Jordan Levi
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Neil, I can understand how opposing other similarly minded groups may seem hyper-critical to someone, but I also feel like we have no other choice if we hope to stick to our principles. We can’t forget that the SPGB was founded due to the SDF abandoning it’s revolutionary aims in favor of reformism. The British Labour Party and the German SDP did the same exact thing. None of our principles are unreasonable to me, so to compromise on a single one would most likely be a slippery slope down the same exact path. Seeing those parties as examples, I feel like it’d be foolish to compromise on any of our principles in hopes of our goal becoming easier, because we’ll just end up losing sight of the goal in the process. We’ve already seen where compromise leads, so if not compromising makes things more difficult, then we’re just gonna have to deal with that. I’ve never been one to let adversity stop me anyway.
You asked if socialism is properly described as moneyless. There were socialists before Marx, but they didn’t have it fully fleshed out. Marx was the first to make a consistent ideology out of socialism. Everyone after him either continued that ideology or deformed it. Since Marx was the first person to properly define socialism, and he defined one of it’s characteristics as it being moneyless, then my answer is: yes it is, and any “socialism” that isn’t moneyless isn’t socialism at all.
You also asked if we’ll go from capitalism to socialism over night. My answer is: sort of. Marx said that “lower stage” communism would be preceded by the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. This would be when socialists gain majority control of the state in each of the major developed countries and use it to take control of private property, etc. and use it to the advantage of the majority to implement socialism. There would of course have to be a few years of planning and building of infrastructure to support a socialist economy of free access for our entire population, but these few years couldn’t properly be called the beginning of socialism or even really a transition, it’d moreso be a pre-socialist capitalism if anything. Socialism and capitalism are separate and incompatible, they literally can’t coexist, so there couldn’t be a transition between the two, it would definitely be a sharp break from one day to the next. I feel like Marx meant there couldn’t be a transition like they couldn’t exist together for any amount of time, but of course there’d have to be a planning stage for socialism to work. If anybody thinks I’m wrong about this and can point me to anywhere in Marx’s literature that he said he didn’t even believe in a planning stage, please let me know.
We should definitely explain how that could happen. I feel like this idea that “we can’t tell the future, we should only focus on the goal” is kind of half-baked. How can we reach a goal without a plan in mind that we can measure our progress against? We can’t suddenly gain majority control and then start planning this kinda stuff, I think it’s the plan itself that would engage people, otherwise we can become the majority without having our next step fully in mind. I’m not saying that we need to make a plan that would fit 100% perfect with any time period, cuz we don’t know how long it might take to reach majority numbers, but we should at least make a plan that’s appropriate to now and adjust it as needed. I’m open to hear anyone out on how that might be a wrong way to think of it tho.
And no, socialism isn’t a transitionary state to communism. Marx never said that, he actually used the terms interchangeably since they meant the same thing, but he preferred the term communism since socialism was more associated with utopian socialists at that time and socialism was also more of a middle class movement, vs communism being the term preferred by the working class at that time. Marx differentiated between “lower” and “higher” stages of communism in ‘The Communist Manifesto’, but he never called these socialism and communism respectively. It was actually Vladimir Lenin who first did that.
Reformism won’t bring us any closer to socialism, that’s been proven repeatedly, so we shouldn’t want any part of that at all.
that’s fantastic! please post and update in this thread whenever you get a response, I’d love to do whatever I can to help too, hopefully we can make some headway relatively soon. and yea, im a member of that facebook group already, my names SwamiNetero on everything; and ive dug into that website too, its pretty informative, thanks!
hey! I’m the vegas member that was mentioned at the beginning of this thread. I would’ve responded sooner, but I didn’t join the forums til like a week ago and just decided to start digging through it like an hour ago lol
it sucks that theres no administrative structure for the WSPUS right now, but I don’t think that means it should be formally disbanded. I think we could definitely salvage it, American members cant get involved in international politics hands on anyway. even if we only have a few members spread out across the country, I think the easiest thing to do would be to take stock of who we have and develop some form of a plan to spur growth. the SPGB could handle administrative duties until we establish a larger membership.
I also don’t think it should be re-branded either. we should definitely work to establish it as an official party that can elect candidates for office, because that’s one of the main goals behind socialism anyway, to take control of the state and use it to the advantage of the people rather than the capitalists. but we’ll never do that if we re-brand it as an educational organization, because a party would have to be established at some point anyway. BUT, I DO think that educating the people on what socialism actually is should be priority #1 for the party. maybe some seminars? educational content on youtube/medium? and strictly focus on facts, as close to no emotion as is humanly possible, and obsessively provide water tight sources so that critics have nothing tangible to argue with. we should stand on the principle of transparency vehemently, I like how all the other branches allow non-members to attend the meetings, so we should definitely do that too.
I also doubt that compromising on the religious principle would help us very much. I actually think it might hurt us. the principles are there to make sure were all on the same page and that our only allegiance is to the truth and facts. religion isn’t based on empirical facts, so to compromise and allow religious devotees to be official members would be a contradiction to that. I’d have to read through the other principles again to decide if any of those should be tweaked a little bit(maybe just the wording on the ‘hostility’ clause could be changed, but not the principle itself), but I definitely don’t think the religious one should be touched at all. but I’m just one member, and that decisions up to the entire party at the end of the day.
I’m gung-ho to do anything I can to help get the WSPUS back on track. again, I think step 1 would be to contact all the US members and gather some ideas of what each of us could do in our areas to get more people to join(organize and advertise an informative meeting/seminar/discussion in their area maybe?), then from there just work on getting new members up to speed on their research so they can educate and recruit new members too, and work on legally officiating the party for the polls
