ZJW
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jondwhite wrote:https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jun/27/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-who-is-she-democrats-new-york-life-career-policiesIn the event anyone wishes to discuss so-called 'socialist' Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she is a member of the DSA and has won the nomination for the Democrats party (Sanders, Clinton, Obama etc.) so I guess she is dual carding (member of more than one political party).
The WSWS has an alright article about her: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/06/28/pers-j28.html?view=article_mobile . The 'International Committee of the Fourth International' (or less grandiosely, Northism, after its leader's name) is trotskyist but heterodox in that they oppose all forms of communalism (for want of a better term off hand) — nationalism, genderism, IdPolism etc — and unlike normal leftists they don't take sides in inter-state fights. That being so, I consult their site daily, and there is often an item of some value. Of course anything touching upon the USSR has to be avoided; and most any article on any (political) subject at all will sooner or latter begin singing the lenino-trotskyist liturgy. If you would like to protect your eyes and your psyche from gazing upon icons of Saint Leon, you can access their site this way: http://www.wsws.org/en/?view=mobilehome . No images! One good article they ran was this review against the cretinous and wholly objectionable blockbuster 'Wonder Woman'. http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/02/22/pant-f22.html?view=article_mobile . Among other things they point out its anti-German theme. Content aside, for those with the right sense of humor, the frenetic, outraged, or even hysterical tone in which they often write can be very diverting. (Would someone please tell me how to make paragraph breaks?)
ALB wrote:ZJW wrote:And here, for those interested is a definition from an introduction to the Bauer book (not by Bauer but by some latter-day academic) of what Austro-Marxism's national autonomy meant. (As a reformist/bourgeois utopian notion, not an unattractive idea.)I agree that some sort of non-territorial cultural autonomy is a not unttractive idea. It can be imagined that this could be applied in socialism to language groups rather than to "nations" (of course), with people speaking the same language having autonomy when it comes to education and culural (theatre, films, publishing, etc) matters; particpation in the democratic decision-making would not be based on where people lived but on what language they spoke.Although, under capitalism, it would be a reformist measure, it is not that "utopian" in the sense of unrealisable. It is applied in the inner part of Greater Brussels where people choose which language "community" to be in (Dutch or French) and voted for its bodies that administer education and culture. So people in the same street can be voting for different bodies dealing with these matters. It is certainly better than ethnic cleansing and to what applies in other parts of Greater Brussels outside the centre which are also linguistically diverse and where the minority (in some communes even the majority) of French-speakers enjoy considerably less "facilities". That's because there things are based on territory and the French-speakers find themselves on Dutch-speaking territory.
I had no idea.I did read sometime ago a text whose url is not immediately to hand, advocating for some countries an elctoral system I recall like this:The centrifugal tendencies in 'consociational democracies' (power-sharing set-ups like in NI) can be tweeked 'centripetally' with the adoption of a Multiple Proportional Vote (MPV) system. What's MPV? The same as Part-List Proportional (PR-List), except that with PR-List, the voter votes once, while with MPV the voter votes as many times as the constitutional setup recognises separate-but-equal ethnic-or-religious groups. Let's say it's Northern Ireland, I identify as a member of the Catholic/Nationalist/Republican community. So I cast one vote for one of the C/N/R parties, but then I also cast a vote for one of the Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist parties. (What happens to Alliance, Greens, and the various Trots I don't know. There must be some provision for cross-community parties.) The first vote is my internal ballot; the second ballot is my external ballot. The point is that they don't 'weigh' the same. How much more is the internal worth than the external? 1 : 0.5? 1: 0:25? It was not clear to me. Anyway, the aim is: with this voting system, politicians of Group A will have some incentive to attract votes from — or at least not be utterly repugnant to — voters in Group B. (How do I make paragraph breaks?)
alanjjohnstone wrote:The Zionist Jews look at the fate of most of the Bundists – the death camps – and ascribe to it the failure of the Bundist ideas of fighting alongside their fellow-worker in the working class rather than fleeing. It was not a failure of principles, imho, but an unprecedented and unforeseen consequence of the war.Oh, you mean that. I see. Yes, indeed.By the way, and unrelated to the above, it seems to me that these two things are usefully treated separately:1) Showing the nonsensical nature of 'anti-zionism = anti-semitism' through historical citation of Jews who based on various ideologies (religious, bourgeois, socialist … ) have opposed the existence of a Jewish state. 2) Among avowed socialists, the various views on the Jewish Question in relation to the socialist movement: thus, assimilation-integrationism vs Bundisms vs left-zionism (= 'socialism' yes, but in a Jewish state in Palestine, and just for the Jews there).
And here, for those interested is a definition from an introduction to the Bauer book (not by Bauer but by some latter-day academic) of what Austro-Marxism's national autonomy meant. (As a reformist/bourgeois utopian notion, not an unattractive idea.)'In most conventional theories, national autonomy requires a territorial base for the autonomous national community, or at least the intention to build some kind of "autonomous homeland" that will serve as the territorial base. Bauer and Renner's theory, however, rests on the idea of "nonterritorial national autonomy." This means that autonomous communities are organized as sovereign collectives, whatever their residential locations within a multinational state. As in the millet system in the Ottoman Empire, peoples of different ethnic identities can coexist in the same territory without straining the principle of national autonomy. The crucial difference of Bauer and Renner's system from the millet system is, however, that the autonomous communities are organized democratically and are based on individual consent to belong and on internal democracy. The analogy used by Renner was that of religious communities. Much in the same way as Catholics, Protestants, and Jews could coexist in the same city, Renner argued, so members of different national communities could coexist with their own distinct institutions and national organizations, provided they did not claim territorial exclusivity.'
alanjjohnstone wrote:A very extensive reading list can be found here, scroll down to the Bund sectionhttps://www.marxists.org/subject/jewish/In addition: (1) A section of Otto Bauer's 1907 book 'The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy', a PDF of which is available on libcom. Backround: the Social-Democratic Workers Party of Austria was formed in 1889. In 1897, '[f]ollowing Czech demands, the party decided to transform itself into a federative organization of six national parties (Ukrainian, Czech, Polish, German, Italian, and Slovene) with a common executive committee'. In 1905 a split occurred in the Polish party with the universally condemned formation of the Jewish Social Democratic Party. This is the starting point of the sub-section of Bauer's book titled 'National Autonomy for the Jews?' (pages 291-308) . He judges himself incompetant to speak of Russia and the Bund, and he is indeed is not speaking of rationales for party-formation, anyway, but of the demand for Jewish national autonomy in a somewhat re-jiggered future Austria (he was a reformist after all), but you can extrapolate from what he says that he is opposed to Jewish-exclusive organisation. The language is different, but the thesis is similar to that of Abram Leon: Jewry is not an ethnicity so much as the decaying remainder of an economic caste left over from the middle ages. So: in the interests of working-class solidarity between Jewish and non-Jewish proletarians, further decay — ie integration — is to be encouraged, not hindered. (2) The 1989 book 'Class and Ethnicity in the Pale: The Political Economy of Jewish Workers' Nationalism in Late Imperial Russia', by Yoav Peled, which is downloadable from a book site whose url I will not cite here but will be known many forum participants. In it, these parts are of value: The two chapters 'The Historical Setting' and 'From Emancipation to Autonomy: The Evolution of the Bund's National Programme' (ie pp 16-71). And then, for regarding some problematic peculiarites of the Jewish proletariant in the Pale, pages 73-76 (the section titled 'The Jewish Working Class'). Much of the rest of the book is academic twaddle. And by the way, the Bund claimed to be the exclusive representative of Jewish workers not only in tthe Pale (already bad enough) but throughout the Russian Empire. (Logically meaning also of course regardless of whether said Jewish workers — whether in the Pale or outside of it — were monoglot Yiddish speakers or not.)
alanjjohnstone wrote:As for its nationalism, we have to remember that Jewish pales and ghettoes were well-defined territories for a Party to organise on the basis of. We also got to remember the importance of Yiddish as the lingua franca of many geographically diverse Jewish communities.A special language-section of an existing party (cf the 'language federations' of the De Leonist or Hillquit-Debs parties in the US ) would take care of that. But in the event, the overlapping of parties (even leaving aside for the moment whether the Bund suffered from nationalism) resulted in the situation reported by Warski to Kautsky here on page 112, beginning 'Recently we have got to the point […]': https://books.google.com/books?id=347-digzQXMC&pg=PA110&dq=%22the+bund%22+Rosa+luxemburg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjz7_-Fk8HbAhUDmJQKHeF0DkAQ6AEIJTAA#v=onepage&q=we%20have%20got%20to%20the%20point&f=false Of course what he says goes both for the Bund in Russia, and for its ideological homologue in Habsburg Galicia — the wrong-headedly formed The Jewish Social-Democratic Party.
A very extensive reading list can be found here, scroll down to the Bund sectionhttps://www.marxists.org/subject/jewish/I fully recognise the limitations of the SS article but the main purpose was simply to demonstrate that there existed a popular Jewish movement outside of Zionism which was left-wing and part of the social democracy of the period and that the state of Israel was never the be all and end all of the Jewish people. Bund history if not forgotten has often been misinterpreted. As for its nationalism, we have to remember that Jewish pales and ghettoes were well-defined territories for a Party to organise on the basis of. We also got to remember the importance of Yiddish as the lingua franca of many geographically diverse Jewish communities.
alanjjohnstone wrote:I fully recognise the limitations of the SS article but the main purpose was simply to demonstrate that there existed a popular Jewish movement outside of Zionism which was left-wing and part of the social democracy of the period and that the state of Israel was never the be all and end all of the Jewish people.Ok.
alanjjohnstone wrote:Bund history if not forgotten has often been misinterpreted.In what way would you say it has been misinterpreted?
alanjjohnstone wrote:The New York Times accused of conflating criticism of Israel with anti-semitismhttps://www.truthdig.com/articles/with-literal-nazis-running-for-office-nyt-suggests-candidates-israel-criticism-is-antisemitic/The site http://mondoweiss.net has a lot of this sort of thing.
As another curiosity: Socialists (on libcom I would write 'internationalist communists') of course don't support a Two State Solution or a One State Solution but rather a No State Solution (and not just over the territory of Mandate Palestine), so it's nothing to stand up and applaud, but it is interesting that there existed 'cultural zionist' (?) groups that while supporting Jewish immigration to Mandate Palestine, opposed partition (ie two states) in favor of a a single bi-ethnic state: Brit Shalom (the name later hijacked to other purposes), Hashomer Hatzair Workers Party, and Ihud. The lattermost, if I recall correctly, continued to exist and maintained its position for a while even after the Israeli state came into being.
Robbo203: Or better yet, go straight to the horse's mouth: http://www.nkusa.org . (And it's not the only such group.) Anyway, it's not so strange. Orthodox Judaism was largely anti-zionist before opportunistically accommodating itself (the 'religious parties' in Israel) to the newly formed state. This receives some mention in Israel Shahak's 'Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years': https://archive.org/details/JewishHistoryJewishReligion .
There's also this: http://mondoweiss.net/2017/02/jews-iran-travelogue/ .
Speaking of China, see Michael Roberts' argument that China is not capitalist , followed by some 60 comments, including one by the SPGB's own Red Deathy ( = YMS?). I guess Roberts is some kind of Trot, on this subject anyway, according to which, China's is a 'planned economy'; the only thing missing is democracy.It won't be acceptable to readers of this forum, but there is also a nuanced comment from a left-communist (or left-leninist?) which begins:We have two distinct, but intertwined threads to deal with here. First, we have Michael’s argument that China is not, or not yet, capitalist, or fully capitalist, or dominated by capitalism because of the weight, specific and general, of the state property. The second thread is the long debated designation of “state capitalism” as a proper characterization of — then the former Soviet Union and now, China.The url: https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2017/10/25/xi-takes-full-control-of-chinas-future
Mattick reviews Piketty here: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2014/06/field-notes/editors-note-much-ado-about-something
