ZJW
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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
(Sorry if these two links have already been posted, quickly logging on and logging off and don’t have time to read through everything.)
Statement by the international organisation to which the Anarchist Communist Group belongs. (Note that this is not the same as the ACG’s own statement. This is much more meaty.)
Statement by the … marxo-anarchist (??) group TŘÍDNÍ VÁLKA:
Proletarians in Russia and in the Ukraine! On production front and military front… Comrades!
(I thought I posted the following here, but can’t find it now, so it must have only been on libcom that I posted it.)
The International Communist Current (ICC) also reviewed the ACG pamphlet and similarly have a problem with the ‘autonomous’ part:
https://en.internationalism.org/content/17126/acg-and-identity-politics-very-inadequate-break
Stephen Shenfield’s article is excellent.
In it is mentioned Khrushchev’s transfer of Crimea from Russia to Ukraine. How did this transfer come about? What motivated it? According to the following, it was a machination generated by K’s struggle with Malenkov: buying off a fellow ruler so as to get on his good side in said struggle:
”The transfer of Crimea to the UkrSSR also was politically useful for Khrushchev as he sought to firm up the support he needed in his ongoing power struggle with Soviet Prime Minister Georgii Malenkov, who had initially emerged as the preeminent leader in the USSR in 1953 after Joseph Stalin’s death. Having been at a disadvantage right after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev had steadily whittled away at Malenkov’s position and had gained a major edge with his elevation to the post of CPSU First Secretary in September 1953. Nevertheless, the post-Stalin power struggle was by no means over in early 1954, and Khrushchev was trying to line up as much support as he could on the CPSU Presidium for a bid to remove Malenkov from the prime minister’s spot (a feat he accomplished in January 1955). Among those whose support Khrushchev was hoping to enlist was Oleksiy Kyrychenko, who had become first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine in early June 1953 (displacing Leonid Mel’nykov, who had succeeded Khrushchev in that post in December 1949) and soon thereafter had been appointed a full member of the CPSU Presidium. In 1944, when Khrushchev himself was still the Communist Party leader in Ukraine, he reportedly had suggested to Stalin that transferring Crimea to the UkrSSR would be a useful way of winning support from local Ukrainian elites.[2] Regardless of whether Khrushchev actually did bring up this matter with Stalin (the veracity of the secondhand retrospective account is uncertain), it most likely reflects Khrushchev’s own sense as early as 1944 that expanding Ukraine’s territory was a way of gaining elite support in the republic. In particular, Khrushchev almost certainly regarded the transfer of Crimea as a means of securing Kyrychenko’s backing. Khrushchev knew that he could not automatically count on Kyrychenko’s support because the two of them had been sharply at odds as recently as June 1953, when Kyrychenko endorsed Lavrentii Beria’s strong criticism of the situation in western Ukraine — criticism that implicitly attacked a good deal of what Khrushchev had done when he was the leader of the republic in the 1940s. Khrushchev hoped that the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine would dispel the lingering tensions from this episode and thereby help to solidify Kyrychenko’s support in the forthcoming showdown with Malenkov.’
source: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/why-did-russia-give-away-crimea-sixty-years-ago’
DJP wrote:
‘What’s with the reluctance to call the storming of the Capital with the intention of overturning an election an ‘insurrection’? ‘[…]
‘Interesting background facts are in this BBC series: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001324r ‘
1) I wonder if the question was asked before or after reading the Greenwald. I put the word in quotation marks because I agree with Greenwald. And also with the Anarchist Communist Group, which already on Jan 10 wrote:
‘The invasion of the Capitol was uncoordinated and there was no united and overall plan to stage a coup, even though some of those who came to Washington were armed. A coup requires some serious planning, as well as a degree of support among the police and military and the ruling class. ‘
(from: https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2021/01/10/the-bud-lite-putsch-or-the-storming-of-the-us-capitol )
2) Re the BBC, why should pro-revolutionaries (to use the spikymike and Internationalist Perspective term), who *have no dog in the race* when it comes to taking sides between Republicans and Democrats, necessarily accept the BBC-Guardian-NYTimes-Atlantic …. consortium-of-facticity-and-viewpoint on this or any other matter over that of Greenwald? Greenwald is a longterm left civil-libertarian and opponent of war (in so far as this is at all possible within the limits of capitalism and capitalist political discourse). How does that compare with the record of The Atlantic, Guadian, ….?
One should should for purposes of comparison read not only the mainstream liberal media but also such sources as, at least:
https://greenwald.substack.com
https://www.antiwar.com
https://consortiumnews.com(The latter two, especially the third, will sometimes include content, however, that runs off the rails in the opposite direction (from pro-US/Natoism) to: pro-Russia, pro-Iran, pro-Assad, pro-China …)
DJP later wrote:
‘Maybe it’s partly semantics. […]’Yes, maybe so, at one level a matter of semantics. But I don’t think that’s important. What is important then? For purposes of argument, let’s assume that Jan 6 was indeed a failed coup/insurrection by Trump. So what? For *us* what is the objective function of treating this as barely avoided asteroid-collision with the Earth? This: the production of Chomskys, of Klimans, of Peter Harrisons, of Guesdes , of Kropotkins. It results in the Union Sacrée, in the Popular Front. As the ACG wrote in that article, ‘Now the narrative will be centred around the “defence of democracy” and that all good people should rally behind the Democratic Party. ‘ Exactly.
The Amnesty International Report is here:
‘Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity’:Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity
plus:
Mondoweiss: ‘U.S. lawmakers attack Amnesty International’s report on Israeli apartheid’:
U.S. lawmakers attack Amnesty International’s report on Israeli apartheid
in which …
‘In a follow-up question, the AP’s Matt Lee asked Price why the Biden administration is so dismissive of Amnesty’s report but often cites its human rights research on countries like Syria and China.
“Why is it that – without taking a stand or making a judgment about the findings of this particular report, why is it that all criticism of Israel is – from these groups is almost always rejected by the U.S., and yet accepted, welcomed, and endorsed when it comes – when it comes out, when the criticism is of other countries, notably countries with which you have significant policy differences?,” asked Lee.’
Alan —
Do you not recall that Final Conflict was uploaded to libcom by jondwhite a good many years ago and a pdf of it can be freely downloaded there?
https://libcom.org/library/last-conflict(A bit more practical than linking to a free preview of it on Amazon, no?)
sshenfield wrote:
‘There will still be elections but they will be held in conditions that ensure Trump can ‘find’ the votes he needs to win (like Putin in Russia). Vigilante terror will neutralize ‘enemies of the people’This is something like a mirror image of the nightmare 10,000-year Reich of Democrat rule that is in the minds and media of Republicans: the Democrats remain in permanant power — carrying out their program of quotas, wokeism, censorship-of-the-right, statue-destruction, transism blah, blah, blah — through ‘imported’ voters (legal immigrants plus non-citizens) and vote-rigging. As for the military, just the reverse of what’s in the quote, up high it gets filled with those loyal to the Democrats’ program.
Bijou Drains and/or Bird:
Some many years later now — I just looked up to see if Vygotsky had ever been mentioned on this forum (yes, 12 times), a question: what value do you find in him?
Me, I only know that Bruce Lerro (self-identifying ‘council-communist’ who thinks that Russia was [authoritarian] socialism! ) thinks the world of him — https://socialistplanningbeyondcapitalism.org/what-is-socialist-psychology-lev-vygotsky-activity-theory-and-socio-historical-psychology .
And Andy Blunden (the marxists.org fellow) thinks the world of him as well: https://ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/vygotsky.htm . (Not that I’ve read any of these.)
By the way, does anyone know of anyone/writings (absurdly or otherwise) advancing some sort of Marxism making use of Jung in a way analogous to the Frankfurters/Reich/Fenichel with Freud or Ruehle with Adler, or of a positive view from a Marxist standpoint of this-or-that aspect of Jungianism?
I’m not sure which thread to post the following to. There are two others that seem as appropriate (or not) as this one.
On June 28 MovimientoSocialista wrote ‘I do not know why Richard Wolf call himself a Marxist […]’, Well, Michael Rechtenwald anyway takes Wolff to be one, and challenged him to debate: https://twitter.com/TheAntiPCProf/status/1411060098429079553 . (Unrequited it seems, as I could never find later news about it.)
If the name is not familiar, Michael Rechtenwald is another renegade, cf Watkins … Harrison etc. An ex-left-communist (well, a short-term and rather screwed-up one, it seems) and comrade of Loren Golder. Here you can read his ‘How a Marxist of Twenty-Five Years Became a Misesian Libertarian’: https://mises.org/wire/how-marxist-twenty-five-years-became-misesian-libertarian
It contains a passage beginning ‘Of course, Mises’s treatment of the calculation problem proved devastating to socialism. He showed [ …]’.
During all his 25-years of ‘marxism’ had he never even heard of the economic calculation argument? If so, quite an accomplishment.
Lew: Thanks for that very useful information. I’d read some years ago that iPlayer was configured such that VPNs could not unblock the geographical restriction, so I didn’t even bother with one. Looking now again at internet I see that this is not the case, or is no longer the case if it ever was.
I know little about Lassalleanism (especially after Lassalle’s death, in the Lassallean party, the ADAV, under Schweitzer) and even less about Wolfism.
Question: What are the similarities/differences? I mean on the subject of cooperatives and their replacement of capitalism.
Or more specifically:
1) for Wolfism, how is the society-of-cooperatives to come about? (Presumably not through state-aid brought about through working-class universal suffrage, as with Lassalleanism.)
2) With Lassalleanism, is the final goal also producer cooperatives producing for the market (as I gather it is with Wolfism)? Or something more socialist than that?
