problems
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You can split this post if you want.
How would you change the minds of people who want the "opportunity" to gain greater wealth than others, as under a capitalist society?
Also, your pamphlet doesn't explain how a socialist majority would get elected all at the same time.
How do you keep the military from just turning the delegates into puppets, or disregarding them altogether (similar to what seemed to happen in Egypt with Morsi et. al. not that they were socialist) and ruling or the delegates form becoming the rulers?
I want to start distributing info or advocating, but I haven't found something I can get behind completely.
Thanks
Electing for socialism
The election of a majority of socialist delegates will not be an instruction to them from the whole population to go on running capitalism, as it is to political parties today. It will be an instruction, first, to take control of the armed forces of the state so that they cannot be used against the people.
Secondly, it will be an instruction to enact legislation transferring the ownership and control of all companies producing, distributing and administering society's goods and services into the hands of the whole of society. Once this is done, the job of socialist delegates to parliaments and other democratic assemblies will be complete. Their tasks will be at an end and they will return to ordinary life
“your pamphlet doesn’t explain how a socialist majority would get elected all at the same time.” Certainly different countries hold elections for their parliaments on different time-tables and for different lengths of office. Perhaps, there will be street demonstations about calling for immediate elections. We have always based our principles on historical materialism, that ideas are social. We expect the idea of socialism, or more accurately, its popularity, to grow socially too. Borders and frontiers do little to stem the flow of ideas, more true even today in the day of the internet and mass media. Like music tastes and fashion trends, politics too spreads via interactions of people as we see with Occupy and Arab Spring. There will be a world movement towards socialism, not a parochial national one. It has been said that there is two models of socialist revolution. The snow-ball effect and the avalanche scenario. There is also the theory of critical mass. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass_(sociodynamics) Certainly we cannot deny that there may be some places where there will be hold-outs, perhaps Saudi Arabia, but as they are relatively isolated we can work around them until they too eventually come aboard.
We've actually got a pamphlet that deals specifically with the questions you raise of possible military coups, delegates selling out, etc, What's Wrong with Using Parliament? It's on this site here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/whats-wrong-using-parliament
AHHH. very good. Is there anything you haven't covered, lol? Rhetorical. I though by the headline you didn't want to use it, tho Paddy wrote me u did. I will read it in depth. I'm dense sometimes. I'll get there. Thanks
You've missed the question mark and the subtitle "The cases for and against the revolutionary use of parliament" !
Just finished reading the pamphlet Whats Wrong With Using Parliament? and thought that's it's well argued and is based on democratic credentials. What's interesting about the pamphlet is the point that in the UK Parliament has evolved based on the dynamics of the class struggle from being feudal to being capitalist. Never thought about it in that way before. I know that while many workers have little faith in Parliament they still are unable to see any alternative to Parliament at the present time. Maybe there is a need to renew the idea that Parliament and all the associated structures can be transformed into something that can be used to facilitate the transformation into a socialist society.
The problem with thinking in the abstract, is that one cannot relate, or does not realise, that, one can think in the specific! That parliament is a specific function within Capitalism, is not a given. It is a state of mind, a state of mind, that the "state" would have us believe. We, as a class, can use the functionality, implicit within a "parliamentary system" and turn it to our own class advantage. We can turn it on it's head and use it and turn it, from an instrument of oppression, to one involved in "our" own class emancipation. The power is implicit. It is who controls it, that is the crux!To aver otherwise, is to ignore self-awareness and self-justification as a class and to submit to the self rationalisation, that the "ruling class" would have us accept. Steve Colborn.
I think a major contradiction exists for most workers in Britain which is that there is a general decline in a belief that parliament will make workers lives better. Just look at the decline in numbers voting and the general decline in party membership. The other half of the contradiction is that for many workers parliament is the only method of changing society for the better. It's this situation that socialists have to work in and find a way to connect with workers looking for some solution to the current crisis.
rodshaw wrote:I think we've been spammed – see post above.Offending spam now removed.
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