Historical Overview
In his article "All Power to the Soviets," V.I. Lenin stated that, "democracy is the rule of the majority" and said that the Soviets had legitimacy "as a result of truly free, truly popular elections." Repeatedly after October 1917, the government pointed to the Bolshevik majority in the Soviets in Petrograd and Moscow (and elsewhere) as evidence that the population had "chosen" the socialist road. Even until the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaders like Gorbachev would say that the country had made the "socialist choice." This "green light" to socialist revolution is central in Trotskyist defences of the October Revolution, in saying that the Soviets were more representative of the working class and therefore more legitimate. The Red Terror that followed and concentrated power into the Bolshevik dictatorship was, then, acceptable because of that initial spark provided by the pro-revolution majorities.
An alternative view, which was supported by early council communists like Rosa Luxemburg and Georg Lukacs, was that any socialist revolution was legitimate in itself to start with, but that the task of the party was to "build" a majority for socialism. That is, revolutionary forces ought to set up the basic structures of a socialist society, and then let those systems be directed by participatory/direct democratic institutions like worker's councils. Contrary to the Bolsheviks, then, one shouldn't "wait" for a majority, but should use whatever means necessary to seize power and reform society along socialist lines.
Ironically, Stalinism (orthodox Marxism-Leninism) essentially follows the Luxemburg line of thinking in some important respects. Stalinism largely rejects traditional democratic representative institutions in favour of a sort of front of social interests as filtered through party institutions. The reason for this is that socialism is non-negotiable. Socialism, which follows from historical laws, is so necessary that any public resistance must be crushed, not facilitated. Yet the same systems depended heavily on popular mobilizations in their building of socialism, which created a sort of paradox where official Stalinism held that democracy did in fact exist in an advanced form, while at the same time repressing any independent politics.
Lukacs pointed out very early on that Stalinism has a flaw: The new level of participation in the system promised for the future will probably never come about. That's because there are powerful forces within contemporary society, even one that is revolutionary, that motivate against socialism. The most important of these is the constant reinforce of the logic of the commodity - prices, buying, selling, hoarding, debts and so on. In the neoliberal period this has been seen as part of the process of financialization and numerization of social life. So socialist revolutions reach a limit where the public is being told by the economic structures to be selfish and being told by the government pronouncements to be altruistic, and it isn't hard to know which side wins in everyday life.
Faced with the limit of the commodity, there were a number of radical attempts at transforming society beyond such relations in the 1960s. The first was the Chinese Cultural Revolution, where radical leftists contended for power around a limitation of the use of incentives in the economy and new direct popular control over, or even against, the state. Another was the events of May '68 in France, where students and workers formed the basis of a rebellion that also contended for state power, although in a more limited way. Both of these revolutions failed when the state appealed to traditional institutions and economic normalcy against the potential for an alternative society. In both, Communist Party members played a leading role in the suppression of the revolutions, because of their position as trusted members of some sections of society.
After the failure of the events of the 1960s, and with the failure of the Fordist pact that had preceded it in the Western world, there was a convergence towards more classically bourgeois economics and the rise of financialization. Corresponding to this was the condition known as postmodernism. Postmodernism included the rise of new social movements that displaced class as the unchallenged center of leftist political subjectivity, such as race, gender and sexuality. With the fracturing of the subject, which had, of course, never been fully unified, new arguments arose among socialists about how to structure disagreements. The main way this happened was through the rise of Eurocommunism, which emphasized Gramscian modes of politics that saw the possibility of building majorities through parliamentary means. This was seen as an adaptation to the disappearance of the traditional homogenous working class. Leftist parties across Europe and much of the world reconstituted themselves as defenders of liberal-democracy and committed to various coalitions with social-democratic parties. While the entire left weakened in the absence of strong Keynesianism, those groups that had focused on revolutionary leftism became tiny sects. Later, when Latin American populists started to label themselves as socialists, much of their work was still within the basic coordinates of social-democracy, with only limited experiments outside the core system of representation.
As social movements developed, many took on anarchistic practices, drawn from a variety of sources, which emphasized horizontality and the possibility of renewing direct democracy through respectful deliberation. This culminated in the various people's campaigns against corporate globalization at the turn of the century, facilitated by new technologies and distrust of traditional institutions that seemed captured by neoliberalism. As old line Stalinist parties faded away in much of the world, there was a rise of smaller parties that emphasized connection with social movements and modeled their alternative as one that was deeply participatory. Old-style central planning became disliked by most of the radical left, while alternatives that focused on worker's councils and other systems of popular input became popular.
The Question
I live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The three jurisdictions I have listed there correspond to three levels of government, each of which have held elections in the past year. In the mayor's race, the right-wing Rob Ford won. Then, in the federal election, Stephen Harper and the Conservatives won. This October, the large majority of seats in Ontario were won by right-wing or moderate candidates. In other words, contemporary representative institutions in my locality are dominated by people who have no interest in radical socialism. So what claim do I have to overturn these three decisions, let alone overturning the basic structures that facilitated these decisions? What constitutes a mandate for socialist revolution?
Obviously such questions as the above only make sense given the failure of representation. But is it fair to act against representation because it produces the wrong choice? Or do we accept the limits of liberal-democracy in order to propose alternatives within it, considering democracy a value worthy of adhering to. Perhaps direct democracy is "more" democratic, but it seems odd to suggest that everything could be subordinated to this logic in a straightforward way. More importantly, it suggests that the large number of people who are largely content with voting for rightists would act differently if new institutions were forced upon them. But the history of actually existing socialism suggests that isn't true.
The problem with proposing radical alternatives within a democratic framework is that parliamentary democracy is premised on majority-building. If you can't show how your radical faction can influence the center of power, it falls apart. Therefore most of the traditional democratic left, such as social-democratic parties, are only vaguely left now, and shape their entire argument in terms of resisting some worse right-wing project against the state. But these parties will not move left unless the center moves left, which creates a vicious circle which paralyzes any resistance to capitalism within the existing order. But small movements outside of power, however dramatic they might be, can only be of grand importance if they can contest the power of the state itself, either through conversion to a popular political movement (like the Latin American and Carribean left) or through direct seizure of state dictatorship (the old Marxist-Leninist states). Yet even people like Hugo Chavez insist that their parliamentary states are transitory and that a new worker's state must be created.
A strong point made by Peter Hallward is simply that "waiting" has never made a revolution happen. If you consider capitalism a transformation of slavery, and existing capitalist society to be unjust, then it doesn't matter if the legal paperwork has been done. John Brown didn't leaflet for abolitionism, he tried to arm the people and destroy the institution he despised. "Waiting" for a parliamentary majority, or a well established consensus around some economic alternative, seems like it concedes all the ground to the opposition. Likewise, no pro-capitalist force ever fully adheres to democracy when it loses its majority, so it is a bit of an unfair fight. As Emma Goldman said, "If voting changed anything, it would be illegal."
The question of the state is central to revolutionary strategy, and I haven't reached any firm conclusions on it yet. My instinct, though, is when I see people fighting the police, I support the people, despite whatever legitimacy the agents might have as connected to a liberal-democratic state. If there is an absurd choice to be made by intuition at the base of things, then I would support a worker's revolution. But I'd like to see what other people think and work through it in more detail.
Edited by discipline ()
in the first, the police are preventing occupy wall street from camping overnight in grant park, and appealing to the "rule of law," that is that the police have to "enforce the law" above anything else. this inspires a deep revulsion in me, even with my distaste for occupy wall street, so like you, i see the "people" fighting the "police" and i side with the people
in the second, it is 1923 and the soviet police are going from town to town in rural russia administering vaccines. when a local village begins to resist, they are cruelly repressed until the only villagers left existing are those who will submit to the vaccination. now in this case, do i have any deep revulsion for the people? not particularly, but i see no problem with what the police are doing: they have some mandate that furthermore is not related to the rule of law, but toward some form of societal progress. similarly, in laszlo krasznahorkai's novel "the melancholy of resistance," a traveling circus that sows destruction wherever it goes comes to a deeply backwards hungarian town, in which everybody who lives is also evil, selfish, hurtful, stupid, and so on. when the circus' traveling retinue of thugs & brigands is told by the circus' leader to go out and destroy the town, "burn it to the ground and leave nothing behind," i find it inspirational, i'm even happy that it's happening, and when the townspeople join in, destroying the town and essentially destroying themselves, i'm happy for them, because they do not deserve to exist. finally, as a last defense, the townspeople call in the hungarian military to restore civil order, what the military finds is so disgusting that the colonel orders everybody imprisoned or institutionalized, and i don't see any problem with his decision.
so i guess in my view, there is something like mandates - socialist mandates? i don't know, but i support state action where there is a mandate. in this instance "Right makes Might"; but in the original instance, when rahm emanuel and the cpd pathetically repressed ows protesters, their stance was basically that their might made right - they used a pathetic excuse and a pathetic justification to the "law" that nobody took seriously, and this predictably filled everybody with disgust. so i don't believe central planning or democracy or popular majorities are goods in themselves; there must be some "socialist mandate" for any state decision to have legitimacy, and i agree with stalin when he says that in the absence of popular support, the majority must be built. this is a hilariously outmoded point of view in 2011, but i stand by it
Impper posted:
this actually made me think about my own attitude to the police - that is, let's take two separate cases:
in the first, the police are preventing occupy wall street from camping overnight in grant park, and appealing to the "rule of law," that is that the police have to "enforce the law" above anything else. this inspires a deep revulsion in me, even with my distaste for occupy wall street, so like you, i see the "people" fighting the "police" and i side with the people
in the second, it is 1923 and the soviet police are going from town to town in rural russia administering vaccines. when a local village begins to resist, they are cruelly repressed until the only villagers left existing are those who will submit to the vaccination. now in this case, do i have any deep revulsion for the people? not particularly, but i see no problem with what the police are doing: they have some mandate that furthermore is not related to the rule of law, but toward some form of societal progress. similarly, in laszlo krasznahorkai's novel "the melancholy of resistance," a traveling circus that sows destruction wherever it goes comes to a deeply backwards hungarian town, in which everybody who lives is also evil, selfish, hurtful, stupid, and so on. when the circus' traveling retinue of thugs & brigands is told by the circus' leader to go out and destroy the town, "burn it to the ground and leave nothing behind," i find it inspirational, i'm even happy that it's happening, and when the townspeople join in, destroying the town and essentially destroying themselves, i'm happy for them, because they do not deserve to exist. finally, as a last defense, the townspeople call in the hungarian military to restore civil order, what the military finds is so disgusting that the colonel orders everybody imprisoned or institutionalized, and i don't see any problem with his decision.
so i guess in my view, there is something like mandates - socialist mandates? i don't know, but i support state action where there is a mandate. in this instance "Right makes Might"; but in the original instance, when rahm emanuel and the cpd pathetically repressed ows protesters, their stance was basically that their might made right - they used a pathetic excuse and a pathetic justification to the "law" that nobody took seriously, and this predictably filled everybody with disgust. so i don't believe central planning or democracy or popular majorities are goods in themselves; there must be some "socialist mandate" for any state decision to have legitimacy, and i agree with stalin when he says that in the absence of popular support, the majority must be built. this is a hilariously outmoded point of view in 2011, but i stand by it
thats messed up
Edited by Crow ()
sosie posted:
It's very hard to remove oneself from history and look objectively at the world. In the 50s, the Frankfurt school wrote about the new social contract between labor and capital which would stabilize both forever. In the 80s, pomo philosophers wrote about all the reasons socialism was not historically inevitable and why the socialist experiments failed. Both movements have a lot to teach us about social change in the 1st world but are largely incorrect. It's clear that the contradictions of capitalism, which can never resolve themselves and can only be displaced over an even larger field, never went anywhere. The proletariat is larger than ever, the exploitation of humanity is increasing at a more rapid rate than ever in both the third world and in the first, and the earth is running out of places for the primitive accumulation of capital and the localization of crisis. In fact, the earth is simply running out of resources, and capitalism will be dead within the next 100 years whether it takes along most human life or not.
It's clear that the great depression was solved by the massive devaluation of capital in WW2, the increased efficiency of fixed capital for wartime production, and the massive appropriation of wealth from Europe and the third world by the USA. The crisis of capitalism in the 70s was solved by creating the world market and financializing the 1st world economies as parasites and labor aristocrats. Neither of these solutions actually solved the problem, but simply expanded the geographic area of capitalism and increased the power of crisis. If it took the most deadly war in history to solve the great depression, how can we possibly solve today's crisis which touches the entire globe and cannot devalue itself in the age of nuclear weapons? Even the most severe Keysnianism cannot touch today's crisis, the massive amount of surplus value that would be required to bring exchange value back into balance with value most likely doesn't even exist on the earth anymore.
Basically, after all the class struggles since Marx was born and even before then, which have gone back and forth and seemed to be in a down period until a few years ago, it's tough to stick to the fundamental contradictions of capitalism as the determinant force in history, but it is also necessary. As for the concept of democracy, it's a mostly nonsensical concept, and the western definition which you are using is complete nonsense. American elections and European elections represent the people about as much as Saddam Hussein getting 99% of the vote every election.
babyhueypnewton posted:
The idea of individual rationality and free will is not only a myth, it's based on christian morality which serves to oppress humanity.
To put it in your terms: this is not only incorrect, it is antiscientific. You are making the vulgar materialist error.
babyhueypnewton posted:
Basically, after all the class struggles since Marx was born and even before then, which have gone back and forth and seemed to be in a down period until a few years ago, it's tough to stick to the fundamental contradictions of capitalism as the determinant force in history, but it is also necessary.
lol what
the rest of your post was fine (except the line crow quoted) but wtf is this lol
Crow posted:babyhueypnewton posted:
The idea of individual rationality and free will is not only a myth, it's based on christian morality which serves to oppress humanity.To put it in your terms: this is not only incorrect, it is antiscientific. You are making the vulgar materialist error.
how come? I'll quote foucault on human nature:
these notions of human nature, of justice, of the realisation of the essence of human beings, are all notions and concepts which have been formed within our civilisation, within our type of knowledge and our form of philosophy, and that as a result form part of our class system; and one can't, however regrettable it may be, put forward these notions to describe or justify a fight which should-and shall in principle--overthrow the very fundaments of our society. This is an extrapolation for which I can't find the historical justification. That's the point. ..
and it seems sort of obvious to me that our beliefs are a result of a variety of economic, political, and social factors, none of which are the result of anything innate that we would call "free will". I'm interested in your thoughts here though.
babyfinland posted:babyhueypnewton posted:
Basically, after all the class struggles since Marx was born and even before then, which have gone back and forth and seemed to be in a down period until a few years ago, it's tough to stick to the fundamental contradictions of capitalism as the determinant force in history, but it is also necessary.lol what
the rest of your post was fine (except the line crow quoted) but wtf is this lol
too much typing, that ended up sounding confused and bad. I was trying to say that living in a period in which the class struggle is subdued makes it seem like the struggle is dead. marcuse couldn't imagine anyone resisting one-dimensional society, when only 4 years after one dimensional man was published may 68 was probably the closest the 1st world has come to revolution. empire was published in 2000 and it was mostly irrelevant 3 years later. just have confidence in the nature of capitalism to have crises even if it's not immediately happening.
babyfinland posted:
crises of capitalism do not beget proletarian utopia
capitalism will destroy itself. that's never been in question. malthus and ricardo already knew this before marx, and it's really obvious that once capitalism ran out of non-capitalist modes of production to devour and natural capital it would die out. marx is the one who shows that within the seeds of capitalism are it's own destruction and the solution beyond just an empty earth. you're right that to create the proletarian utopia it requires actions from individuals, but these individuals are still part of larger social forces and their role as historical agents is determined by their economic position. to me, stressing the individual character of revolution is wrong and unhelpful, the only power individuals have is to scientifically understand the forces around them, they cannot change them. lenin, mao, che, etc all understood the economic character of the world situation and their specific societies, there was absolutely nothing unique or special about them beyond this.
e: this is one of the biggest mistakes trots make and why they become liberals. the idea that if only lenin hadn't died, or if only trotsky had been in power instead of stalin things would have been different is nonsense. in fact, stalin suffered from this because he thought he could reverse the growth of the new capitalist class in the bureaucracy by killing anyone who had revisionist tendencies in the great purge when in fact this did nothing to stop the social forces that created men like gorbachev and bukharin. both of these men were infinitely replaceable.
Edited by babyhueypnewton ()
babyfinland posted:
people who are not marxists also understand these things buddy.
but what does this mean? what does it mean to not be a marxist? do you not agree with marx's political economy? in that case you're wrong. like in reality i don't talk using marxist jargon because people don't really study political economy in general and it's not necessary but on a discussion forum precise language is essential.
babyhueypnewton posted:babyfinland posted:
people who are not marxists also understand these things buddy.but what does this mean? what does it mean to not be a marxist? do you not agree with marx's political economy? in that case you're wrong. like in reality i don't talk using marxist jargon because people don't really study political economy in general and it's not necessary but on a discussion forum precise language is essential.
marxist-leninist. marxian economics is one thing. leninism is a political and moral commitment, even a religious commitment at this point
discipline posted:
I study political economy and marx is really wrong about some things indeed critical/marxist political economists would say the same
be gentle...
discipline posted:
I study political economy and marx is really wrong about some things indeed critical/marxist political economists would say the same
hmm interesting point. i too study political economy and i disagree. glad we had this debate.
babyhueypnewton posted:Crow posted:babyhueypnewton posted:
The idea of individual rationality and free will is not only a myth, it's based on christian morality which serves to oppress humanity.To put it in your terms: this is not only incorrect, it is antiscientific. You are making the vulgar materialist error.
how come? I'll quote foucault on human nature:
these notions of human nature, of justice, of the realisation of the essence of human beings, are all notions and concepts which have been formed within our civilisation, within our type of knowledge and our form of philosophy, and that as a result form part of our class system; and one can't, however regrettable it may be, put forward these notions to describe or justify a fight which should-and shall in principle--overthrow the very fundaments of our society. This is an extrapolation for which I can't find the historical justification. That's the point. ..
and it seems sort of obvious to me that our beliefs are a result of a variety of economic, political, and social factors, none of which are the result of anything innate that we would call "free will". I'm interested in your thoughts here though.
Marx:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
The point here is encapsulated perfectly in the first clause: 'Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.' In particular, Marx here is speaking from an understanding of German Idealism. I am thinking Schelling here, when he talks about the Grund (God; or in your case the material, 'objective' circumstances) rupturing, and from which the Geist ('passionate spirit', in our case the subject) splinters.
So from objective/material conditions come an unpredictable force, a force that is indeterminate, and therefore contingent. This is how when the USSR fell into revisionism, it took on a passive sort of attitude determined by the idea of the 'inevitability of worldwide socialism under Soviet power' and mediated under social imperialism.
To put it in our terms, the subject DOES have free will, which originates in the material conditions, but then takes on a life of its own. 'Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.' In that distinction, we avoid the error of determinism and positivism, and here we are backed by mathematics and physics. In the former, a good example is Godel's incompleteness theorem, and in the latter, the shocking idea that electrons are created 'borrowing from the future', and when they return their energy they annihilate from existence. 'The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.'
The reason why this happens, is because the Grund itself is incomplete. If All was whole and unified, before linear time, before the Big Bang, then there would be no change. All is not unified and whole, it is split, it is incomplete. The split is where there is space for rupture, and why things change and develop, instead of remaining static. This is the dialectical idea of a split All, a 'contradiction of relations,' and it is very much against the Idealism of a complete All (we can see this in the Western Buddhism of Steve Jobs and the like, but also in determinist scientists, in New Age types, in finance capitalists, on and on). From the All comes the Many, as the Maoists said in the Cultural Revolution: "One Divides Into Two, but Two do not Unite into One." This is because from the ruptured One comes Two, but since the One isn't whole, the Two cannot be again united into the One. From the objective conditions comes the subject's will, but the will cannot be assimilated back into the objective conditions. It is no wonder that after the revisionists retained power in China, was the 'Two Unite into One' rehabilitated and justified as a path towards using Socialism and Capitalism toward Communism.
To understand that we have free will is important, because it puts the revolutionary project in very intimate, dynamic terms. It is our decision to create a better world, it is not simply the functioning of faraway machinations, and if we don't do it, then the world will not come into being by itself.
A stupid article on wikipedia on the 'One divides into Two' matter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Divides_Into_Two
A much better article on it by Alain Badiou:
www.lacan.com/divide.htm
As far as individual rationalist goes, it exists its just.. well, the formula is very contradictory and incomplete in modern liberalism, which is why they jettisoned Freud so completely, and react so violently towards Lacan.
Edited by Crow ()
Impper posted:
if marx was 100% wrong about everything, still he is 100% right about everything
exactly, in error is the truth process.
lungfish posted:
So basically this argument rests on wrong being right, error being truth, black being white, up being down, left being right, dogs being cats, A being ¬A
"Who's to say I cannot speak on theory, if I speak on theory from the perspective of a lungfish?"
-Gilles Deleuze
lungfish posted:
So basically this argument rests on wrong being right, error being truth, black being white, up being down, left being right, dogs being cats, A being ¬A
Lol no
there is no wrong if there wasnt a right. if something is wrong, within it contains that which points to what is 'right'. the same thing for error. the same thing for black and white and everything, Ya silly idiot fish
babyfinland posted:
i know more about political economy than marx
wow congratulations, i know more about mathematics than Pythagoras
babyhueypnewton posted:
its gonna take me a while to wrap my head around that but thanks for the very c00l post. forgive me if this is dumb, but isn't marx's reliance on german idealism, especially hegel, a weakness of his considering he went out of his way to distance himself from hegel and idealistim at least in words? reliance on a geist to give our specific revolutionary struggles meaning makes us feel good but im not sure if it's scientific. nietzsche and foucault have convinced me that analysis of historical forces and grund as you say is the only truly revolutionary science, any revolutionary society which clings to the individual at all or to the idea of innate justice that we choose to strive for is tied to a slave morality which will drag us back into a system like liberal democracy which is the highest expression of it (at least so far).
why do you insist on discarding the non-material
babyfinland posted:
basically my problem with marxism is that it doesnt understand any form of non-capitalism social organizations except false ones like the communist states or fantasies like primitive communism. non-capitalist (and non-feudal etc) forms of organization have existed (mostly outside of Europe, shocking but true) but the assumptions that marxism lies on make them incomprehensible
actually marxism never claims to know anything about pre-capitalist economies because it's completely irrelevant under a capitalist mode of production. value and exchange value only have meaning in a capitalist mode of production and use value becomes unique under capitalism in a dialectical relationship between the three. marx does talk about feudalism when he touches on primitive accumulation and imperialism (the world market) but this is not a valid objection sorry.
i dont know why you're being so vague all the time, what economies are you referring to? this is often claimed about non-western economies but is rarely true and usually just ends up being a primitivist, noble savage view on economics.