HenryKrinkle posted:glomper_stomper posted:the communist parties involved in the leave campaign, as far as i understand, have shown that they have no obligation to rush in advance to actually defend england's most oppressed and exploited classes from fascist terror.
i honestly don't know if this is the case but i know that in the US the "hard" left is overwhelmingly pro-immigrant and knows that attacking the victims of neoliberal globalism is no means of assaulting neoliberal globalism.
i mean for all the hate WWP/ANSWER gets for being "tankies" or w/e they are some of the most militant advocates for the undocumented.
Probably quibbling but WWP hasnt participate in ANSWER since the WWP/PSL split. PSL is in there now tho
Edited by Urbandale ()
in the 20s and 30s the CPGB didnt have roots among the people, it so thru housing action stopping evictions fighting landlords buidling tenants unions etc in working communities
the cpgb-ml may need to do something similar
ER: I am a European. My father is Spanish and my mother is British. I love European unity. I like going to wander around the Europe. I like hearing and speaking other languages. Our party’s policy is open borders. We are only in favour of international coordination and cooperation between workers of every country. We object to all immigration controls. But that doesn’t mean that automatically we have to support an imperialist organisation. There are lots of people who come Britain for job opportunities. Also, you have to understand that we have got lots of British people working all over the world. Are you going to bring them back? Let people go where the opportunities are. Capital goes wherever it wants. Why not people? Part of the hardship suffered by the working class is that the capital they have worked to provide to the capitalist goes to make more money in another part of the world. Capitalism is capitalism; that’s how it works. It can’t work differently. It must pursue maximum profit. The only solution is getting rid of capitalism. And leaving European Union may be a step towards it.
........................................................
A dreadful interview and I shudder at the offhandness of her "gotta break a few eggs to make a brexit" remarks, but it's not as though she is advocating mass deportation. She's saying, in a cold and sloppy way, that leaving the EU is bound to have unwanted and negative consequences for people, and yet it is still the right choice. That's not an unreasonable position.
when i looked up who the revolutionary communist group are i found this video.
this is similar to some of our outreach for building the housing struggle here in dublin, the groundwork of which is paying dividends for example related to the antifascist struggle; we are building up a direct action group/network to assist with building occupations and anti evictions.
antifa and other direct action groups are giving advice and will hopefully be part of it/overlap in members (its early days), and its also helpful for them because they can be criticised for coming in from outside of communities and 'making the situation worse' or some such.
there are some immediate things we can collaborate on: for example migrant families being placed in all white irish areas and getting racial abuse off their neighbours
it might go nowhere or it might build into something really good ... either way i thought i'd mention cos seeing examples of fash coming out is a bit depressing
Petrol posted:this cannot be our answer when we are dealing with an event like this, with such huge potential ramifications for imperialism
no one has ever demonstrated that the UK will be any less imperialist outside of the EU
c_man posted:Petrol posted:this cannot be our answer when we are dealing with an event like this, with such huge potential ramifications for imperialism
no one has ever demonstrated that the UK will be any less imperialist outside of the EU
I'm not sure it makes much sense to talk about imperialism in that way. Imperialism is not like a bad behaviour that countries need to be convinced or coerced into stopping, it is a mode that exists under certain conditions. Time will tell how much Brexit influences the rest of Europe, whether it stymies transatlantic adventurism, etc. But I don't think it's a stretch to call the potential ramifications huge.
Petrol posted:I'm not sure it makes much sense to talk about imperialism in that way. Imperialism is not like a bad behaviour that countries need to be convinced or coerced into stopping, it is a mode that exists under certain conditions.
yeah. the idea that you're going to definitively and controllably affect it at all via a principled (substantial minority) position on a referendum is idealist posturing
Petrol posted:A dreadful interview and I shudder at the offhandness of her "gotta break a few eggs to make a brexit" remarks, but it's not as though she is advocating mass deportation. She's saying, in a cold and sloppy way, that leaving the EU is bound to have unwanted and negative consequences for people, and yet it is still the right choice. That's not an unreasonable position.
she actually is advocating mass deportation, she just says bad things about capitalism and that she actually loves migrants afterwards to make you feel better about it
c_man posted:Petrol posted:A dreadful interview and I shudder at the offhandness of her "gotta break a few eggs to make a brexit" remarks, but it's not as though she is advocating mass deportation. She's saying, in a cold and sloppy way, that leaving the EU is bound to have unwanted and negative consequences for people, and yet it is still the right choice. That's not an unreasonable position.
she actually is advocating mass deportation, she just says bad things about capitalism and that she actually loves migrants afterwards to make you feel better about it
what the fuck, no she is isnt,
CPBG-ML_in_2014 posted:Crisis is built into the system of capitalist production, but, rather than let us understand that and draw our own conclusions about the continued usefulness of such a flawed set-up, our rulers do everything in their power to redirect our anger at the poverty that their crisis is forcing upon the masses of workers. So, just as the Nazis in 1930s crisis-ridden Germany pointed the finger at ‘jews’ as being the cause of German workers’ suffering, in Britain today our politicians tell us that ‘immigration’ and not capitalism is the enemy we need to fight.
The truth is that the only way to stop immigrants having a downward pull on our wages and conditions is to demand an end to all immigration laws and equal rights for every worker in Britain, and to recruit immigrant workers en masse into the British working-class movement. Together, we will be in a far stronger position to fight back against the attempts of our rulers to make us pay for their crisis through cuts to our pay, conditions, services, housing and pensions.
oh im sorry your right, that definitely reads 'get these damn polacks out of our country'
when i have my idiot glasses on!!!
Scrree posted:end to all immigration laws and equal rights for every worker in Britain
or else i hope they would have done it by now.
i dont see why the expectation isn't something along the lines of a "compromise" between labour liberals and the various right wing groups allow certain migrants to stay but with reduced access to public services and some sort of condition (like the ones common in US visas), probably contingent on employment in some way, that make them much easier to exploit by employers and much more vulnerable to the police.
like Guyovich or Petrol or Tears said earlier - it would have been nonsense for leftists to advocate for the referendum before it was announced, and the referendum happening at all was in itself a victory for white nationalism and racism in england.
BUT it would have been far worse if Remain had narrowly won, and as the working class suffered more and more pressure and degradation from the 'great recession' the west has never recovered, from the far right had been able to say 'look, we had a chance to regain our pride, but the damn laborites/leftists/jews/cucks threw it away!' - now they've revealed they have no actual way to follow through with all of the promises they made, and they're left holding a bag of shit.
the arguments for lexit were that the brexit was an oppurtunity too
1) strike a blow against a imperialist, bourgeois institution
&
2) sharpen class conflict in england
and, from 48 hours in, it seems to be doing just that
c_man posted:the people pulling for a lexit appear to have approximately zero capacity to force british capital to do anything in particular
if communists only advocated for things they had control over, there would be a lot more communist potlucks!!
Scrree posted:the arguments for lexit were that the brexit was an oppurtunity too
1) strike a blow against a imperialist, bourgeois institution
&
2) sharpen class conflict in england
and, from 48 hours in, it seems to be doing just that
no one has described how britain leaving the EU is a "blow against imperialism" in any concrete sense. as far as "sharpening the class conflict in england", i also disagree. it seems to have caused a bunch of leftist infighting, which ought to have been expected since the left is not organized in any capacity to dictate terms to capital (something very closely associated with being a major capital exporter), and as a result is left arguing over which of the options the national capitalist class in england have presented are the most leftist. the fact that the people who claim to be the migrants' supporters are arguing to vote against the welfare of migrant populations in britain does not do very much to make the lines of class conflict clear and stark. i dont know too much about the details but the reported increase in racist events post-referendum aren't a good sign that class consciousness is developing either, but again i dont know too much about that.
Maybe the CPGB-ML analysis is flawed, this doesn't mean the organization everyone was high on a few weeks ago is now shit. Compared to the critique they are facing from left-liberals I'm not so sure their analysis even is flawed, it seems to be a bit too realpolitik for polite company. But even if it was, throwing labels like racist at communist paties is liberal sectarianism at its most spooky.
c_man posted:Scrree posted:the arguments for lexit were that the brexit was an oppurtunity too
1) strike a blow against a imperialist, bourgeois institution
&
2) sharpen class conflict in england
and, from 48 hours in, it seems to be doing just thatno one has described how britain leaving the EU is a "blow against imperialism" in any concrete sense. as far as "sharpening the class conflict in england", i also disagree. it seems to have caused a bunch of leftist infighting, which ought to have been expected since the left is not organized in any capacity to dictate terms to capital (something very closely associated with being a major capital exporter), and as a result is left arguing over which of the options the national capitalist class in england have presented are the most leftist. the fact that the people who claim to be the migrants' supporters are arguing to vote against the welfare of migrant populations in britain does not do very much to make the lines of class conflict clear and stark. i dont know too much about the details but the reported increase in racist events post-referendum aren't a good sign that class consciousness is developing either, but again i dont know too much about that.
this is like arguing the Bolsheviks splitting from the Mensheviks is "causing leftist infighting" which is an argument that actually was often leveled at Lenin. if coming out against the EU and siding with the working class causes splits and open conflict then this sounds like what the left needs. the only coherent argument made so far is that this isn't the working class but the labor aristocracy, however we are not in America with a huge immigrant population necessary for the basic functioning of the economy so this argument does not automatically transfer without further analysis. it is also clear that even in the worst case scenario in which Brexit is nothing more than xenophobia, destroying the EU (or at least showing it can be withdrawn from) has potentially huge ramifications for Greece which is probably the most important country right now on the cusp of revolution. this is the kind of analysis I'm interested in, not parroting liberal anti-racist (not anti-racism) identity politics.
c_man posted:words
There's already a set of post-referendum policies suggested by most leftists who aren't hysterical liberals reflexively crying about working class people voting Brexit as if it were the apocalypse, even fucking Paul Mason made a decent proposal of new policies. You're probably choosing to ignore it though. Brexit neatly showed itself to be a class vote, and the working class vote won over the bourgeois vote, now leftists have to decide what to do about that.
Now that the Labour leadership is suffering a coup it doesn't seem likely that Corbyn could stand for a general election, but if he still were to, he (and possibly SNP/Greens) could totally actualize some core proposals such as restoring the closed shop, better minimum wage, etc. Some even say that they won't need to leave the EEA, but they totally should—we need to be clear that the breakup of the EU is an objectively good thing.
The damage that Brexit could bring to German and American interests by proxy is self-evident, Brussels is shook about this result as much as Greece's "Oxi" and the hysterical press reflects their interests. The EU is synonymous with NATO for decades now, and the EU record on arms sales, the breakup of Yugoslavia, recently Ukraine, etc are all evidence of its imperial character. The EU is not some class neutral, quasi-supranational state. It's not even a social-democratic construct like the Nordic Council, it is an openly pro-capitalist, anti-labor formation that was created to counter the labor movement when workers were more organized and on the offensive. It's a Mont Pelerin Society type of construction and its charters and directives are designed to depreciate wages and social spending. The "free" internal markets, especially the labor market, are designed to create a race to the bottom, especially after the enlargement to the former Warsaw Pact countries. I've said all of this already but it bears repeating because many leftists have this narcotic attachment to the EU that they can't even realize that it is everything they hate, except it's packaged in a romantic internationalist way so they refuse to see it for what it is.
I get that some of us have a sentimental image of migrants coming and going throughout Europe, or maybe it's just that "the left" is mostly made up of permanent academics now so they like the EU's grants and research cooperation, but this is not the average worker's reality. If you are a woman in cleaning, a man in building, restaurants, retail, the wages and conditions are getting worse by the month, and your view on what the EU is and does is much more influenced by everyday experiences and less by Facebook activism.
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c_man posted:no one has described how britain leaving the EU is a "blow against imperialism" in any concrete sense.
i did.
c_man posted:or they could focus on building a mass movement instead of getting really heavily invested in an electoral referendum that they will not be able to capitalize on regardless of the outcome
are you in an organization or just really really into telling people how to spend their time
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xipe posted:http://collections.mun.ca/PDFs/radical/OurFlagStaysRed.pdfin the 20s and 30s the CPGB didnt have roots among the people, it so thru housing action stopping evictions fighting landlords buidling tenants unions etc in working communities
the cpgb-ml may need to do something similar
Isn't this like marxism101 ....engage in popular struggle? Are there seriously brit parties which have no wish to do this?
COINTELBRO posted:You're probably choosing to ignore it though. Brexit neatly showed itself to be a class vote, and the working class vote won over the bourgeois vote, now leftists have to decide what to do about that.
A significant majority of both working age and people in part or full time employment voted to remain. a majority of people who described themselves as "asian" or "black" - the ethnic groups that experience the highest rates of poverty in the uk - voted to remain. while the exit vote did experience substantial bases in geographic areas with significant low income/non-working populations, these are also regions with substantial ageing and pensioner populations who both overwhelmingly supported exit and turned out to vote in a much greater degree than working age individuals
calling this a "working class" vote because it appealed to a particular minority of a highly stratified and heterogenous working class, and one side as a "bourgeois" option as if exit did not have immense support in the bourgeois-nationalist right or was not articulated entirely under political positions completely amenable and desirable to the bourgeois-nationalist right, is absurd
babyhueypnewton posted:Communist parties have to state a position on the issue so you either advocate for Brexit or for the EU. There are no other options.
i think there probably are other options seeing as a significant proportion of working age individuals - likely even a majority - did not choose either one
people who are ostensibly critical of bourgeois-democratic process uncritically acting as if the sector of a population that turned out to vote in a national referendum as somehow representative of "half the british people" is maybe the most insane thing about the discussions surrounding this
Petrol posted:As much as I appreciate the need to keep our facts straight and recognise the mostly reactionary character of the leave vote, the point is that true working class interests can and must be pushed to the fore in the brexit process.
You're doing this thing repeatedly throughout the thread where you assert or align yourself with arguments asserting a particular character of the Brexit voting base and its motivations and then immediately turning around to say that the point is only determining the direction going forth as if the previous argument had never been made
blinkandwheeze posted:Petrol posted:As much as I appreciate the need to keep our facts straight and recognise the mostly reactionary character of the leave vote, the point is that true working class interests can and must be pushed to the fore in the brexit process.
You're doing this thing repeatedly throughout the thread where you assert or align yourself with arguments asserting a particular character of the Brexit voting base and its motivations and then immediately turning around to say that the point is only determining the direction going forth as if the previous argument had never been made
That's not quite true. What I have been doing is insisting we remember that anti-immigrant populism preys on the economically disadvantaged, and although it may be true that most leave voters were motivated by fears about immigration, that doesn't mean they are all unsalvageable frothing racists.
These points are worth making because the vote is over and brexit is happening, so it's time for the left to finally start taking the discourse seriously and agitate for brexit to become lexit. It's hard to do that if we make the mistake of bemoaning and smearing leave voters as little Eichmanns, instead of advocating worker rights and an end to austerity, while at the same time condemning and combatting the opportunist fascist minority who are actually out there attacking and intimidating immigrants.
blinkandwheeze posted:"very high" is relative to general standards of participation and not an absolute quality, though. i haven't seen data on other age groups but 64% of voters aged 19-24 did not vote and while turnout is likely somewhat higher in older working age demographics i don't expect it to be hugely different
yeah. we can easily say that the two choices are between finance capital and reactionary protectionism or w/e, just like most bourgeois elections are choices between two different flavors of liberalism. i don't think pointing towards the turnout in isolation is necessarily a good tactic, seeing as British ppl were more willing to turn up to have their say about this issue than they were any general election since 1997 (or 1992?).
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Makeshift_Swahili posted:i don't think pointing towards the turnout in isolation is necessarily a good tactic, seeing as British ppl were more willing to turn up to have their say about this issue than they were any general election since 1997 (or 1992?).
Sure but it's nevertheless important to highlight the absurdity inherent in the "53% of Britons" framing of these discussions that have been coming from both sides
Petrol posted:while at the same time condemning and combatting the opportunist fascist minority who are actually out there attacking and intimidating immigrants.
I don't think anyone will disagree, even those most critical of Brexit, that sectors of the disadvantage are preyed upon by reactionary discourse and that significant proportions of a reactionary voting base are a misplaced response to genuine concerns
but if we are realistic about the composition of this voting base and the degree to which they represent a share in the working class generally significantly problematises the idea that we can identify a general character of this base as motivated by the concerns you suggest and not in fact racism, xenophobia and fascism proper
i think the entire idea of there being distinct and discrete categories of the leave voting base and an "opportunistic fascist minority" requires a general identification of a class character of the voting base. if we can't make that class identification i think it becomes the case that these are not in fact discrete categories and "condemning and combatting" the opportunist fascist base will in fact require condemning and combatting significant proportions of those you believe would be wrongly smeared as little eichmann's