#41
[account deactivated]
#42
The charnel house guy was the editor for platypus as well

If you haven't heard of platypus, this article gives you the inoculation you need

http://platypus1917.org/2012/09/01/anti-semitism-and-failure-of-left-on-iran
#43
#44
haha that's right tpaine i'm taking all your bits ahahahahaha
#45

pogfan1996 posted:

The charnel house guy was the editor for platypus as well

If you haven't heard of platypus, this article gives you the inoculation you need

http://platypus1917.org/2012/09/01/anti-semitism-and-failure-of-left-on-iran


lmao i had no idea that was him aahahahahah

#46

chickeon posted:

pogfan1996 posted:

The charnel house guy was the editor for platypus as well

If you haven't heard of platypus, this article gives you the inoculation you need

http://platypus1917.org/2012/09/01/anti-semitism-and-failure-of-left-on-iran

lmao i had no idea that was him aahahahahah



I thought I had heard that name (platypus) before as well and searching my bookmarks, found this:
http://www.leninology.co.uk/2013/06/open-letter-about-platypus-affiliated.html

This is apparently what the founder thinks of what the Palestinians should do:

Now I am going to say something for internal consumption only (this is perhaps a "closeted" position): At this point, the only hope that the Palestinians have is in and through Israel, precisely as a "settler colonial state," not independent of, let alone opposed to it. Just as the only hope for Native Americans has been through integration into the U.S.

Of course the degree to which the U.S. was racist it failed as bourgeois society -- as is true of Israel today. Now, precisely the problem is that Israel doesn't "want" the Palestinians. So the Palestinians are indeed quite vulnerable. But the rational kernel of such racism is that "they are not like us," i.e., the recognition and rejection of non-bourgeois forms of life. We must defend this rational kernel of bourgeois subjectivity obscure to itself, rather than the Ben Lewis et al.'s perspective of assuming everyone is always already bourgeois, anthropologically. They're not.

Bourgeois society is a fragile achievement, not natural. It is a society, not an individual matter.

And it is the only possible basis for progress in freedom.



I remember why I looked into them too. I saw Wolf invite Sam Williams, the author of the essays over at the excellent Critique of Crisis Theory site, to one of Platypus's meetings in 2012.(see comments of this essay) He was ignored and event didn't list Sam as a speaker, but it did have the usual suspects, Andrew Kliman, David Harvey, Paul Mattick etc. I suspect the invitation was extended because Sam had kept to economics, crisis theory and more importantly, only Marx. It wasn't until later that he wrote these gems and outed himself as One of Us:
A spirited defense of Arab nationalism and unity, Syria, and Libya: https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/responses-to-readers-austrian-economics-versus-marxism/empire-revolution-and-counterrevolution/
A defense of the Soviet Union's (and Stalin's) achievements: https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/money-wage-labor-and-marxs-critique-of-the-gotha-program/
And finally, an essay many of us are already familiar with: https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/is-russia-imperialist/

#47

karphead posted:

since he didn't approve my comment imma leave it here





wait, he has to approve all comments?

so he went through, one by one, and put the little check in the box for that post by "shieldwallnetwork," a fascist site for "grassroots patriotic outreach and organization" run by billy roper, who SPLC describes as "the uncensored voice of violent neo-Nazism" who "isn't afraid to celebrate genocide and mass murder"

and then he also greenlit a couple other posts by "anti antifa fa"

basically comrades are well justified not to feel safe around ross wolfe, is what i'm getting from this, and not just because he's a gross smarmy creep

#48
its there now

he has an update to the blog btw

Addendum


.
So after I pos­ted this a couple days ago it was picked up by Anti-Fas­cist News, which linked to it along with the sole re­mark that it was “in­ter­est­ing.” This led some fans of Set­tlers to then launch a cam­paign against me per­son­ally, re­fer­ring to me as “a sac­ri­fi­cial pig to be made an ex­ample of” (a Mar­rano, per­haps?) and ap­plaud­ing the fact that I’d been doxxed in the past as a “com­mie Jew” by Storm­front neo-Nazis. One per­son even threatened to send people to my door, all be­cause I cri­ti­cized a book she likes. Joshua Mou­fawad-Paul of the blog M-L-M May­hem, whose meta-re­view I linked and whose name I un­for­tu­nately mis­spelled, also re­spon­ded to the post.

Now the per­son who threatened to send people after me is de­mand­ing a re­trac­tion and an apo­logy, fol­lowed by “mon­et­ary re­par­a­tions will be made to the mul­tiple Black and in­di­gen­ous people who have had to de­fend their his­tory from the de­valu­ation of a White per­son for their labor.” You can’t make this shit up; it’s way too elab­or­ate and de­ranged. Rather than en­gage with a small group of ded­ic­ated and ob­vi­ously dis­turbed trolls, however, I’d prefer to sub­stan­ti­ate some of the cri­ti­cisms made in my open­ing tirade. Ad­mit­tedly, most of this con­sisted in me sum­mar­iz­ing en­gage­ments with Set­tlers un­der­taken by oth­er Marx­ists, with very little in the way of ori­gin­al com­ment­ary. Hope­fully this ad­dendum will give some sense of what it is I ob­ject to in the book.

To provide just one ex­ample of Sakai’s shoddy his­tor­ic­al re­search, he writes on page 53 of Set­tlers: “The pro-im­per­i­al­ist labor ar­is­to­cracy — which in 1914 Len­in es­tim­ated at roughly 20% of the Ger­man work­ing class — were the lead­ers of the Ger­man trade-uni­ons, the ‘so­cial­ist’ party, etc.” Un­sur­pris­ingly, no men­tion is made of what text Len­in sup­posedly made this es­tim­a­tion in (much less a cita­tion). I have scoured through all of Len­in’s writ­ings and have yet to find any­where he claims twenty per­cent of the Ger­man work­ing class be­longed to the “labor ar­is­to­cracy.” Neither in 1914 nor in any oth­er year.

Fur­ther, it’s very frus­trat­ing that Sakai nowhere ex­plains what his cri­ter­ia are for someone be­long­ing to the “labor ar­is­to­cracy.” In­stead he just cites US Labor Bur­eau stat­ist­ics, but then fol­lows it by par­en­thet­ic­ally claim­ing that “60% of this sec­tion is labor ar­is­to­cracy.” As if that were a cat­egory the Labor Bur­eau would ever use. On the fol­low­ing page he just baldly as­serts that “the set­tler labor ar­is­to­cracy is con­sid­er­ably lar­ger than its hard core, per­haps com­pris­ing as much as 50% of all male Euro-Amerik­ans.” Be­cause Sakai provides no in­form­a­tion for how he ar­rives at this fig­ure, there is no way of as­sess­ing its ac­cur­acy.

The “labor ar­is­to­cracy” thes­is first ad­vanced by En­gels dur­ing the 1890s and then ex­pan­ded upon by Len­in between 1905 and 1922 has already been chal­lenged con­vin­cingly by writers such as Charles Post and or­gan­iz­a­tions like the In­ter­na­tion­al Com­mun­ist Cur­rent as first “a myth” and then “a so­ci­olo­gic­al the­ory to di­vide the work­ing class.” Even grant­ing some an­ec­dot­al valid­ity to the ob­ser­va­tion that there’s an elite strat­um of skilled laborers — who, to use Len­in’s meta­phor, “fight for the scraps that fall off the im­per­i­al­ist ta­ble” — there’s no em­pir­ic­al ground­ing of the thes­is. Mostly it’s just a post-hoc ra­tion­al­iz­a­tion of work­ing class re­form­ism and de­feat.

Char­ac­ter­ist­ic­ally, moreover, Sakai neg­lects to men­tion that op­pressed pop­u­la­tions in the New World have just as of­ten been at each oth­er’s throats — e.g., the “Buf­falo Sol­diers,” all-black vo­lun­teer cav­alry units which served with dis­tinc­tion in mas­sac­ring Plains In­di­ans for nearly a quarter-cen­tury. Sev­er­al cen­tur­ies earli­er in what today is Mex­ico, the ma­nu­mit­ted Afric­an slave Juan Gar­rido be­came a highly suc­cess­ful Span­ish con­quista­dor. He also helped con­quer Pu­erto Rico, Cuba, Guada­lupe, Domin­ica, and Flor­ida. Or the Cher­o­kee lead­er Stand Watie, a slave-driv­ing plant­a­tion own­er who fought on the side of the Con­fed­er­acy dur­ing the Civil War and rose to the rank of bri­gadier gen­er­al. Watie was the last South­ern gen­er­al to stop fight­ing. Treach­er­ous at­ti­tudes and be­ha­vi­ors to­ward oth­er ex­ploited and op­pressed groups was hardly lim­ited to the white work­ing class.

Need­less to say, as a side note, I do not in any way deny the hor­rors en­dured by black and in­di­gen­ous people in Canada, the US, and else­where throughout the world. For a far bet­ter ac­count of ra­cism and white su­prem­acy check out Theodore W. Al­len’s The In­ven­tion of the White Race (1994), Bar­bara and Kar­en Fields’ Race­craft: The Soul of In­equal­ity in Amer­ic­an Life (2012), or Loren Gold­ner’s ma­gis­teri­al es­say on “Race and the En­light­en­ment” from Race Trait­or (1997).

#49
lol i just read it
#50

RTC posted:

This is apparently what the founder thinks of what the Palestinians should do:


wow i'm extremely fake surprised to see that a trot's "closeted" real talk is straight up nazism

#51
front page this whole thread
#52
fuck what da trotsky said
#53
Ramón gon' give it to ya
Fuck waiting for you to get it on your own, Ramón gon' deliver to ya
Knock knock, open up the door, it's real
With the non-stop, pop pop of icepick steel
#54
lets tilt these trots more https://www.marxists.org/archive/olgin/1935/trotskyism/index.htm readolgin.com
#55
J. Sakai Comments On “Looking At The White Working Class Historically"...which i noted is NOT on readsettlers.org/extras

Since David Gilbert has rightfully started off a re-evaluation of the entire question of the white working class, i would like to throw a few points into the discussion. First off, i think the value of Looking At The White Working Class Historically is in what it attempts. Examining a class by historical materialism is something that is seldom done by revolutionaries in the u.s.

Usually class is treated in an objectified way, as a statistical category that is accepted uncritically from u.s. census reports. Which is one reason why Movement discussions of class are so ritualistic and – in truth – useless. It’s when we confront a class as a living development, now and historically, that we can catch the flow of it’s evolution into the political future.

Gilbert puts his investigation in the right framework by moving W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction to the center. DuBois’ massive study of what happened to that brief period of Black bourgeois democracy after the Civil War in the South – known as Black Reconstruction – was written by DuBois as a defense of his anti-integrationist views. Already being iced by the Black Elite because of his break with amerikanism, and moving toward his call for “A Negro Nation Within The Nation”, DuBois aimed his history at the present. To think of Black Reconstruction as just about some old 19th century events is to miss DuBois’ crosscourt pass.

Looking At The White Working Class Historically gets right to the question: if Class, as scientific revolutionaries believe, is the primary shaper of political consciousness, then why in amerika’s 400 years has the white working class always been loyal to its capitalists (and thus its Race) not its Class? At a time when the u.s.s.r. has evaporated and national movements in the Third World are moving towards capitalism, people all over the world are rightfully questioning the value of communist ideas.

As Gilbert notes, to DuBois Black Reconstruction from 1866 to 1877 was such a telling test because it was the best chance amerika would ever have for a democratic alliance of Black & White working people. New Afrikan-led State and local governments in the ex-Confederate states lifted the poor whites up, gave him political rights, public education and protective labor legislation (women were, of course, excluded from this democracy). Still, the poor whites of the South remained loyal to their defeated slavemaster nation (and still cherish the “stars and bars” and “dixie” in their hearts today). As Gilbert so correctly writes:

"In the South, the poor whites became the shock troops for the mass terror that destroyed the gains of Black Reconstruction. DuBois explains that the overthrow of Reconstruction was a property – not a Race – war. Still, the poor whites involved were not simply tools of property. They perceived their own interests in attacking the Black advances…"

In the century since Black Reconstruction the white working class has congealed, solidified, grown old actually. A white working class which has always been opposed to any real democracy is hardly a bet for Class war and revolution. Let’s get real: after 400 years of waiting for the bus, this isn’t even a question but a fact of life like gravity and taxes. So how does the equation end up? What’s the bottom line?Paradoxically, i believe this only proves again how “Class is everything”, the primary division in the struggle between oppressor and oppressed. And the white working class is unfortunately no question at all.

Settlers is often misread to the effect that there’s no white working class. Probably because it wasn’t written more clearly. David Gilbert says:

"Thus, for Sakai, there is an oppressor nation but it doesn’t have a working class, at least not in any politically meaningful sense of the term… In my view, there is definitely a white working class. It is closely tied to imperialism, the labor aristocracy the dominant sector, the class as a whole has been corrupted by white supremacy; but, the class within the oppressor nation that lives by the sale of their labor power has not disappeared… under certain historical conditions it can have important meaning."

Of course, there’s a white working class in amerika. Settlers reminds readers of Engels’ point that “there are many working classes” (my emphasis). In world history, a great variety of working classes. The idea that there’s only one kind of working class – exploited, noble, urban and industrial, male-centered, politically class-conscious – is a cardboard abstraction. That’s why Walter Rodney didn’t like the term, wanted to use “producers” instead. The white working class is a particular kind of working class: one that is an oppressor class, by its very nature wedded to capitalism, and not a proletariat (the proletariat is the lowest, most oppressed class in society).A working class isn’t primarily determined or shaped by the fact of working for wages. The prison warden works for a wage, after all, while the Afrikan slaves who built amerika on their backs never were wage-laborers. What is determining is the extraction of surplus value. Technically, when we say a class is exploited what we mean is that capitalism extracts surplus value (what becomes profits in the level of the marketplace) from its labor.

For example, no one can deny that there is a Boer white working class in South Africa (at least there is at this writing in 1992 – this is only an example). They exist in the millions, in mines and offices and factories. They are wage-laborers. Yet, as a whole, they produce no (as in zero) surplus value. Economic studies show that all the surplus value created in South Africa is created by Afrikan labor. The Boer white workers’ wage-labor is merely an indirect mechanism for them to share in the exploiting of Afrikans. That’s why Afrikan workers live in dusty Soweto and the white working class lives in ranch-style homes with cars, appliances, .357 magnums, swimming pools and cheap Afrikan servants. They are a working class, alright, but a parasitic one with no real class consciousness and no contribution to make to the liberating of the world.

It isn’t so hard to see that the same thing is true with the white working class in settler amerika (the only working classes anywhere in the world with lifestyles like the Boer workers in South Africa are those here in north amerika). David Gilbert and other white anti-imperialists certainly understand this. And as he warns: “We must guard against the mechanical notion that economic decline will in itself lessen racism… The white workers closest to the level of Third World workers can be the most virulent and violent in fighting for white supremacy.” These are apt words for the 1990s, when new reformist illusions are being spread at the same time as David Duke and racist skinheads show the renewed appeal of the white Right.

Gilbert then raises his main question of what dissenting class forces can be seen arising out of “peoples relationship to the mode of production.” Even privileged whites “who live by the sale of labor power” have, in Gilbert’s view, different ultimate interests from “those who own or control the means of production”. In amerika’s future, he believes, “those who aren’t in control have a basic interest in a transformation of society”.

This may be true as a generalization, but what does it mean? Specifically, what is the mode of production now for white people? What is the white settler class structure really like? Without this foundation Gilbert has a seeming bind: old theory says that white wage employees (it’s hard to keep calling them workers since so many don’t do any work or are professionals) will be for “a transformation of society”, while immediate reality tells us that for many of the poorest whites the “transformation” they want is Black Genocide.

We’re trying to understand an expressway-gang-banging-import-export culture of neo-colonialism with the Class analysis and Race concepts of 100 years ago. i doubt it’s true that the white working class, shrinking and ever less-important, will ever be progressive in our lifetime. Already, a class grown old, they’re backward-looking, nostalgic, literally reactionary and recoiling from the future (like some Third World movements in amerika). I’m sorry for them, but not all that sorry.

To me, the main point is that in seeing Classes as they really are, in their historical materialist development and in their daily lives, we learn that truly change oriented classes are new classes. Young, being born in the contradictions of social structures. Young classes that are self-consciously creating themselves as much as they are being created by anonymous social-economic forces. The young euro-bourgeoisie was once such a class: bold, adventurous, reshaping the world through a revolution in the arts and sciences as much as the cannon. In a much lesser way, for example, the impact of the new class of New Afrikan islamic male vendors, artisans and merchants today is due to a similarly bold outlook.

Naturally, i don’t agree with all of David Gilbert’s thoughts about the present, but appreciate how he closes Looking At The White Working Class Historically by connecting his examination of Class to the 1960’s New Left, when some white working class youth searching for a different way of life were stirred into joining the “Jailbreak”. Although the stereotype is of student radicals from wealthy or very suburban backgrounds, a number of the most radical collectives and armed struggle groups of the 1960’s were disproportionately working class in their composition. The George Jackson Brigade or the semi-underground G.I. organizations, for instance. But then, these weren’t folks trying to reform the white union at the Ajax chrome toilet factory – they wanted out, of their dead culture with its racist and repressive rules and loyalties, out of their sick nation, the whole thing. They were a small minority, of course (although still many thousands, then).

When the “Ohio 7”, for example, began armed action, they were a small Boston-area collective from mostly working class backgrounds, forced underground for fighting u.s. backing of the Apartheid regime in South Africa. It would be ironic if they become the last anti-Apartheid fighters left in prison anywhere in the world.

May 1992

P.S. Reading David Gilbert’s Looking At the White Working Class Historically reminds me of C.L.R. James’ insistence that “There is no Black history, there is only history.” By which he meant that there is only one journey of human history and we are all in it: mixing, influencing and gate-crashing on each other’s stories. Although Gilbert’s paper only deal with the question of the white working class (and is obviously intended mainly for other white anti-imperialists) the question of Class that he pursues is just as important – and unanswered – for Third World comrades, although we’ve been avoiding it.

The question of Class is hardest to deal with not for white but for Third World movements here, who have ambiguously straddled the question by embracing a unity that says we’re entitled to everything the white man gets (“equality”). But no matter who lives them, those middle-class and upper working-class lifestyles (private houses, cars, appliances, credit card cultural life) come from the super-exploitation of Afrika, Asia and Latin America. Which is why Third World movements here have both hated Amerika and have been pulled towards loving Amerika – as so many Black leaders have pointed out – “even more” than white people do.

Can you have it both ways? A revolutionary future built on us sharing the exceptional wealth from super-exploiting the Third World.

Bluntly, the oppressed world majority can’t afford and doesn’t need $35,000 a year civil service office workers, $50,000 a year autoworkers, or $75,000 a year computer programmers. No matter what their Race is or what continent they want to be centric about. Revolutionary change requires us to discover a new communal class culture, a different daily life.

#56

AZ_IZ_OT posted:

I mean, he's not an idiot in a technical sense, so he's capable of nitpicking shit like this:

To provide just one ex­ample of Sakai’s shoddy his­tor­ic­al re­search, he writes on page 53 of Set­tlers: “The pro-im­per­i­al­ist labor ar­is­to­cracy — which in 1914 Len­in es­tim­ated at roughly 20% of the Ger­man work­ing class — were the lead­ers of the Ger­man trade-uni­ons, the ‘so­cial­ist’ party, etc.” Un­sur­pris­ingly, no men­tion is made of what text Len­in sup­posedly made this es­tim­a­tion in (much less a cita­tion). I have scoured through all of Len­in’s writ­ings and have yet to find any­where he claims twenty per­cent of the Ger­man work­ing class be­longed to the “labor ar­is­to­cracy.” Neither in 1914 nor in any oth­er year.



A citation is indeed missing - I think yall already observed and suggested a project for that sort of thing.



So I actually had to do some research a couple days back on these claims of 'lack of citation.' I found that actually Sakai does cite these stuff, he just doesn't always do it well. And sometimes he gets it wrong, in fact. The claim for the 20% figure appears on Chapter V, page 53 of Settlers, in between citations #6 and #7. If you look at citation #6, you'll see it's HOBSBAUM. op.cit.; V.I. LENIN. "Thesis on the Fundamental
Tasks of the 2nd Congress of the C.I." Collected Works. Vol. 31. p.184201
(no idea what's up with the page #), so I looked this article up and couldn't find this 20% figure in it. But the "op.cit." refers to citation #1, from page 51, which cites ERIC HOBSBAUM. "Lenin and the Aristocracy of Labor." In SWEEZY & MAGDORF. Lenin Today. N.Y., 1970. p. 47.

And sure enough:

In the first place, it is evident that the corrupted minority could be, even on Lenin’s assumptions, a numerically large sector of the working class and an even larger one of the organized labor movement. Even if it only amounted to 20 percent of the proletariat, like the labor organizations in late nineteenth-century England or in 1914 Germany (the illustration is Lenin’s), it could not be simply written off politically, and Lenin was too realistic to do so. Hence a certain hesitation in his formulations. It was not the labor aristocracy as such, but only “a stratum” of it which had deserted economically to the bourgeoisie (“Imperialism and the Split”). It is not clear which stratum. The only types of workers specifically mentioned are the functionaries, politicians, etc., of the reformist labor movements. These are indeed minorities—tiny minorities—corrupted and sometimes frankly sold to the bourgeoisie, but the question why they command the support of their followers is not discussed.



https://monthlyreview.org/2012/12/01/lenin-and-the-aristocracy-of-labor/

Well, so it looks like Hobsbaum actually got the figure not from "Thesis on Fundamental Tasks of the Second Congress of the Communist International" as one might guess, but from "Imperialism and the Split in Socialism." Here is Lenin discussing this figure:

In a letter to Marx, dated October 7, 1858, Engels wrote: “...The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.”

[...]

That these ideas, which were repeated by Engels over the course of decades, were so expressed by him publicly, in the press, is proved by his preface to the second edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1892. Here he speaks of an “aristocracy among the working class”, of a “privileged minority of the workers”, in contradistinction to the “great mass of working people”. “A small, privileged, protected minority” of the working class alone was “permanently benefited” by the privileged position of England in 1848–68, whereas “the great bulk of them experienced at best but a temporary improvement”.... “With the break-down of that monopoly, the English working class will lose that privileged position...” The members of the “new” unions, the unions of the unskilled workers, “had this immense advantage, that their minds were virgin soil, entirely free from the inherited ‘respectable’ bourgeois prejudices which hampered the brains of the better situated ‘old unionists’” .... “The so-called workers’ representatives” in England are people “who are forgiven their being members of the working class because they themselves would like to drown their quality of being workers in the ocean of their liberalism...”

[...]

The last third of the nineteenth century saw the transition to the new, imperialist era. Finance capital not of one, but of several, though very few, Great Powers enjoys a monopoly. (In Japan and Russia the monopoly of military power, vast territories, or special facilities for robbing minority nationalities, China, etc., partly supplements, partly takes the place of, the monopoly of modern, up-to-date finance capital.) This difference explains why England’s monopoly position could remain unchallenged for decades. The monopoly of modern finance capital is being frantically challenged; the era of imperialist wars has begun. It was possible in those days to bribe and corrupt the working class of one country for decades. This is now improbable, if not impossible. But on the other hand, every imperialist “Great” Power can and does bribe smaller strata (than in England in 1848–68) of the “labour aristocracy”. Formerly a “bourgeois labour party”, to use Engels’s remarkably profound expression, could arise only in one country, because it alone enjoyed a monopoly, but, on the other hand, it could exist for a long time. Now a “bourgeois labour party” is inevitable and typical in all imperialist countries; but in view of the desperate struggle they are waging for the division of spoils it is improbable that such a party can prevail for long in a number of countries. For the trusts, the financial oligarchy, high prices, etc., while enabling the bribery of a handful in the top layers, are increasingly oppressing, crushing, ruining and torturing the mass of the proletariat and the semi-proletariat.

[...]

One of the most common sophistries of Kautskyism is its reference to the “masses”. We do not want, they say, to break away from the masses and mass organisations! But just think how Engels put the question. In the nineteenth century the “mass organisations” of the English trade unions were on the side of the bourgeois labour party. Marx and Engels did not reconcile themselves to it on this ground; they exposed it. They did not forget, firstly, that the trade union organisations directly embraced a minority of the proletariat. In England then, as in Germany now, not more than one-fifth of the proletariat was organised. No one can seriously think it possible to organise the majority of the proletariat under capitalism. Secondly—and this is the main point—it is not so much a question of the size of an organisation, as of the real, objective significance of its policy: does its policy represent the masses, does it serve them, i.e., does it aim at their liberation from capitalism, or does it represent the interests of the minority, the minority’s reconciliation with capitalism? The latter was true of England in the nineteenth century, and it is true of Germany, etc., now.

Engels draws a distinction between the “bourgeois labour party” of the old trade unions—the privileged minority—and the “lowest mass”, the real majority, and appeals to the latter, who are not infected by “bourgeois respectability”. This is the essence of Marxist tactics!



https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm

This seems to happen a good deal, the citations are there, if you can track them down.

#57

gj crow. i was working on the source for that 20% quote last night. i got as far as getting this quote here and then trying to find out the employement rates in Germany in 1914 before going to bed:

When he addressed the highest body of representatives of capitalist America, this leader of a two-million-strong army of German trade unionists—namely, the Social-Democratic trade unions—this member of the Social-Democratic group in the German Reichstag, delivered a purely liberal, bourgeois speech. Needless to say, not a single liberal, not even an Octobrist, would hesitate to subscribe to a speech about “peace” and “culture”.



anyways, fuck you ross you cherry-picking piece of shit. if trotskyism is continually owning yourself then i think we finally have that question answered.

Edited by karphead ()

#58

kamelred posted:

Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:

what other books can the rhizzone promote to make trots mad at us?

das kapital




Power post, I smoke Camel reds too.

#59

I have scoured through all of Len­in’s writ­ings



lol almost nobody has done that. Lenin has 45 volumes of collected works. But maybe I'm wrong and that one Sakai statement made you so mad that you read 45 volumes of Lenin just to look for his statement on German trade unionism.

Let me list topics in my near and dear Soviet printed volume of Lenin:

Among Newspapers and Their Periodicals

Resolution on the Accountability of the Credentials Committee to the Congress

Speech In Reply to the Debate on the Present Situation and the Class Tasks of the Proletariat.

I'm Mean as Hell and I'm Gay and other hits by Tpaine

Edited by walkinginonit ()

#60


CLICK HERE to debunk sakai
#61
Oh wait , he talked about German trade unionism in On The Debate About The Present Condition of the Committee to Organize Manure Shovelers and their Relation to the German Proletariat. Idiot

Edited by walkinginonit ()

#62

pogfan1996 posted:

The charnel house guy was the editor for platypus as well



Platypus were the people where those emails between them leaked about how they had a crazy-person super-villain plan to "allow" the entire Western left to disintegrate at which point Platypus would leap in from the wings and lead the revolution...

I mean on top of indicating why this guy likes to screech at other leftists it also suggests that at one point, he entertained megalomaniacal delusions to match the tiniest ultra-left sect.

#63
Why are Trotskyites so terrible? It's almost like their mission is to sabotage any genuine socialist/communist movement.
#64

Barbarossa posted:

It's almost like their mission is to sabotage any genuine socialist/communist movement.


well, knowing what we do about their father, i can think of no better way to honor his legacy

#65
i think he added more to his addendum which includes a shoutout to McCainnus Krul
#66
chapo trap house book club read settlers dot org GOTY edition sam kriss hitler bUmp
#67
[account deactivated]
#68
close thread
#69

cars posted:

close thread


where else will we discuss slanderous accusations against the rhizzone by dubious individuals

#70

cars posted:

close thread






#71
close every thread but this one
#72

Ufuk_Surekli posted:

if anybody's worried about what they should read instead by the way, don't worry, thecharnelhouse.org actually published their own alternative reading list last month in the article preceding this one:

Le­on Trot­sky, 1905 (1907)
Le­on Trot­sky, Ter­ror­ism and Com­mun­ism: A Reply to Karl Kaut­sky (1920)
Le­on Trot­sky, Mil­it­ary Writ­ings, 1920-1923
Le­on Trot­sky, Lit­er­at­ure and Re­volu­tion (1923)
Le­on Trot­sky, The Chal­lenge of the Left Op­pos­i­tion: Writ­ings, 1923-1925
Le­on Trot­sky, My Life (1928)
Le­on Trot­sky, The Third In­ter­na­tion­al After Len­in (1928)
Le­on Trot­sky, His­tory of the Rus­si­an Re­volu­tion, Volume 1: The Over­throw of Tsar­ism (1929)
Le­on Trot­sky, His­tory of the Rus­si­an Re­volu­tion, Volume 2: At­tempt at Coun­ter­re­volu­tion (1930)
Le­on Trot­sky, His­tory of the Rus­si­an Re­volu­tion, Volume 3: The Tri­umph of the So­vi­ets (1931)

Vic­tor Serge and Nat­alia Se­dova, Life and Death of Le­on Trot­sky (1946)
Jean van Heijenoort, With Trot­sky in Ex­ile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacán (1978)
Dmitrii Volko­gonov, Trot­sky: The Etern­al Re­volu­tion­ary (1992)
Ian D. Thatch­er, Trot­sky (2002)
Joshua Ruben­stein, Le­on Trot­sky: A Re­volu­tion­ary’s Life (2011)



huh think i should check out this trotsky guy

#73
i read some of his books a few years ago, feel free to pick my brain
#74
lol