daddyholes posted:getfiscal what are your thoughts on the "putting children first act". i was just reading august bebel's "society of the future" to give the context.
do you mean mcguinty's attempt to fuck over teachers? he basically lost. if that's what you're talking about i can ramble on about it for a bit if you like.
getfiscal posted:do you mean mcguinty's attempt to fuck over teachers? he basically lost. if that's what you're talking about i can ramble on about it for a bit if you like.
thats the one yes. im just curious i guess what you think about schooling under the bourgeois state and the way in which marxist-leninists can involve themselves with education workers while also adhering to the idea that socialism demands a different sort of education system
VoxNihili posted:have you tried http://www.reddit.com/r/socialism
the second thread is about an immortal technique music video from 2001
RBC posted:VoxNihili posted:have you tried http://www.reddit.com/r/socialism
the second thread is about an immortal technique music video from 2001
still better than the second thread here (but yes, i wasnt serious in that recommendation, obviously)
where else is gewd for discussion and that
I really don't understand what you're looking for. Every left forum I can find is just circlejerking about some news story or neoliberalism or whatever. There's no real debate or even constructive effort toward any goal. If you're just looking for people who agree with you there's democraticunderground, tumblr social justice, and LLCO comments. But at the end of the day you have to realize that Rhizzone has changed for a good reason, its because leftwing politics is retarded, and there is nothing more to be said about it.
daddyholes posted:im just curious i guess what you think about schooling under the bourgeois state and the way in which marxist-leninists can involve themselves with education workers while also adhering to the idea that socialism demands a different sort of education system
well you probably know the political situation but to recap: ontario political financing laws and such are much looser than most jurisdictions in canada. unions and corporations can give money, and more importantly third party groups do a fair amount of advertising.
mcguinty only ever got elected because teachers and nurses preferred the liberals as a bloc because of the terrible cuts of the conservatives. they spend millions of dollars attacking the conservatives during campaigns and the unions imply that teachers should vote liberal to stop conservatives in most ridings. the official policy is that they should vote NDP in ridings the NDP can win (most of the union leaders are NDP supporters), but the implication is that the liberals should be (re)elected.
anyway mcguinty felt he had to decide between bay street (which told him there could be a debt crisis if he didn't cut spending) and the teachers. for example, drummond said that they should basically give up on their big push to surround the classroom with support workers, and should freeze teachers wages. he even said full day kindergarten was dumb iirc. well mcguinty was like uhh okay look we'll keep my legacy programs in place but we'll freeze wages through legislation. so i think the teachers just said to him "if you fuck us over we're not going to run pro-liberal ads next time". but mcguinty couldn't really hold together his coalition as it stood so he quit and was replaced by wynne, who won because she basically promised to play ball. she might do some other stuff unions want like a higher minimum wage and stuff. and i guess her plan is to hope that she can eat into enough of the NDP's soft support to get another minority or something, or otherwise just lean on them for a while.
the conservatives have been begging the liberals to fuck over teachers because it's win-win for them. if liberals don't do it then they make it look like the liberals can't stand up to public sector unions which are bankrupting the province. if liberals do do it then the teachers-nurses bloc breaks apart and the liberals lose. the conservatives don't believe the NDP can win in ontario again, so some of the loose cynical voters will go to the conservatives, and the split left will result in a conservative landslide. at the same time, teachers realize that, which is why the bloc exists in the first place, and why they were quick to rebuild it even though they are getting screwed in terms of low pay and few opportunities for new teachers.
i'm not really sure how that basic situation can be changed except through peeling off workers from the conservatives (in places like oshawa or brampton) such that well-off working class people start to think of themselves as leftists. otherwise the average teacher (as a sort of index of progressive unionized working people) in many suburbs will continue to vote liberal because they think (rightly) that a conservative government would be a catastrophe. i mean much of toronto is already held by left-leaning people.
i'm not smart enough to know how to fix that though. if i had to guess i think that part of the issue is to polarize the debate in the cities. both electorally and non-electorally have the left fight hard within toronto to criticize the NDP and liberals for being so weak against the banks. like i think a left party would be useful as a way of forcing the NDP (and liberals) to defend their left flank. i'm not even sure i would support/join such a party, i just mean, there's an opening on the left-of-the-left. such a party probably wouldn't get much of the vote outside the cities so it wouldn't really split in conservatives so it would cause the major parties concern but it would basically be a field day of controversy within the cities. i mean any publicity is good publicity, so i mean a bunch of people flipping out that there's a significant minor regroupment party calling for a public bank or something would be nice.
part of the problem though is that the entire infrastructure to make that sort of shift possible is either tied up with the NDP or just sick of normal politics. like in quebec, there was a specific historical process that produced quebec solidaire, including a groundswell of opinion of academics and activists in the period after the defeat of a social-democratic government that was seen as betraying the cause. it also has nationalist connotations which aren't present in ontario. in ontario, i think most leftists don't see much point in contesting the NDP from the left because they either don't think there's much chance they'd get anywhere or they just already tacitly or actively support the NDP. in other words, the NDP would have to win and do badly in government for them to start up a left party, and the NDP isn't very likely to win a majority anyway.
Edited by blinkandwheeze ()
mcguinty only ever got elected because teachers and nurses preferred the liberals as a bloc because of the terrible cuts of the conservatives.
Yeah, conservatives have working class support because education funding is regressive.
How do you fix this? Well the Left can stop promoting policies which are directly against the interest of the people they're trying to "help".
Even trots know this.
http://www.intelligencer.ca/2009/03/28/hudak-says-budget-offers-little-for-working-class
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/03/cali-m23.html
California teachers unions back regressive tax proposal
mcguinty only ever got elected because teachers and nurses preferred the liberals as a bloc because of the terrible cuts of the conservatives.
Yeah, conservatives have working class support because education funding is regressive.
How do you fix this? Well the Left can stop promoting policies which are directly against the interest of the people they're trying to "help".
Even trots know this.
http://www.intelligencer.ca/2009/03/28/hudak-says-budget-offers-little-for-working-class
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/03/cali-m23.html
California teachers unions back regressive tax proposal
mcguinty only ever got elected because teachers and nurses preferred the liberals as a bloc because of the terrible cuts of the conservatives.
Yeah, conservatives have working class support because education funding is regressive.
How do you fix this? Well the Left can stop promoting policies which are directly against the interest of the people they're trying to "help".
Even trots know this.
http://www.intelligencer.ca/2009/03/28/hudak-says-budget-offers-little-for-working-class
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/03/cali-m23.html
California teachers unions back regressive tax proposal
mcguinty only ever got elected because teachers and nurses preferred the liberals as a bloc because of the terrible cuts of the conservatives.
Yeah, conservatives have working class support because education funding is regressive.
How do you fix this? Well the Left can stop promoting policies which are directly against the interest of the people they're trying to "help".
Even trots know this.
http://www.intelligencer.ca/2009/03/28/hudak-says-budget-offers-little-for-working-class
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/03/cali-m23.html
California teachers unions back regressive tax proposal
mcguinty only ever got elected because teachers and nurses preferred the liberals as a bloc because of the terrible cuts of the conservatives.
Yeah, conservatives have working class support because education funding is regressive.
How do you fix this? Well the Left can stop promoting policies which are directly against the interest of the people they're trying to "help".
Even trots know this.
http://www.intelligencer.ca/2009/03/28/hudak-says-budget-offers-little-for-working-class
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/03/cali-m23.html
California teachers unions back regressive tax proposal
mcguinty only ever got elected because teachers and nurses preferred the liberals as a bloc because of the terrible cuts of the conservatives.
Yeah, conservatives have working class support because education funding is regressive.
How do you fix this? Well the Left can stop promoting policies which are directly against the interest of the people they're trying to "help".
Even trots know this.
http://www.intelligencer.ca/2009/03/28/hudak-says-budget-offers-little-for-working-class
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/03/cali-m23.html
California teachers unions back regressive tax proposal
mcguinty only ever got elected because teachers and nurses preferred the liberals as a bloc because of the terrible cuts of the conservatives.
Yeah, conservatives have working class support because education funding is regressive.
How do you fix this? Well the Left can stop promoting policies which are directly against the interest of the people they're trying to "help".
Even trots know this.
http://www.intelligencer.ca/2009/03/28/hudak-says-budget-offers-little-for-working-class
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/03/cali-m23.html
California teachers unions back regressive tax proposal
mcguinty only ever got elected because teachers and nurses preferred the liberals as a bloc because of the terrible cuts of the conservatives.
Yeah, conservatives have working class support because education funding is regressive.
How do you fix this? Well the Left can stop promoting policies which are directly against the interest of the people they're trying to "help".
Even trots know this.
http://www.intelligencer.ca/2009/03/28/hudak-says-budget-offers-little-for-working-class
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/03/cali-m23.html
California teachers unions back regressive tax proposal
i think the failure of socialism was "real" insofar as it flows from a series of reasonable decisions and discoveries which were attempted in response to real problems in socialist economies. that doesn't mean they were right in some moral sense to disband socialism, just that it's very understandable from within the currents and popular views at the time. the explanations that most people provide to counter that are so simplistic and strange that i don't understand how they can believe them. at the same time i think there are logics within capitalism that constantly push towards the need to transcend capitalism and that it would be a very positive thing for us to continue to try to build a socialist economy. i don't really know if all the extra weird things people try to build into that (trying to say the real socialist countries were great or spending a lot of time draping yourself in its propaganda or whatever) make much sense.
i think lenin was both pragmatic and extremist in certain senses. like i think some of the limits people try to put on theory are odd - like the whole MLM people's war thing that tries to turn revolution into this exact worked out model that must be true in all cases and takes a very specific form or something. i think lenin would have been like you need to be very open to a wide range of possible roads to revolution. if anything the 20th century showed that all sorts of countries could have 'democratic' or socialist revolutions in different ways. and even if consolidating the revolution proved impossible in most countries for various reasons, i'm not sure that talking about "continuing the revolution" actually matters at all, as if places like cuba weren't interested in ways of reinventing their revolution to stay relevant. and almost everything trotskyists argue about specific choices is garbage, although it seems true that the lack of democracy (in a broad sense) internal to most socialist states seemed to help along revisionists.
in terms of extremism/anti-revisionism, though, i think lenin (or at least stalin) was also correct that there are some lessons that we can say are probably fixed. like the idea that workers need to create states, parties and leaderships that can build socialism, that socialism should be constitutional within these states and that the leadership of political organizations of the working class should be assured, that leadership should be subordinate to the political organizations and to the working class more broadly, that the state and the party are separate ideas, that it isn't just transparently a party dictatorship, etc. i mean there are dozens of things that i think are worked out facts, and i think that also applies to the economy in some senses, but otherwise i think people need to be very flexible and open with things.
in some ways the above things are very common on the left but they always seem to get bogged down in all these additional claims that don't make much sense to me, or historical claims that get really aggressive. i guess that's normal with stuff some people face as life and death. but anyway i feel like most if not all the public debates happening in places like jacobin and northstar are things that were considered pretty settled by communist parties around the world for much of the 20th century. like they keep trying to rebuild these weird kautskyist models of social-democracy or they write confusing things about the nature of the state or whatever. it's like the left has forgotten most of its history. the people who come closest in my opinion are maoists, and even then they tend to be very schematic and often concede huge territory to trotskyists and anarchists in various ways. they also seem very masculine and aggressive, like tempting fate with valorization of war and violence.
that said, there are real imperatives in the economy that constantly press people towards revolution, and the revolutionary road leads to fairly basic realities that determine much of the form of the revolution, so i'm sure the 21st century will involve numerous attempts at building socialism. i don't think i have any way of influencing those huge movements other than maybe as a minor bureaucrat in one of the states eventually but yeah.
What schools of leftist thought are not friendly to the concept of democracy (Zizek?), and is that a defining line? Is it enough to pin our focus on "class analysis", and hope that the representation aspect handles itself?
I am unsure.
i think lenin was both pragmatic and extremist in certain senses.
No, he was a self interested sociopath like every other politician. "All morality is relative to its contribution to the revolution." The goal of socialism is control, and it was highly successful at that for a long time. That people still think something good might have come out of it is heartbreakingly naive.
that said, there are real imperatives in the economy that constantly press people towards revolution,
But revolutions aren't fun, however much they get one's little extremist dick hard.
getfiscal posted:
tfw when you realize you're an insane person posting on a forum full of other insane people 
