Critisticuffs on Inflation
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“Well, I guess if you set your expectations low enough anything can seem like a major victory.”
Yep, ever the pragmatist. đ
And then you wonder why all your reformist efforts come to nothing.â
Oh, the irony. Remind me, how long has your little band of âbrothersâ been pushing your âwell-meaningâ pipe dream? đ
___________________________________________________________Lizzie, it will remain a pipe dream unless and until people like you come round to sharing it and seeking to realise it. It’s not just our loss that it has not been realised; it is yours as well!
This is the point. The precondition for establishing socialism – the mass understanding and support it needs – has not even remotely been reached. The vast majority of the population is not socialist. We know this very well and it is precisely for this reason that socialism has not yet been tried.
However, capitalism has been tried and the reformist attempt to run capitalism in the interests of the workers – like running the abattoir in the interests of the cattle inside – has demonstrably failed. The same old problems keep cropping up again and again. We perceive them as problems from our personal perspective but from the impersonal perspective of the capitalist machine they are just a sign that the system is working perfectly normally
Capitalism has failed us yet you persist in supporting a system that cannot logically operate in our interests. You don’t see the problem in its wider context. Tiny reformist victories such as the abolition of the poll tax are held up as examples that sustain the illusion that the system is amenable to progressive improvement and perfection. You don’t see that, like water finding its own level, what the system gives with one hand it takes with another.
Yet you continue to support this system. It is the fact that you and millions like you continue to support this system that makes socialism appear to be a “pipe dream”. That is the only reason why it appears to be that
“Yet you continue to support this system.”
As a matter of fact I don’t, but millions do and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Thus I remain a pragmatist.
Lenin was being optimistic when he was reported to have said “If socialism can only be realised when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see socialism for at least five hundred years.”
‘Actually I donât, but millions do and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.’
Lizzie45 – Well yes you do because you think ‘millions’ do. The irony is that many among your millions make exactly the same claim – I would support socialism but that would be a waste of my time because the vast majority will never support it. It’s a self fulfilling prophesy. In fact I never buy this excuse because it’s plain that those who use it are just projecting their own misconceptions, doubts and insecurities onto the ‘millions’ of others – it’s merely a way of not taking responsibility for the consequences of your political actions.
Lenin talked about waiting for âall the peopleâ. But only âmostâ people need be in favour of socialism before they can establish it. Lenin was just caricaturing the case against his view that a minority â a vanguard party â could. It couldnât of course because of the nature of socialism as a participatory democracy â and look what his view led to when he tried to carry it out.
It has been a long debate. Longer than any of us thought
Darren’s Socialist Standard archive website has just re-published a 1929 article on banking trying to differentiate the conflicting interests of financial and industrial capitalists, âcaptain of industryâ Versus âking of financeâ as the article puts it.
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2022/11/industry-and-banks-wicked-bankers-and.html
Without the bolsheviks, the Soviet Union and Marxism-Leninism, socialism would have been in a much better stand in our time, with them socialism did not advance one day. At the end of his life Lenin recognized that there was not difference between the old state and the soviet state, therefore, their minority coup did not work. Lenin knew what socialism really is. In order to understanding Leninism his collected works must be read and most Leninist do not do that. Lenin and Leninism some groups want to separate it, but Leninism is a body of ideas developed by Lenin and removing one element of Lenin will not resolve the problem, that is what the Marxist Humanist and ICC are trying to do, Leninism is a dangerous current with the working class movement
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