Alf
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Binay, I had the pleasure of visiting your home back in 1985, as part of an ICC delegation (the other comrade was from Germany).I also had the pleasure of reading your excellent post on ascendance and decadence. Is this a contribution to a discussion that is underway inside the SPGB?,
In respone to ALB: in our view the wage form and the law of value should be attacked from the beginning of the revolution. But that's not the same as declaring it 'abolished' once and for all. Perhaps you are right and will it all be very straightforward because by the time the workers take power they will have thrown off the entire weight of thousands of years of class society. But what happens if the revolutionary process meets with obstacles and set backs and what Marx called 'the 'old shit' starts to reassert itself again? If you have the idea that it's all going to be plain sailing, will you be prepared for such set backs? Class consciousness can regress as well as move forward -and even the very high level needed to take political power could go backwards if the revolution runs into dificulties. The answer to that is not, as the Bolsheviks ended up thinking, that the party has to hold onto power on behalf of the workers. On the contrary, it will require the most convinced communists to keep fighting very hard against any tendency for large numbers of workers to fall back into the old passive attitudes where politics becomes the affair of specialists.
LBird wrote:The ICC thinks that all the proletariat needs is a party, now, at present. Objectively, the class is ready. This gives a shorter perspective.The SPGB (and I) thinks that all the proletariat needs is consciousness, then, in the future. Objectively, the class is not ready. This gives a longer perspective.No, no and again no. The proletariat is not ready. It is still very far from having the level of consciousness and self-organisation needed to make the revolution. One of the elements in this process is the activity of revolutionary political organisations. The fact that such organisations are so small today is one measure of the fact that the proletariat is not ready, because as it becomes more combative, more organised and more conscious revolutionary organisations will tend to grow in size and influence – this in itself proves that these organisations are products of the movement and not a spirit hovering over it like God over the waters.If you want to call these factors 'objective', OK. There is never a total separation between subjective and objective. But if you call everything objective, where does that leave the subjective factor?
Hi LBird, we meet again….Communism can't be created without a massive and profound change in the consciousness of the exploited class. Communist organisations play a vital role in this process, but they can't introduce it from the outside. Where we disagree is not on these basic (but crucial) points but in our understanding of the process through which the class becomes conscious of its communist goals. We think that communist consciousness can become a mass consciousness during the process of revolution, which isn't just a single moment of 'taking power' but a whole development of struggles, economic and political through which the working class recognises that the only way forward is to overthrow the bourgeoisie and create communism. Rosa Luxemburg provides a very clear general framework for understanding such a process in her book The Mass Strike. This is a collective process which goes beyond winning workers one by one to the communist cause through argument and discussion – this always goes on but it's the shift in the underlying movement of the class in response to the impasse of the capitalist system that makes this possible to take place on a mass scale.It seems to me that LBird and the SPGB do share a lot in their conception of how the majority become communist, even if the former sees this taking place through elections to the workers' councils and the latter primarily through elections to parliament. Rosa Luxemburg, answering the parliamentary fetishism of the majority social democrats in her defence of the Bolsheviks and of the October revolution, could ahve been responding to both: Thereby the Bolsheviks solved the famous problem of “winning a majority of the people,” which problem has ever weighed on the German Social-Democracy like a nightmare. As bred-in-the-bone disciples of parliamentary cretinism, these German Social-Democrats have sought to apply to revolutions the home-made wisdom of the parliamentary nursery: in order to carry anything, you must first have a majority. The same, they say, applies to a revolution: first let’s become a “majority.” The true dialectic of revolutions, however, stands this wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: not through a majority, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority – that’s the way the road runs (The Russian Revolution, chapter one).By the way, I think this discussion has shown some positive developments (of class consciousness….) among SPGB comrades. ALB's posts about the 'hostility clause' seems to confirm something I have already seen stated in The Alternative to capitalism: that the SPGB no longer sees itself as being alone in the world but as part of a wider movement – distinct from and opposed to the capitalist extreme left – of groups who do defend a genuine view of communism, even if they differ on the way to achieve it. And Ed and pfbcarlisle have made an honest attempt to explain (and perhaps even express some sympathy with) our positions as they understand them.
This thread has moved a long way from Devrim's criticisms of our internal functioning, which I won't go into here, except to say that there's a big difference between having a conception of organisation which avoids hierarchical methods and actually carrying that in practice out given the huge pressures of bourgeois society and its ideology on any organisation that sets out to oppose it. Having a principled position against hierarchy is certainly necessary but not sufficient. I'm not going to enter into the problem of 'how long before we get to communism', but I certainly don't share the SPGB's 'overnight' (more or less) approach, which seems to vastly underestimate the scale of the task facing the working class, which will be unprecedented in history. I just want to clear up a couple of misconceptions. When we talk about civil war we are referring to the fact that violent conflict with the ruling class will indeed be inescapable. But we certainly don't think a repeat of what happened in Russia would bode well for the next revolution. On the contrary, although the civil war was 'won' in military terms it was to a great extent lost in political terms, ending up in the disaster of Kronstadt, the emptying out of the soviets and the statification of the Bolshevik party. Still worse would be a Syria write large because that is nothing but capitalist barbarism. In general we can say that the working class can't outfight the bourgeoisie in military terms. Its victory will depend on its level of class consciousness and organisation, which will in turn reduce the necessity for violence. A key element will be in winning over the lower echelons of the armed forces to the struggle. But it is naive to think that despite all this there will be no gangsters, reactionaries and crazies who will be prepared to commit the most horrible atrocities on behalf of the old order. On the 'maturity' of conditions. We think that decadence implies that the 'objective' conditions for communism have existed for a long time – about 100 years. The question is not to 'develop the productive forces' in the sense of accumulating more capital but to transform the existing productive forces so that they can serve human need. The question of 'maturity' is mainly about the subjective conditions – so once again we are back to the question of class consciousness. The period of transition is necessary above all because getting rid of the ideological muck of ages will demand a huge struggle. The attachment to the old world will certainly be strong among those other non-exploiting classes who have survived into the period of capitalism's decline, but it will also have a powerful weight on the working class itself. As Marx said: only in a revolution can the proletariat rid itself of this muck. Will the proletariat exploit itself during the transition period? In reality, as long as the law of value has not been decisively eliminated on a world scale, then the proletariat will not have freed itself of capital. The idea of 'exploiting itself' is only true to the extent that it consciously chooses to forgo some immediate satsifaction of need in order to produce the wealth needed by the global population, which will not be fully integrated into the working class. But in a deeper sense the working class can only be exploited if capital still survives Better for the working class to recognise that it has not fully emancipated itself until the whole world is communst than to think it has reached the promised land when the power of the old system has not been totally liquidated.
Greetings to all – I had trouble logging in for a while but this now seems to have been resolved. I will come back and respond to some of the issues posed here when i have a bit more time.
Hello, I'm Alf from the ICC. Thanks for posting this up DJP, and glad to hear that Ed is planning to come. We have decided to go with the topic 'how do we get from capitalism to communism' – the announcement on our website has been altered accordingly. http://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201304/7460/come-day-discussionA topic of interest to SPGB members, no doubt….
