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Although we criticise syndicalists who think that the way to end capitalism is through a general strike (that would be suicidal with the state machine still in the hands of the capitalist class), this does not necessarily mean that we think that a general strike can never be useful for the working class. Under certain circumstances, this can be an appropriate means of trying to defend living standards and trade union rights. So, for instance, we supported the General Strike in Britain in 1926 and here’s what we commented on a general strike in Belgium in 1960-1The planned general strike in Spain is not going to be a real strike (as these two were) but more of a one-day protest demonstration.  There’s nothing wrong in that but it’s probably not going to have much effect as the law that is being protested against has already been passed by the Spanish parliament and the government (recently elected) is not likely to repeal.  Also, the situation in Spain is (I think) complicated by rival trade union centres. You on the ground in Spain are in a better position than us to judge whether there is an element of one union confederation trying to show that it is more militant than some other one.There was a one-day protest public sector general strike in Britain on 30 November last year. Our discussion of this (and the text of the leaflet we handed out) can be found on this forum here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/30-november-tuc-day-actionIn the end, while showing solidarity to those on strike and joining it if we’re involved, we can’t do much more than JohnD says: argue the case for political action to end the wages system altogether by converting the means of production into the common property of society under democratic social control.

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Gilbert McClatchie.

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I have been following my own advice and re-reading Dietzgen’s The Nature of Human Brain Work (together with Pannekoek’s introduction to it). I can’t find any evidence for him having been influenced by Hegel either in ideas or terminology. The only philosophers mentioned are Kant, David Hume, Alexander von Humboldt and Ludwig Feuerbach.For the record, here is the essence of Dietzgen’s position that is being criticised:

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In the practical world of sense perceptions, there is nothing permanent, nothing homogeneous, nothing beyond nature, nothing like a “thing itself.” Everything is changing, passing, phantomlike, so to say. One phantom is chased by another. “Nevertheless,” says Kant, “things are also something in themselves,” for otherwise we should have the absurd contradiction that there could be phenomena without things that produce them.” But no! A phenomena is no more and no less different from the thing which produces it than the the stretch of a twenty-mile road is-different from the road itself. Or we may distinguish between a knife and its blade and handle, but we know that that there would be no knife if there were no blade and no handle. The essential nature of the universe is change. Phenomena appear, that is all.The contradiction between the ‘thing itself,” or its essence, and its outward appearance is fully solved by a complete critique of reason which arrives at the understanding that the human faculty of thought may generalize any number of varied sense perceptions under one uniform point of view, by singling out the general and equivalent forms and thus regarding everything it may meet as a concrete part of one and the same whole.

Nothing mystical there. No occult forces at work. Nothing occult at all.You say, RL, that you accept the materialist conception of history. This means that, unless you think history is a series of unconnected events, you must accept the concept of history being a continuous stream and a “whole”, from which historians extract, describe and form theories about parts. So, if seeing things as an interconnected whole is acceptable here why does it suddenly become “mystical” when applied to nature and the universe?

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But, Stuart, isn’t this is the thin end of the slippery slope? Where, and how, do you draw the line? How, and when, do you apply the brake to stop ending up arguing that, if you want a particular reform, the best way to get it is to support a party that has a chance of forming a government and so be in a position to implement it (and other reforms), say, Labour? The only other possibility is what we’ve got now: a myriad of single-issue pressure groups campaigning to get existing governments to implement their particular reform.Surely in all this, there’s a need for a group of people to put forward the bigger picture — that only socialism can provide the framework within which the problems facing ordinary people (and which these pressure groups campaign on) can be lastingly solved. Otherwise we’ll never get beyond struggling to go up a downward escalator (or is it a slippery slope?).

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Yes, very interesting. Also this comment:

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These changes in attitudes over a relatively short period of time may reflect the income and wealth inequality message conveyed by Occupy Wall Street protesters across the country in late 2011 that led to a spike in media attention to the topic.

Raising awareness of capitalism by name and its consequences may turn out to be the main achievement of the Occupy movement (they haven’t achieved any concrete reforms, not that some of them wanted to anyway). This raised awareness is certainly something that is making it easier for us to put across the case for socialism as a system of common ownership and democratic control with production for use not for the market and profit.

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Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

So, Dietzgen more closely resembles these mystics than he does scientists. Indeed, he pinched this idea from Hegel and the German naturphilosophers — who in turn lifted it from Jakob Boehme and Plotinus, among others.

I think you need to re-read Dietzgen The Nature of Human Brain Work (1869). He didn’t pinch his basic idea from Hegel (there is no evidence that he had read any Hegel by then, Hegel being a “dead dog” by 1869). He got it from Kant. In fact, one way of seeing his theory is that it is Kant’s without the idea that behind what we experience there is a thing-in-itself that can’t know anything about. So all that exists is the ever-changing world of phenomena which humans try to understand by naming, describing and classifying its parts (Dietzgen’s theory of knowledge and of science). This doesn’t imply the existence of “cosmic energies” (in fact it denies this) or anything mystical like that (which I agree Hegel was).

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

And thanks for the Pannekoek reference, but I have a copy of the book you mention, and have read it. …  I thnk he is wrong about Lenin (but we can duiscuss this another time)

Actually, it would be interesting to discuss it. Do you mean that you don’t think that Leninism was an ideology for the state-capitalist development of economically backward countries?

Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

No, I don’t have a theory of science, and nor do I want one — and nor do we need one. As I pointed out, all such theories are non-sensical

Yes you do, actually. It seems to be that (as in the quote from Glenn Magee) “the cosmos is …  a loosely connected set of particulars”, ie that the “particulars” have an independent existence and are not parts of a greater whole (which inevitably means that there are inter-related if only for that reason). I don’t think this theory is non-sensical, just a different, less adequate one.

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Engels isn’t criticising Dietzgen in the quotes you give. If anything, Dietzgen would have criticised Engels’s approach which assumes that the so-called “laws of dialectics” actually exist in nature and can be discovered. Dietzgen’s argument was that what science is essentially doing is describing what we observe in nature (or, rather, in the world of experience) and that therefore the “laws of nature” are our decriptions of what we observe, with a view to predicting future experiences so as to better survive.The theory of relativity does not refute Dietzgen’s theory of the nature of science. As a more accurate, and so more useful, description than previous ones of the same phenomena it was an example of what Dietzgen meant science was and how it progressed (by better and more useful descriptions).The Dutch astronomer Anton Pannekoek (who wrote A History of Astronomy which became a standard textbook) who accepted Dietzgen’s theory of science had no problem accepting relativity Here is what he wrote in chapter 6 of his book (originally written in German in 1938) criticising Lenin’s materialism Lenin As Philosopher:

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Hence, according to Lenin, “materialism” accepts Newton’s doctrine, the basis of which is that there exists an absolute space and an absolute time. This means that the place in space is fixed absolutely without regard to other things, and can be ascertained without any doubt. When Mach says that this is the point of view of contemporary physicists he surely represents his colleagues as too old-fashioned; in his time already it was rather generally accepted that motion and rest were relative conceptions, that the place of a body is always the place relative to other bodies, and that the idea of absolute position has no sense.Still there was a certain doubt whether or not space-filling world ether did not offer a frame for absolute space; motion or rest relative to world-ether could be rightly called then absolute motion or rest. When, however, physicists tried to determine it by means of the propagation of light, they could find nothing but relativity. Such was the case with Michelson’s famous experiment in 1889, arranged in such a way that in its result nature should indicate the motion of our earth relative to the ether. But nothing was found; nature remained mute. It was as if she said: your query has no sense. To explain the negative result it was assumed that there always occurred additional phenomena that just cancelled the expected effect – until Einstein in 1905 in his theory of relativity combined all facts in such a way that the result was self-evident. Also within the world-occupying ether – absolute position was shown to be a word without meaning. So gradually the idea of ether itself was dropped, and all thought of absolute space disappeared from science.With time it seemed to be different; a moment in time was assumed to be absolute. But it was the very ideas of Mach that brought about a change here. In the place of talk of abstract conceptions, Einstein introduced the practice of experiment. What are we doing when we fix a moment in time? We look at a clock, and we compare the different clocks, there is no other way. In following this line of argument Einstein succeeded in refuting absolute time and demonstrating the relativity of time. Einstein’s theory was soon universally adopted by scientists, with the exception of some anti-semitic physicists in Germany who consequently were proclaimed luminaries of national-socialist “German” physics.The latter development could not yet be known to Lenin when he wrote his book. But it illustrates the character of such expositions as where he writes:“The materialist view of space and time has remained ‘harmless,’ i.e., compatible, as heretofore, with science, while the contrary view of Mach and Co. was a ‘harmful’ capitulation to the position of fideism.” (210)Thus he denotes as materialist the belief that the concepts of absolute space and absolute time, which science once wanted as its theory but had to drop afterwards, are the true reality of the world.

In other words, it was Lenin’s version of “dialectical materialism” not Dietzgen’s that was repudiated by the theory of relativity.You say we don’t need a “philosophical theory of the universe”, but surely we need a “philosophy of science” or, if you prefer, a theory of science? You must have one, even if only implicitly. What is it?

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Rosa Lichtenstein wrote:

In fact, Dietzgen’s rather poor, a priori speculations are far easier to refute than are those of Engels and Plekhanov. But we can discuss this further the moment you post something — anything — of his that is worthy of merit. And by a priori speculation I mean assertions like this: “As a review in the October 1998 Standard put it ‘dialectics means that, in analyzing the world and society, you start from the basis that nothing has an independent, separate existence of its own but is an inter-related and interdependent part of some greater whole (ultimately the whole universe) which is in a process of constant change.'” Not only is there no proof of this, there couldn’t be. For example, how is it possible for everything to be ‘inter-related’ when there are vast regions of space and time that are, and always will be, inaccessible to us? On this, look up ‘light cone’ using Google — for example:

I don’t see how this refutes the philosophical assumption of the nature of “reality” made by Dietzgen that all that “exists” is the universe as a whole and that what humans do, to understand so as to better live in it, is to name parts of it as if they were separate things, to describe these parts and form theories on the basis of this.  In other words, that the world we observe and perceive is not made up of separate things but that supposedly separate things only exist as these in our minds. In reality these are only parts of a larger whole and so are inter-related in this sense.You seem to be assuming that what Deietzgen was saying is that the world is made up of separate things and that these things are inter-related as separate things. But that’s not what he was saying. Quite the opposite in fact. So light cones and so-called inaccessible regions of space and time do not invalidate his basic assumption. In fact, these are descriptions, based on our observations of part of the world of phenomena, which we use to try to explain what we observe (or, rather, in these cases, of what scientists use to explain what they observe). What Dietzgen was advancing was in fact a theory of the nature of science.

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Here’s what Marx had to say on the subject (in chapter 46 of Volume 3 of Capital):

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From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and, like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.

Of course, unlike land reformers who just wanted to end private property in land, Marx took the view that this principle should apply to human-made instruments of production as  well as to land and natural resources, and together at the same time.This is why socialism (or communism) can be described as a global society in which the resources of the planet, natural and industrial, are the common heritage of all humanity.

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Some of the chapters in this book reviewed on our blog should be helpful.

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Hic Rhodas wrote:

if I consider the “revolutionary wave of 1917-1923” I see a lot of mad insurrectional adventures (for example Germany) that couldn’t work. Or cathastrophists visions about revolution now seem me ilogical. I stand now for a conscient and majoritary revolution.

Have you seen this article about this period that appeared in the Socialist Standard of the time (February 1919)? Also, this article about why the events of November 1917 in Russia were not, and could not have been, a socialist revolution.There are other similar articles on the Education section of this site here:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/study-guides/russian-revolution-and-bolshevik-dictatorship-and-labour-theory-valuehttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/study-guides/notes-mans-social-nature-and-capitalist-role-bolshevism

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jondwhite wrote:

Can you be a positivist and agree with the WSM?

Why not? Positivism is a form of materialism and most people are in practice “positivists” without realising it, ie they base their actions and ideas on what they have experienced or learned from other people’s experience. It wasn’t for nothing that Dietzgen called his main work The Positive Outcome of Philosophy. Personally, I think A J Ayer’s (who was a Logical Positivist) Language, Truth and Logic (1936) does a brilliant demolition job on metaphysics and religion. I remember a member who spoke at Hyde Park who refused to use the word “God” but said G-O-D instead on the grounds that the word “God” was meaningless as it referred to nothing. Pure Logical Positivism.The only “philosophical” criterion for being a member of the WSM is to be a materialist, who rejects all religion. So, any materialist, whether dialectical or positivist or behaviourist or empiricist or rationalist or secularist or humanist or whatever, is welcome. At least that’s the practice. It’s only those who are non-materialists (as judged by their attitide to religion) who are ineligible to join.

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TheOldGreyWhistle wrote:

the word ‘support’ seems to be a big problem.

I think that’s right, because of its ambiguity. It can mean anything from “good luck to you” to giving financial and political aid.In 1969 the EC drew up a Policy Statement on Reforms which was later endorsed by Conference. The last part of it read:

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the EC holds that while declaring our sympathy with the exploited in their resistance to the exploiters it is essential, in order to avoid any possibility of misunderstanding, and in the light of the Party’s attitude of not advocating reforms that we should avoid using the word ‘support’ in relation to actions of reformist parties, groups and individuals.

In other words, although we do support  “the exploited in their resistance to the exploiters” we should not actually say so in case we are misunderstood as offering support in the strong sense !I’m not sure this really solved the dilemma in that the actions referred to in relation to which the word “support” should not be used are those of “reformist, parties, groups and individuals”. This leaves out actions by “groups and individuals”, eg ordinary non-political workers trying to survive under capitalism, who might not fall into the category of reformist.In any event, everyone has always been agreed on the key principle that “we do not advocate reforms”.

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Personally I think Hegel is a load of mumbo-jumbo. I’ve started to try and read him 3 or 4 times but gave up each time because his language is virtually incomprehensible. The only book of his I read to the end is his Philosophy of History but that wasn’t actually written by him but by one of his students based on notes they took of his lectures. If I remember rightly it’s idealist even religious nonsense. We don’t have to like Hegel just because that was the intellectual background in Germany at the time Marx and Engels became communists and from which they emerged.As to dialectics, that depends on what you mean. If what is meant is that it is some force working in nature (as Engels sometimes gave the impression), then that’s wrong. If you mean that it is a way of trying to understand phenomenon we experience in nature, that’s another matter.

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robbo203 wrote:

Nevertheless the SPGB supports trade unionism in principle and I see no reason why it should not support direct action in principle too . Accordingt to Adam it has already declared its support for squatting.

That’s not quite what I said. Nor what the quote from the 1969 Socialist Standard did. It said:

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The Socialist Party supports the efforts of workers to improve their housing conditions under capitalism — even by squatting.

What this says is that we support the principle of workers struggling to improve their housing (as other) conditions under capitalism and that we consider squatting to be an example of this. Another example would be tenants association, which some members have been and are still active in in the same way that we are in trade unions.You yourself have often made the valid point that there are not just two possible working class activities — reformism and revolution — but three, the third being working class activity to survive under capitalism which is neither one nor the other and which we don’t denounce as reformism. Reformism is political, but these other activities are what might be called “sub-political” (a better term than “ditrect action”, which is often “reformism by blows”). You can’t oppose them without incurring Stuart’s criticism of not being an ordinary decent human being. Anyway, who are we to be judgemental in such matters and tell people not to squat, shoplift, grow their own vegetables, etc. or to do these things, for that matter?Another anecdote: two party members were once on the platform at Clapham North tube station after a meeting at Head Office when they saw somebody getting ready to commit suicide by jumping in front of the train. One comrade rushed to try and stop him. The other comrade said he shouldn’t have as this was reformist. I don’t know if this tale is true but the other comrade was in the old North West London branch.

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