one debate was over feminism, which they decided they were strongly in favour of, despite the overwhelming evidence of misandry given things like men still expected to pull out chairs for women at restaurants. obviously everyone here is a trans-critical radical feminist so i'll let this pass in silence.
more importantly, there was a debate on whether to be an explicitly socialist organization with a particular set of values, or to be a broad church leftist party that were fishers of men rather than holding principles. they overwhelmingly went with the left party paradigm, meaning that they will not try to enumerate a bunch of beliefs beyond what's necessary for functioning. for example, it was traditional in the SWP-UK to have a statement of principles that referred to state-capitalism and such, this new party won't do anything like that, so that all sorts of leftists can join in. this is based on the theory that they need to peel off a lot of activists and voters from labour if they want to be a pole of attraction.
this left strategy has sort of spread like wildfire over the past decade, and increasingly so over time given the relative success of SYRIZA, and to a lesser extend the left bloc in portugal, die linke in germany, front de gauche in france and so on. closer to home for me, quebec solidaire has emerged as a left-of-left formation that has won two seats in the national assembly of quebec, and now plays a notable role in social debates.
at the same time, there have been a lot of problem cases. most of the above left fronts have not broken a ceiling of about 1 in 10 voters. in some cases, attempts at left refoundation have been pretty disastrous, as the NPA in france saw their presidential candidate win 1.15% of the national vote in 2012 (presumably flocking to the front de gauche). various left parties in italy have failed to do well, many disappearing from parliament over the last few elections. in many countries in eastern europe, the official left converted into social-democracy, with hardliners sticking to reformulated communist parties with very little theoretical innovation.
the exception to most of this has been latin america, where left-social-democratic parties have been elected in many countries. these countries do not escape the horizon of capitalism, but many have made important social reforms, such as chavez in venezuela. you know this but it's a narrative damn it!
anyway, my general opinion is that these parties are essentially attempts to rebuild second international style reformist parties, on a sort of 'militant reformist' model. often this is very explicit - as with the various neo-kautskyian types calling for a 'return to the SPD' sort of model. other times, like richard seymour, it's framed as a problematic but necessary step to rebuild relevance for the left in the sphere of politics. that is, it's reformist but we're all reformists right now, and maybe if we take power with left formations we can force contradictions which can be exploited by revolutionaries.
i tend to doubt that very much. i don't see how a party can take power, force contradictions within the system to come to a head, and then somehow harness this energy for a revolution, when the line of the party has already been liquidated for reformist purposes. especially because the counterattack would not be peaceful. in france this is more explicit: the candidate of the front de gauche was a member of mitterrand's government and a PS member until recently, he is explicitly trying to rebuild the common front program on a 'we'll get it right this time' basis. but if he stood by the PS when they turned to the right, why would we trust him again?
in greece, SYRIZA has recently liquidated their internal factions to create a monolithic party. this was presented as being essential to forming a united front for the possibility of taking power in subsequent elections. what did it mean in practice? that the various radicals - maoists, trotskyists, etc. - were attempted to be digested by the eurocommunist majority, almost explicitly positioning the party to be a "safe choice" that will attempt some sort of negotiated climb-down from the current economic mess.
is there any rationale behind being a "left-of-the-left-of-the-left" though? i'm not really sure. sitting off to the side and complaining about the turn to left regroupment is a pretty easy option but i'm not sure it actually fixes any problems. i think independence for the anticapitalist left is important, but if such smaller groupings (such as ANTARSYA in greece) get a tiny percentage of the vote, is there any point in having a separate electoral front at all?
anyway within a few days of left unity being founded, a green party candidate called for joint candidates between greens and lefts. if they've already given up socialism as an electoral goal, can they compromise with a middle-class ecologist party too? that might be too far of a stretch, but it'd be interesting to see how they relate to other minor parties. the track record hasn't been very great - a few seats between respect and greens and a few other minor parties.
EmanuelaOrlandi posted:sounds good where do i sign up?
i've posted a membership form in the pdf sharing forum. give it to my mom next time you're over.
SariBari posted:i enjoyed this post very much, gf.
♪ merci beaucoup ♪
littlegreenpills posted:i got back together with my wife. accelerationism
what why?
also the internet forum is the only currently revolutionary form.
1976
Concepts developed by Habermas provide a starting point, from which we can draw conclusions about proletarianization in the metropole: isolation resulting from the alienation which exists throughout the entire system of production. Isolation is the basis for manipulation.
Freedom in the face of this system is only possible through its total negation, that is to say, through an attack on the system as part of a fighting collective, the guerilla, a guerilla that is necessary if a genuine strategy is to be developed, if victory is to be had.
The collective is a key part of the guerilla’s structure, and once subjectivity is understood as the basis of each person’s decision to fight, the collective becomes the most important element. The collective is a group that thinks, feels, and acts as a group.
The guerilla leadership consists of the individual or individuals who maintain the open and collective functioning of the group and who organize the group through their practice—anti-imperialist struggle, based on each individual’s self-determination and decision to be part of the intervention, understanding that he can only achieve what he wants to achieve collectively, meaning within the group in all its dimensions, military and strategic, and as the embryo of the new society, developing and conducting the anti-imperialist struggle through the group process.
The line, which is to say a rational and logical strategy geared towards a single purpose—action—is developed collectively. It is the result of a process of discussion informed by everyone’s experiences and knowledge, and is therefore collectively formulated and serves to draw people together. In other words, the line is developed in the course of practice, through an analysis of conditions, experiences, and objectives. Coordination is only possible because there is unanimity regarding the goal and the will to achieve it.
Once the line has been developed and understood, the group’s practice can be coordinated according to a military command structure. Its execution requires absolute discipline, and, at the same time, absolute autonomy, that is to say, an autonomous orientation and decision-making capacity regardless of the circumstances.
What unites the guerilla at all times is each individual’s determination to carry on the struggle.
Leadership is a function that the guerilla requires. Leadership cannot be usurped. It is exactly the opposite of what psychological warfare describes as the raf’s leadership principle. Andreas has stated that if he had in fact acted in the way described by the baw, there would be no raf and the political events of the past five years would not have occurred. Simply stated, we would not exist. If he assumed leadership of the raf, it is because from the beginning he has always had that which the guerilla needs most: willpower, an awareness of the goals, determination, and a sense of collectivity.
When we say that the line is developed in the course of practice, through an analysis of conditions, experiences, and objectives, what we mean is that leadership falls to the individual who has the broadest vision, the greatest sensitivity, and the greatest skill for coordinating the collective process.
Leadership must have as its goal the independence and autonomy of each individual—militarily speaking, of each combatant.
This process can’t be organized in an authoritarian way. No group can work this way. The idea of a ringleader is out of the question.
The goal of the baw’s smear campaign against Andreas is clear: they are laying the groundwork for the pacification of public opinion in the event he is murdered. They present the entire issue as if it is only necessary to snuff out this one guy, Andreas, and that would solve the whole problem the urban guerilla poses this state—according to Maihofer, the only problem this state does not have under control.
We doubt that. Over these past five years, we have learned from Andreas—because he was the example we needed—specifically, someone from whom one could learn to struggle, struggle again, always struggle.
What he and we are doing is in no way irrational, involves no compulsion, and is not evil.
One reason that the baw hates Andreas in particular is because he makes effective use of all available weapons in the struggle. It was from him that we learned that the bourgeoisie has no weapons that we can’t turn against them—a tactical principle drawn from the observation that revolutionary contradictions can be developed within capitalism. So Andreas is the guerilla about whom Che said, “He is the group.”
Of us, he is the one who has consistently and for a long time now made the function of rejecting individual possessions clear. It was he who anticipated the role of the guerilla and of the group and who was able to direct the process, because he understood that it was necessary. It was he who understood the complete dispossession implicit in proletarianization as it exists in the metropole. It was he who understood that the guerilla’s isolation required the development of strength, subjectivity, and willpower in order to build a guerilla organization in the Federal Republic.
Once again, we must not forget that all revolutionary initiatives are initially instinctive processes—for us, the massive wave of strikes in Russia in 1905 and the October Revolution come to mind—direction, coherence, continuity, and political power encouraged individuals to develop their resolve and willpower.
For Gramsci, willpower was the sine qua non; strength of will as the motor force of the revolutionary process in which subjectivity plays an important role.
Ulrike Meinhof
1976
gyrofry posted:question: is 'the party' still a useful or viable organizational form
well i'm not sure but that sort of fits with something i was thinking about today. this is via some stuff i was reading about althusser, but also in consideration of the "kautskyist" trend towards rebuilding SPD-like parties.
lars lih argues that lenin was essentially a kautskyist his whole political life, and that he saw the universality of the russian road as not so much a negation of the need for an SPD-like party but rather the rehabilitation of second international marxism for the conditions of authoritarian imperialism. i think this takes things too far, but it does suggest a certain model: the masses elevate a vanguard party to power, which then reorients the economy towards socialism through a fiercely centralist regime. the masses play an important role in fighting bureaucracy and revisionism, but this basic separation still takes place where the soviet state is somewhat autonomous of the general public.
lih's argument is that 'stalinists' misconstrued leninism as a monolithic theory based on ideas of a 'party of a new type' and such which rationalized the substitution of the politburo for real open debate. there are many trot discussions about this in terms of 'substitutionism', but that's not so much what interests me. what i think, and althusser also argues, is that maybe instead stalin was locked into this kautskyian sort of paradigm where the CPSU was essentially a SPD-like party in conditions of dictatorship. that is, it was similarly monolithic, the "only game in town", it focused on the national road, it was stageist, it was economic determinist, it relied on simplistic theory, it extended into all areas of social life, etc.
these tendencies were expanded upon by other comintern parties, many of whom had converted en masse from second international parties. this process simply accelerated after stalin's death, where every major party converted towards social-democratic coalition-building (for example, the PCF's decision to endorse mitterrand as the sole left candidate in 1965, or the PCI's 'grand compromise' with christian democrats, and eventually outright eurocommunism). this was a managerial/ministerial socialism which was right out of the second international. this sort of bureaucratic attitude, with a focus on development of productive forces, almost inevitably affected reforms in the eastern bloc, where every country moved away from stalin's model (industrial artels in germany, hungarian market socialism, yugoslav self-management, etc.).
i think mao identified these problems well but he was attached to the people's democratic state which was itself an image of a sort of 'dictatorship kautskyism'. that is, it had no real institutions for rivalry to undermine bureaucracy, sticking to the idea of a monolithic party. when the cultural revolution happened, mao claimed that only 5% of the party cadre were bad, and the process that ensued had no real internal logic. the ultralefts were crushed quickly as a trend and the youth dispersed repeatedly. the problem, i think though, might have been that the state and economy itself was framed in this "socialism-from-above" way that made it essentially impossible to correct. which is why there was a massive tendency to shift towards a sort of managed middle-ground 'market socialism', or capitalist restoration, which happened in every socialist country. the official maoist line then was a sort of mass participation in rectifying the kautskyist-stalinist system, which was an incredibly difficult task because it became a sort of personnel issue rather than a structural issue.
i read an article the other day that stated some of these problems (focusing on the monolithic nature of stalinism) but i'm not sure you can solve them within maoism, because maoism defends stalin as 'basically good'. but if you accept that radicalization of democracy is central not only to pulling down bureaucrats but rather to structuring the whole project in itself, that it can't operate as a sort of conveyer belt between the masses and the leadership, then why would you support the liquidation of the old bolsheviks? and this isn't simply a "restoration" of the democratic kautsky, you'd have to go back to the 'state and revolution' and accept that popular power would have to be organized in a 'real' soviet/council form on a local and neighbourhood basis, even if federated and such. otherwise the economy would be treated as a 'mechanism' to be fine-tuned by the planners rather than a process of self-management. any managerial sort of socialism will tend towards the sort of thing that managers want to do - which tends to include market reforms. which means that the market itself needs to be smashed very quickly along with the bourgeois state. because the 'stalinist' state, despite rhetoric, is essentially structured along bourgeois (and nationalist) lines. especially because all the trappings of democratic participation are effectively nullified in practice, the democratic participation limited to workplace/union organs, which were easily sidelined over time by revisionists.
at the same time, you've got to explain why some sort of worker's state didn't magically flower. well i think that part of it is that this twin of social-demoracy and marxist-leninist model simply dominated the horizon of the left and purposely tried to destroy alternatives, even within systems like china. so like there were things like may 68 and the GPCR, but they had no clear idea of how to articulate into real counterpower. and i'm not really sure how they could, if there are always huge powers of recuperation and dispersal available to the institutional left. anyway i'm not really sure where i'm going with this but yeah, that's what i was thinking about.
as for these left unity blocs, they're also based on bad science. besides all the nonsense taken for granted about 'stalinism' they are mostly inspired by SYRIZA with the assumption that SYRIZA did something and the KKE is useless. I would question both assumptions, and if there's ever been a real analysis from the anglo-left about the power of the KKE, the unity and radicalism of PAME, and its revolutionary strategy that isn't full of emotional nonsense I have yet to see it. the left has been taken over by blogs and twitter, but you can't do a serious economic study with those resources. I've never seen Richard Seymore actually grapple with the KKE, simply take it for granted that 'stalinism' doesn't work so why bother to engage with the oldest communist party in the world with loyalties going back to NAZI resistance and the civil war, resistance to the dictatorship, entire 'red' islands.
swampman posted:Getfiscal, I think you're right that in the "fundamentally reformist" first world there can be no success for parties whose main strategy is to dominate a portion of the left-right continuum. The most successful radical political movements are based on programs, and election victories come as programs begin to work... I think a major failing of modern progressive is to underestimate its members' capacity for activity. People don't want to be exhorted to study Lenin and turn out at the polls, they want to be given something to do. Even a plan as fundamentally stupid as Occupy Wall Street was still a plan: show up at the park and just protest, and do whatever! Have fun with it! That was enough for very high participation among left radicals, some of whom took the concept in creative and unanticipated directions. So I guess the problem you're left with, is that you're trying to organize the sabotage of a police state that is watching your every move.
this is true but let's not forget that this is based on certain material circumstances on late-capitalism and are not an eternal principle. in the third world education plays a major role in radicalizing people, especially women and children. in the first world presently, people are over-educated and bored, we leftover goons know better than anyone that there is mass potential to 'do something' that goes to waste on useless internet projects and reformist politics. occupy, as well as the 60s new left gave people a chance to participate in something and give structure to their meaningless lives just by showing up at a concert or camping out or twinkling their hands and following rituals.
the main condition of the labor aristocracy is boredom, any group which means to harness them should understand that and not be an even more boring study group (not that studying is necessarily boring but if you've watched those lecture videos from WWP or SWP they are soooooooo boring and the person speaking is not qualified for anything)
getfiscal posted:ok so recently some leftists got together in the brutish isles and started a new left-of-labour formation called left unity. they spent most of the time coming up with that name but they also managed to hold a few debates.
What the hell? is this some kind of joke? Not cool.
babyhueypnewton posted:Any honest science would immediately disregard the other hypothetical ideas that never went anywhere
lol you clearly have never been involved in any science at all
babyhueypnewton posted:Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is the only one that's ever come up with results.
that's not really true. contemporary western maoism is not based on mao's actual successes, since it essentially agrees that the 'stalinist' state was a dead end and that only the far-let (a "real" shanghai commune etc.) had a solution to the deadlock. but this far-left was suppressed by mao himself, who tried to build a sort of center-left line within the GPCR. there has never been a case of a cultural revolution "working", it's entirely just an extrapolation of a certain logic at work which the majority of society was against.
also, if the measure of success is actuality in a very limited sense, then why is social-democracy a failure but maoism not? like, didn't chavez do pretty well? why is controlling a part of the forests of india a huge success but taking the oilfields of a country and directing the wealth towards social programs not? if it's because maoism is the only possible non-dead-end, then the reason is the logic of popular power. but if that's the reasoning, then it seems like it's wrong to limit that to maoism. the reason that comes next is usually that people's war is the only road to power, but i asked some maoists if that meant they wanted to launch a people's war against the chavista government in venezuela and they said the exact opposite: they wanted to strengthen the bolivarian circles because they had armed capacity. but that's obviously making them tail social-democracy, so why not admit that?
getfiscal posted:why is controlling a part of the forests of india a huge success but taking the oilfields of a country and directing the wealth towards social programs not? if it's because maoism is the only possible non-dead-end, then the reason is the logic of popular power. but if that's the reasoning, then it seems like it's wrong to limit that to maoism.
wanna see the answers to this, cmon purity squads.
dumpies probably are part of a continuum which includes the whole academic and NGO world (the social economy). the social economy exploded in the neoliberal era as the state retreated, partly as a survival mechanism both for people at the bottom but also for middle class types.
the article i read sort of focused on how dumpies and the social economy were mobilized for the sawant campaign along with working class types. and he points out that a lot of these people were explicitly critical of occupy (from the right) and seemed more interested in recuperation of the existing system from their class viewpoint. that is, i think he meant they wanted the government to spend more on social centers, academic institutions, etc. - which creates jobs, but very specific kinds of jobs.
i think it'd be interesting to work in an analysis of first-worldism into that, and also about the social bases of fascism and so on. i think part of what it misses is that people do get (probably) real gains from that sort of activism, too. like the NGO sector does a lot of good in itself, it's not just total ideology. just like a doctor at a private hospital is still performing surgeries that save lives and so on. i think this is an important issue because it's these dumpies and social economy people (the lower ranks of the petty-bourgeoisie) who tend to dominate the left in the first world. i guess that ties into discipline's article about working class voices.
SariBari posted:getfiscal posted:why is controlling a part of the forests of india a huge success but taking the oilfields of a country and directing the wealth towards social programs not? if it's because maoism is the only possible non-dead-end, then the reason is the logic of popular power. but if that's the reasoning, then it seems like it's wrong to limit that to maoism.
wanna see the answers to this, cmon purity squads.
quite simply because socialism without internationalist aspirations is doomed to be re-conquered by capitalism once that course becomes profitable. at the very least, social democracy leaves room for pro-western factions, who are always ready to depose the government knowing that popular support for their action can be manufactured in the international media.
you're right about a lot of contemporary maoism, and i disagree with it. badiou, for example, says that the vanguard state form reached it's end with the GPCR which is extremely dumb. and a lot of maoists are basically just far-left utopians who attach themselves to the reality of the chinese revolution to hide this fact. there have been recent attacks on lenin's "left-wing communism" for this reason.
however you're too focused on mao himself which is liberalism, what mao did is mostly irrelevant. this is the revolutionary potential of lin biao who made the symbol of mao into a mythical, revolutionary force while mao himself was alive which created the possibility of red guards condemning the party of mao in mao's own name. maoism is important because of the possibilities that emerged from the GPRC, otherwise it's basically the same as leninism.
basically maoism to me is the furthest success of communsim and seemingly the only one that's continued to inspire revolutions, but i have a completely open mind for any serious attempt at anti-capitalism which takes into account the reality of the laws of capital and the development of the 1st world labor aristocracy, and i wish groups like hezbollah, the chavistas, and even occupy luck.
MSH used to call most people who consider themselves maoists "fans of mao". that means they appreciate his rule but don't really appreciate his many errors. this led them to conclude that the cadre weren't "95% good" but rather "95% bad". but imagine how bizarre it is to claim that 95% of cadre are bad but somehow you still uphold mao. that seems more like liberalism than my claim. obviously it doesn't matter so much what mao thought or did, you'd have to say instead that it was mao's discovery that the commune-state must be actualized to defeat revisionism. but he didn't believe that and worked against it, and even a lot of maoists ridicule the idea of a commune-state. bob avakian has a talk where he says the idea that a country could organize itself around something like the paris commune is stupid, for example.
as you said, most of maoism is just leninism, if i was as loose as your definition then i'd be a maoist. i'm not sure it matters that i wouldn't call myself one but yeah.
but you're right on mao, he was a great revolutionary symbol by 1969 but the reality of his existence was counter-revolutionary. maybe it would have been better if he died in 1967 or something, though we've seen that doesn't work in vietnam. who can really say, it's an interesting conversation to have because it reaches the end of what we know and goes into what we predict. but marxism in the first world is bogged down in what we already know, which is the one form that works in making revolution, the one form of economy that emerges in a proletarian state, and the one form of revolution that has survived the fall of the USSR (MLM).
this is a bit of my own opinion, but what happens in nepal is really interesting. you pointed out a while ago nepal is following the same path as chinese maoism, except instead of prachada and the party turning right over 20 years it happened in like 3 weeks, however in nepal we're getting a renewal of the people's war and condemnation around the world of the revisionism of prachada. if prachada wins it's pretty disturbing and we're still at the theoretical dead end we've been at since the GPRC failed, but if a second revolution succeeds it might mean something entirely new.
http://www.revleft.com/vb/al-szymanski-red-t185513/index.html
im reading it now and it makes a pretty convincing case. we're so far from a complete understanding of the USSR, maoist china, socialist albania, etc it's redonculous. all we can say is that trots are dumb and anarchists are children
Panopticon posted:getfiscal what's your opinion of grover furr
i haven't read his stuff. his general aim seems to be to exonerate stalin completely from any wrongdoing. i'm not as skeptical as most people are to that undertaking but i'm still skeptical without having read it yet. the typical way this operates is that they attribute any gross error to his ministers and such. i'm not sure this sort of individual morality matters as much, though. like they usually point to yezhov and say he just went crazy killing people because he was trying to undermine stalin and then stalin got rid of him so the killings mostly stopped. but it seems to me that if you've got a system where a leading figure can order the murder of many thousands of people for bad reasons and everyone sort of goes along with it then maybe it wasn't all that healthy.
i think that's also true of china. i mean mao died and there was essentially a series of inner party maneuvers that liquidated the leadership twice and ended with anyone "left" in the party sidelined. but why wasn't there effective resistance to that counterrevolution. i mean the rot had to be pretty bad and the defeat so decisive that no one bothered to try. the standard explanation is that people were tired, demoralized and eventually leaderless after the defeats in the cultural revolution. but that's sort of an odd argument too because you had this huge apparatus of people that said they supported a radical version of socialism and then almost the whole thing gave up or turned capitalist.
i'm not saying i have some magic formula for success or something i just think that there had to be something internal to the logic of the system that produced that near-consensus to abandon socialism among the core of the party leadership and that the institutions they relied on for their power obviously didn't have enough levers for the opinions of the average worker (which i think generally supported socialism but were mostly passive and with low levels of theory) to be able to force their leaders to keep to a socialist road.
but if there's truth to the "demand for normalcy" thing then i think it speaks to the power of capitalist ideology within even societies dominated by socialists. like the idea that capitalist reforms are normalcy is ideological. there are thousands of protests every year in china but if a leftist were to take power then the country would be described as mired in chaos.
getfiscal posted:i haven't read his stuff. his general aim seems to be