ZJW
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Almamater:
‘I participate in the internal forum of some left communists groups […].’
I am interested to know what groups these are. (Anglophone or otherwise.) I only know that the ICC used to have an online forum but then got rid of it.
(But you say *internal* forums … I’m not quite sure what that means. It sounds like something limited to participation by members of that organisation, closed to outsiders. But if you are a participant, obviously that can’t be so.)
Under title of ‘Degrowth and Marxism: A Critique’, here is the CWO’s review of Kohei Saito’s ‘Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism’ (2023):
https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-07-25/degrowth-and-marxism-a-critique
(I see there are at least three different threads on this forum where Saito’s name comes up. I suppose this one is as good as another.)
For what its worth, Engels to Bebel in March 1875 —
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_03_18.htm
— in which,
” ‘We would therefore suggest that ‘Gemeinwesen’ [“commonalty”] be universally substituted for ‘state’; it is a good old German word that can very well do service for the French “Commune.” “
[Trigger warning: possible linguistic trivia]
ALB asked:
‘Are you sure that in this context Zukunftsstaat means the future “government machine, or the state in so far as it forms a special organism separated from society through division of labour”, as Marx referred to the state in his Critique of the Gotha Programme?’
No, I am not in the least sure (which is why I said ‘significant or not’). At one point I wondered if ‘-staat’ here meant ‘state’ in the English sense of the ‘condition’ of something, ‘water has three states’ etc. But it seems German ‘Staat / -staat’ is not so used. (For that meaning, ‘Zustand’ or something else is used.)
Using the marxists.org ‘Cross-Language Section — Selected Marxist Writers’ (https://www.marxists.org/xlang/selected-marxists.htm ) and clicking to Kautsky in French, it is seen that chapter IV in that language is titled ‘La Société future’. Unfortunately none of the other selectable languages there have this book (even if they contain any of Kautsky’s writings at all).
But elsewhere, here is the image-file of a Russian translation: http://e-heritage.ru/Book/10089962 (electronic page 3) and there the chapter-heading translates to English as ‘State of the Future’, using the same word for ‘state’ as Lenin did in the book-title ‘The State and Revolution’.
Have we not someone on this site with the linguistic (native language) and presumed political competence to speak to the matter of ‘Zukunftsstaat’? Lizzie, who I’d have thought is a zealous reader of all posts?
It may be misleading (divorced from the marxist late 19th century usage-context), but here is what the Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache says about ‘Zukunftsstaat’: https://www.dwds.de/wb/Zukunftsstaat . (‘State’, not ‘society’, which would be ‘Gesellschaft’.)
Of significance or not, Kautsky did not use a German term corresponding to ‘commonwealth’ in ‘The Class Struggle’ (i.e. the Erfurt Program). That is a liberty some translator took.
In English the title of chapter IV is has been rendered as ‘Commonwealth of the Future’. But as you can see here in the German, what he has is ‘Der Zukunftsstaat’, that is, ‘The Future State’). https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/kautsky/1892/erfurter/index.htm .
I have hardly ever looked at spopen (or that other forum not open to posting by non-SPGB or WSM members) but just now I did read through the spopen thread on reforms and reformism caused by that Paula-comment that Lizzie linked to, and I have two observations:
1) Yes, a clarification on reforms/reformism is necessary.
2) More rashly:
Spopen — in this instance anyway — seems to be considerably better than *this* forum usually is (or has come to be). A big reason would seem to be that there are members that will not deign to post (or even read, I’d guess) in *this* one, which is, for them, it seems, strictly for the ‘plebs’.
KAZ –
I have just pm’d you via moderator.
(If you don’t get it, then there is something fishy with https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/contact-forum-admin . Used to be you could pm people that way. )
In connection — somehow or another — with the NWBCW Initiative, let us take a look back at the Martov-Luxemburg-Lenin resolution of 1907 at the Stuttgart Congress, how it came about and what it was up against.
It’s here in this Bordigist document titled ‘Anti-militarism in the Second International’. Search for and read from ‘ At the Stuttgart Congress in 1907, 4 motions were presented ‘.
That’s at https://www.international-communist-party.org/English/REPORTS/WARS/Antimiitarism2ndInternational.htm
After that, resolutions at Copenhagen (1910) and Basle (1912) are discussed.
Replying to this part of of ALB’s #182772:
‘The difference between us and the CWO would be (1) they argue that the working class should smash the existing state in an armed insurrection and […]’
It seems to me that the fundamental difference with ‘the insurrectionalists’ (which includes not just the CWO etc but anarchist communists as well I’d think) is not this. After all, the WSM logically can not and does not propose capture/use of legislatures in states where that avenue is not available. In those cases (even if the word goes discreetly unsaid when when the matter comes up, which is not often) what else then than insurrection in some sense or another?
In my view, the fundamental difference with ‘the insurectionalists’ is rather over this: For successful socialist/communist revolution to happen, must socialist consciousness be arrived *before* the revolution (forming in fact one of its pre-conditions)? Or can it *only* come about *in the process* of revolution (insurrection)?
Compared to this, I think that vanguardism vs propagandaism vs spontaneism (as per the mention of 1930s Mattick vs Pannekoek/SPGB, and then Wright … or Kamunist Kranti), though related, are second order differences with other groups.
Unrelated to the above: Do I understand KAZ to be an ex-SPGB member who is now an ACG member?
I think point (c) in my #183320 is far too seldom mentioned. (For example is it anywhere in the ‘An A to Z of Marxism’?)
And lack of its mention contributes toward the ease of caricature of the WSM position. (Or one aspect of the caricature anyway.) This caricature: a population-majority of convinced socialists elect a socialist parliament that then through a myriad of decrees, enacts socialism into being onto a population in all respects passive other than that act of voting.
The Korean group Robbo points out is simply part of the NWBCW effort launched by the International Communist Tendency (ie the CWO and its co-groups).
The ICT/CWO site has had a series of articles about NWBCW — what it is and isn’t, misunderstandings about it, etc, and here is the latest one:
https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-07-05/the-no-war-but-the-class-war-initiativeI don’t know the degree of overlap with that discussion on youtube (which I was unable to steel myself to actually listen to in whole) but:
An article in the current Brooklyn Rail (section Field Notes) ‘The Economic Consequences of Neo-Keynesianism’ by one of those discussants, Jamie Merchant, is introduced by Mattick Jr so:
‘For an outstanding study of capitalism’s current predicament, readers can look forward to the publication in 2024 of Jamie Merchant’s synthesis of economic information and analysis, ‘Endgame: Economic Nationalism and Global Decline’, to be published by Reaktion in the Field Notes series. The article that follows, meanwhile, provides an invaluable account of the most recent state of political-economic play.’
The Jamie Merchant article is at:
https://brooklynrail.org/2023/07/field-notes/The-Economic-Consequences-of-Neo-KeynesianismAnd the article of which it is to a certain extent a critique, ‘Seven Theses on American Politics’ by Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner, is here: https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii138/articles/dylan-riley-robert-brenner-seven-theses-on-american-politics .
The Jamie Merchant has a big footnote about Brenner, beginning: ‘In this respect, Brenner’s more recent output represents a methodological regression compared to his earlier, path-breaking work on agrarian capitalism.’
And in the text of the article itself he says at one point of [Dylan/]Brenner:
”[…] With only vague allusions to the economic forces behind all this, political capitalism [referring to Brennerism] is basically indistinguishable from banal libertarian whining about “crony capitalism,” which is based on a similar claim that government corruption erodes the basis for the capitalist economy to function. Both views elide the system’s dependence on profits extracted from the exploitation of labor, which, pace Brenner, is still the basic foundation of the economic system.’
I’d forgotten there was that thread mentioning both the Heath and Morris books. (A good reason to use the search function before wantonly posting.)
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. ‘Chapter 16: Anarcho-Syndicalism during the Second World War’ of Vadim Damier’s ‘Anarcho-syndicalism in the 20th Century’ ( read it online at https://bit.ly/3nkFjmQ ) may have omissions in this regard, I’d think, since the book is about anarcho-syndicalism and not all anarchist-communists have been syndicalist.
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’?
(Don’t bother with the booklet, also new, by Brian Morris, ‘Communist Anarchism a Defense’. That, I have, and thought reading it was mostly a big waste of time.)
