them which transcend the ordinary. Confusing working class with ‘ordinary’ does us no favours and can be incredibly divisive in practice.