getfiscal posted:xipe posted:how does this differ from proper 'mass line' communist organising?
Just as an aside to this... It's probably true that a lot of Maoist slogans were just formulaic aphorisms that restated obvious things. With the cult around Mao they did take on a sort of guru quality, and in foreign countries you had academics like Althusser playing with the slogans to seem profound.
Ranciere famously insulted (his teacher) Althusser for this. Althusser worked out a discussion on how the "masses alone create history" as some basis for historical materialism when if you read Mao on the actual subject all he was really saying was that the masses were heroic and that leaders could often be stupid.
"Dare to struggle, dare to win" also probably means something like "we should be eager to discuss problems openly and eager to act on them" even though it sort of bounced around and became something like "take huge risks for the cause". In English it ended up being interpreted almost as an inversion of the phrase "nothing ventured, nothing gained" (with the same meaning).
Much of the stuff around "the mass line" was already explicit in socialist organizing literature for a long time. It probably developed as a full-fledged theory largely to distinguish Mao from the Soviet line and people around it like Liu Shaoqi (who had promoted his own hugely popular view of socialist organizing). Many Maoists admit it is wholly derivative and just say that it was the consolidation of the practice under Mao that made it useful when combined with people's war theory. One of the slogans around this was "a minority with the correct revolutionary line is no longer a minority", which suggests merging with the masses on equal terms to achieve common goals but isn't that profound.
I agree Mao can be like a guru for some weird people, particularly in his emphasis on stuff like self-criticism, physical fitness, art, and other stuff the petty-bourgeois can actually affect and pretend to be a revolutionary. But I hate this kind of populist common sense which combines a postmodern focus on discourse with a reactionary anti-intellectualism (never applied to oneself of course). The end result of course is obscuring how the words of anti-communists have real effects (the entire US government is based on a complex system of interpreting the words of dead white male slaveowners) because they are part of the ideological hegemony of 'common sense' while mocking attempts to build a communist ideological foundation as dogmatism, idolatry and crudeness. Saying fidelity to the works of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao is 'not cool' or whatever is the postmodern self-branding version of this.
conventional Maoist literature often does the opposite of what you're suggesting here - taking great efforts not to portray Mao as uniquely innovative at all times but demonstrating that Lenin (and to a lesser extent Stalin) were already saying the same things.
babyhueypnewton posted:We live in an era of May 1968s. In fact there's a derivative event going on right now in France called 'Nuit debut'
nuit debout, not debut. debout is standing up / awake, debut is start.
it's woke night, bro! like, super revolutionary, bro
Although I do think I disagree with you blink. The main current in Maoism did express themselves as just ML for a few years, but there was always a huge tendency in China and elsewhere to attribute conformity to Mao as a person as identical to sort of 'keeping the faith'. Like how people would say that we are all sunflowers and Mao is the sun. I don't think that was very deep of an affection which is evidenced by the fact it evaporated very quickly almost everywhere. This also contributed to the massive confusion when Hua Guofeng temporarily took power as successor but had no idea what he was doing.
Huey, "fealty to the PCF" is sort of an odd angle for that because althusser was on the fringes of the party, and even most of althusser's supporters thought his (temporary) rejection of May 1968 was odd and maybe connected to the fact he was in a sanitarium for part of it. After may 1968 the party made several official breaks with Marxism-Leninism, such as arguing that the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was not suitable for France and that socialism should be won through political democracy. Althusser and Balibar strongly argued against these moves within the PCF. Although he then endorsed the idea of a democratic socialism, and people associated with Althusserianism like Poulantzsas helped form the basis of a state theory which you can trace directly to the eventual emergence of groups like Synapsismos / Syriza. It's also just generally true that Althusser thought the leadership of the PCF were a bunch of buffoons.
getfiscal posted:Although I do think I disagree with you blink. The main current in Maoism did express themselves as just ML for a few years, but there was always a huge tendency in China and elsewhere to attribute conformity to Mao as a person as identical to sort of 'keeping the faith'. Like how people would say that we are all sunflowers and Mao is the sun. I don't think that was very deep of an affection which is evidenced by the fact it evaporated very quickly almost everywhere. This also contributed to the massive confusion when Hua Guofeng temporarily took power as successor but had no idea what he was doing.
oh i think you're misinterpreting me - i didn't intend to claim that maoists considered themselves simply marxist-leninists (i have explicitly argued against this idea several times on these forums actually) but that they saw themselves as an ongoing formalisation, refinement and verification of marxism-leninism as opposed to a real juncture. there was obviously enormous affection for mao as driving force of this process but that often didn't extend to him being thought of as a heterogenous theoretical figure
i also didn't think you were making a general statement about maoism, i was just suggesting a context in which these kinds of idiosyncratic interpretations came about
I think sometimes the "juncture" / ultraleft positions come about for the simple reason that if you just imagine a correct position on things divorced from actual struggles on the ground then you inevitably just end up imagining a fairly advanced and radical form of communism because that's what things are sort of tending towards historically. Like if you imagine that everyone else is about to embrace 'full communism' almost immediately then it seems bizarre and evil that a few people are acting as a brake on that.
Which is also probably a symptom which is generated in a situation where rightism is openly struggling for ascendancy, because people on the ground can see that there is a strong tendency emerging for an extremely conservative position which will either stagnate or devolve. Like in 1963 or something if you see the 'Soviet' line consolidating then you might anticipate that China will end up some bureaucrat-capitalist monstrosity and you desperately need to push against it by radicalizing.
I think Bettelheim sort of argues that's what happened in the mid-1920s to late-1930s in the USSR, too, really, which is that large sections of the party apparatus thought that some sort of 'market socialism' was the only viable path, while the 'center' around Stalin felt it had to destroy that bloc and build socialism as a strategy of avoiding falling into revisionism, although at enormous human cost. Which has always seemed as a fairly plausible argument to me, really, although it didn't end up working on a world-wide scale (socialism didn't win yet).
getfiscal posted:the 'center' around Stalin felt it had to destroy that bloc ... at enormous human cost.
Citation needed
xipe posted:get tom back posting here or thats an empty promise
*places ice cream sundae under a box propped up by a stick*
http://twitter.com/CallumWarwick96/status/751446285874556928
glomper_stomper posted:
Panopticon posted:looks like corbyn's support in the party is mostly outside the metropolis, which bodes well for labour's future as a party of the working class imo
http://twitter.com/CallumWarwick96/status/751446285874556928
and in other news, Orkney & Shetland have conquered most of the United Kingdom
glomper_stomper posted:
horseshoe theory is real and it's propping up this guy's face
glomper_stomper posted:can anypony in the MI5 explain the secret ballot process and the labour NEC to me?
cars posted:
xipe posted:the NEC voted on that at the end without putting it on the agenda and after corbyn and several of his supporting members had left lol... but people are sharing ways round it by eg joining unions so alls well that ends well
Link pls (I'm in unite)
http://www.unitetheunion.org/growing-our-union/communitymembership/
Then sign up as an affiliated member of the party using this form:
https://www.unitetheunion.org/campaigning/unitepolitics/your-party-your-voice/
....
A few more creative options to vote for Corbyn (if you weren't a LP member before Jan 12th) for cheaper than the ridiculously expensive £25 registered supporter status:
- Students, low-hours worker or unemployed: Join Unite Community branch £2.17 a month (before August 8th)
- Black, Asian or Ethnic Minority: Join BAME Labour £5 for 2 years
- LGBT Labour: join for £8 a year (or join as an ally/'solidarity member')
there were a couple more suggestions but i cant find them now; i'm sure the info will be compiled fairly quick, and also how could that decision hold up in court
xipe posted:the NEC voted on that at the end without putting it on the agenda and after corbyn and several of his supporting members had left lol... but people are sharing ways round it by eg joining unions so alls well that ends well
this shit is amazing. at least it's out in public?
xipe posted:and also how could that decision hold up in court
This is what im wondering. I knew they had to have a plan b because trying to keep him off the ticket was never going to work, but god damn this is some shady desperate shit
When Corbyn stood for leader, 200,000 people joined Labour and another 120,000 have joined in the last month. But, as MP Bob Marshall-Andrews said, “This is a return of the Trotskyists we had in the 1980s.” Some people might dispute this on the grounds we might have noticed 320,000 idle Trotskyists over the last 30 years, and it seems odd that 120,000 of them who couldn’t be bothered to join last year left it until now. They must be lazy Trotskyists.
*raises paw*
