DJP
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“Let’s discuss the socialist position on reform.”
Ok.
“Suppose there’s a General Election and we can vote for a candidate whose party promises free school meals or a party that opposes free school meals.”
But now you’ve started talking about something else.
“It seems that Farage’s bank account was cancelled because of his political views.”
Is that actually true though? And why now? His views have been the same, and well-known, for a long time. Either way, he has never been locked out of banking, just had his account moved from one subsidiary to another. It seems for him “non-person” means someone who has a standard high-street account.
“One thing I would hope the Heath book has — has it, DJP? — is something of a list of anarchist communist groups around the world that took an internationalist position during the Second World War.”
Information on that is probably in the book, but you’d have to read through the various chapters on region histories to find it.
Incidentally, I’ve been told a second edition of this book has already been printed and there will be an index available online.
Regarding the Pannekoek article, I note that he is talking specifically about strikes that challenge state power – not just any strike about pay and conditions – that is why he says these types of strikes are revolutionary. I think that makes it a bit more understandable. But even so, it’s a bit of a leap to think that these kinds of actions will somehow spontaneously, without conscious effort or theoretical work, transform into action for communism and not just die down once demands are met, or resistance is exhausted.
Quite a while back in this thread ZJW mentioned that:
“Amusingly, the Western Socialist in 1948 published an article by Pannekoek in which he says: ‘The strikers themselves may not be aware of it — neither are most socialists– they may have no intention to be revolutionary, but they are. And gradually consciousness will come up of what they are doing intuitively, out of necessity; and it will make the actions more direct and more efficient.’”
Was there any commentary on the article written by the Western Socialist? Seems a strange position for them to endorse?
“Speaking of anarchist communists, will someone obtain and review in SS the new big book by Anarchist Communist Group member [?] Nick Heath, ‘The Idea : Anarchist Communism, Past, Present and Future’?”
It’s worth a read, though it lacks an index, and the formatting of the text makes it hard in places to tell if the writing is from Heath, or if he is directly quoting.
Heath doesn’t think Stirner influenced the foundation of anarchism either – as one example, the writings of Stirner weren’t widely available in Italian until the twentieth century, until after anarchist-communism had taken off there.
FWIW here’s a quote from one of the best scholarly studies of anarchism. ‘Black Flame’ by Schmidt and Van Der Walt
In other words, genuine individual freedom and individuality could only exist in a free society. The anarchists did not therefore identify freedom with the right of everybody to do exactly what one pleased but with a social order in which collective effort and responsibilities that is to say, obligations would provide the material basis and social nexus in which individual freedom could exist. This is entirely at odds with Stirner’s views. Stirner believed that “the egoist” thinks “only of himself, only of “my cause” and not of anything more, whether that be “the Good Cause, then Gods cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally, even the cause of Mind, and a thousand other causes.” The “name of egoist” must be applied to the “man who, instead of living to an idea, i.e. a spiritual thing,” is always “sacrificing it to his personal advantage.”
Between the notion of freedom articulated by Stirner and that of the anarchists lies an abyss. For Bakunin, a persons “duties to society are indissolubly linked with his rights.”The watchwords of popular emancipation were freedom and solidarity. Such solidarity was “the spontaneous product of social life, economic as well as moral; the result of the free federation of common interests, aspirations and tendencies.” Most important, he emphasised, it “has as its essential basis equality and collective labour—obligatory not by law, but by the force of realities and collective property.” Kropotkin likewise insisted that “all must be put on the same footing as producers and consumers of wealth,” and “everybody” must contribute to “the common well-being to the full extent of his capacities.
“I have yet to see a successful marrying of anarchist and communist thought, without the one negating the other.”
That’s not surprising since what you are describing as anarchism seems to have more to do with Stirner than Bakunin, Kropotkin or Malatesta. Contrary to what is written in a lot of the commentaries Stirner was not a founding influence on anarchism – I think these, like the roots of socialism in general, can be found in the radical republican tradition.
“The common denominator of anarchism is opposition to external authority”
There isn’t a single “anarchism”, and this very much comes down to what you mean by “external authority”. Social / communist anarchists definitely thought that people did have obligations to the community and were under no illusions about the permanent possibility of social conflict. This is well explained in places of the Zoe Baker book if I recall correctly, and was a topic Malatesta wrote frequently on. People acting in an anti-social manner would be subject to the “external authority” of the community / popular assembly.
“Your reading was doubtless more useful/positive than what I recall of it. What did you get out of it?”
I just thought it was a good, theoretically informed history – which clearly explained and reconstructed the different positions; what various groups and indivduals thought, why they thought what they did, and why and how things changed through time and experience. I thought it avoided being over simplistic and contextualised things quite well.
Oscar Addis and Zoe Baker are (or perhaps were) names for the same person.
“It was dramatic stuff in the short time it lasted but this “Prigozhin affair” risks being blown up out of all proportion like the 6 January riot in Washington in 2021. I can’t see it having any effect on the course of the war.”
I think a likely outcome of this is that Wagner will be Bach soon.
Incidentally, John H. Kautsky’s claim of the unorthodoxy of his arguments – that Marxism and Leninism are two different ideologies that use the same terminology, and that Leninist “Communism was not anti-capitalist and was not relevant to industrialised societies but to underdeveloped ones” – are perhaps not so unorthodox these days, at least within academia and within my limited interaction with it.
His other books about capitalist development and underdeveloped nations might be worth looking at too.
“In the 1960s he was a bit of a Marxist and wrote quite a good article in Economica in August 1963 on “Marxian Value Reconsidered””
Thanks for that. Was not aware of that paper before, it’s quite good yes.
“You can scrutinise Marx’s economic writings until your eyes ache and you wont find the cause of war in them.”
The original plan of “Capital” was to have a book on the state. I think this is where it would make sense to talk about modern war.
