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New article on the CWO (ICT) site:
https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-05-04/reformism-and-its-discontentsSee footnote (2) and the ICT-endorsed quote from Mattick snr (1934). For the SPGB does this also constitute ‘vanguardism’?
(The above is re discussion on November 1 2021 on this thread about the CWO and vanguardism.)
‘The Berlin police investigation is in response to a social media campaign launched by political figures who are adding to the slanders that [Roger] Waters is an antisemite the lying charge that he is trivializing the Holocaust and sympathizing with Nazism during his performance of the song “In the Flesh” from the 1979 Pink Floyd album “The Wall.” ‘
What’s this utter nonsense all about? See here:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/05/27/fheu-m27.htmlChavez also one of four participants, along with Phil Neel, Wendy Liu, and Anette Ramos, in this discussion (on youtube) titled ‘We Have Never Been Post-Industrial’ held May 14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQu5EVkC5vc&t=65s
That same author (Nick Chavez) again.
Here is his on-the-whole not very positive review of a new piece of speculative fiction ‘Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072’:
I suggest also looking at his other writings on his site ( https://designformanufracture.wordpress.com ) , which I have just come to know of.
The link I gave to the O’Neil in August 2020 no longer works. Fortunately it (as well as the Carter article he was rebutting) can nonetheless be read in full on line:
Alan Carter:
‘‘Self‐exploitation’ and Workers’ Co‐operatives—or how the British Left get their concepts wrong’:
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1111/j.1468-5930.1989.tb00391.xJohn O’Neil:
‘Exploitation and Workers’ Co-operatives: a reply to Alan Carter’:
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1111/j.1468-5930.1991.tb00286.x(If sci-hub.ru is blocked where you are, try libgen.rs or libgen.is. Search the article title in the window marked
‘scientific articles’.)An account of the CWO Public Meeting on Zoom about Ukraine (if DJP or Alan already posted this, I did not see it):
http://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2022-03-17/war-in-ukraine-the-internationalist-position
Shocking news. From what I knew of him from this forum, as well as from a few emails with him, a very fine fellow indeed, both personally and politically.
By Angry Workers of the World (AWW), a group which will known to those participants on/readers of this forum who look at libcom:
‘Fragments of a debate amongst AngryWorkers on the war in Ukraine’:
Fragments of a debate amongst AngryWorkers on the war in Ukraine
Just be glad that a Irish government has not (yet) decided that ‘Dublin’ is a foreign term and the city should be called ‘Baile Átha Cliath’ (pronounced blah-KLEE-uh), or at the very least ‘Duibhlinn’ (DIVV-lin).
I will try to make my point in a less convoluted way, but I am not hopeful.
1) Following the logic of the article*: if only the engineers really know how to ‘do anything’, then without them, the forces of production can hardly be freed in the direction of providing abundance.
2) This means that a socialist working class cannot free the forces of production in the direction of providing abundance without the engineers *in particular* being *overwhelmingly* socialist-minded.
In other words, following the logic of the article, the engineer-component of the working class will/would play a *particularly critical* role.
That is what I said I found ‘alarming’.
* Key sentence from the article: ‘‘What can be said with near certainty is that a revolution that does not have substantial participation from engineers is doomed to fail at implementing communism. ‘
sshenfield:
Regarding your post #227302 of March 4 —
I am curious about your reading habits. Did you not see that the Tridni Valka statement was already linked to here — https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/topic/russian-tensions-2/page/43/#post-227045 — on February 26?
Is it that you read the Forum only sporadically, without catching up on what you’ve missed since last reading? Or is it that only certain posters and not others are graced by your attentions?
One of the three recent books about Bogdanov that Bird mentioned here — https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/topic/search-for-some-books/#post-198727 — is the 480 page-something ‘Red Hamlet — The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov’ (2018) by James D. White. The book is freely-easily downloadable from libgen (not libcom).
In this book (which takes a very negative view of Lenin) Bogdanov’s anti-authoritarianism is repeatedly stressed. Under the asterisks some very much at-random quotes from it:
*********************
There are several aspects to Bogdanov’s concept of collectivism, reflecting different strands in his thought. One of these is the elimination of the organiser/ \executor division, that is the distinction between people who organise and those who carry out orders. For Bogdanov this is the earliest and most fundamental social division which afflicted mankind, one which preceded the formation of social classes. It was responsible for authoritarian thinking and for the dualist view of the world that divided phenomena into the physical and the psychical. In socialist society this division is overcome, and the monist view of the world is restored.
…..
Even on the trip to Mars Leonid discovers that Martian society is not authoritarian. Menni is the captain of the spacecraft, but he does not have the power of command. His instructions are followed because he happens to be the most experienced pilot of the spacecraft.75 On Mars itself the comradely relations prevailed between the individuals, with a directness and absence of formality. Great individuals are not commemorated, only important events.
…..
Lenin’s perspective was very different. He did want to be a revolutionary leader and he did crave power and authority. The kind of organisation he favoured was of like-minded people in which he would be the acknowledged head. From Lenin’s point of view Bogdanov was an obstacle to his aspirations. Bogdanov had a claim to influence the direction that the Bolshevik fraction took, because he had rescued it from oblivion in 1904. Moreover, in a Marxist party the legitimation of leadership was the mastery of socialist theory, and this Bogdanov had in abundant measure. He was coming to be thought of as the leading theoretician of Russian Social-Democracy. By comparison, Lenin’s contribution to theory was modest. It was contained in his pamphlet What Is to Be Done?: the idea that the workers’ socialist consciousness had to be brought to them from outside, by the intelligentsia. This idea was so alien to Bogdanov’s way of thinking that the price Lenin paid for Bogdanov’s help in reviving the Bolshevik fraction was that this idea should be abandoned.
…..
Despite his conviction that the Bolshevik seizure of power was not the socialist revolution that Lenin claimed, but merely a ‘war communist’ one, Bogdanov did not stand aloof from the Soviet regime or go into emigration in the West, as many Russian intellectuals did after 1917. He lent his support to the new regime, applying his organisational theory to the problem of economic planning. Bogdanov never became a political dissident in Soviet Russia, and he never wrote a critique of the increasingly repressive Soviet system. It would probably have served Lenin’s purposes better if he had. But in the early 1920s, when opposition movements emerged, all of Bogdanov’s existing writings, suffused as they were with the condemnation of authoritarianism, were of themselves subversive.
Alan — my apologies for having led you into such misadventure. Neither deepl nor, I dare say, probably any other translation software on this planet could safely be used toward such an end, and I certainly did not intend to suggest such. I only meant: for language X –> English translation, deepl is usually better than Google Translate, and that’s all.
Good thing our russophone was on hand to fix it.
And here is a statement — no, an article — from Mouvement Communiste released just today that they have not yet put into English. I advise non-readers of French to use deepl (www.deepl.com), *not* Google Translate. Deepl is usually somewhat~much better. Though it can depend on the language.
https://mouvement-communiste.com/documents/MC/Leaflets/BLT2202FRvG.pdf
