Calling all marxists

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I'd say that the new opiate of the masses is individualism. I'm all for individual rights, but the sort of individualism seen in the USA and in the slogans of right-wing organizations is ridiculous.

astrogeek:
you mean this green left weekly:
www.greenleft.org.au ?
no not really. i mean sometimes i do but only to see how messed up their politics are(theyre affiliated with socialist alliance) or what they say about us. us being socialist alternative(we're cliffites/trotskyists) who put out this magazine which i read regularly:
sa.org.au
im a member of the organisation. we criticise the alliance over their stance on cuba, vietnam/vcp, reformism, attitude towards the cops, stalinism, etc but we still work with them in various campaigns and stuff.

grassroots stuff is great and we do both want that but you seem to be going more for reforms which is great and i want that too, theyre something you can work for in the immediate sense but ultimately revolution is the way to go if you want those reforms to stick. but yeah thats a while off and to be any good it'll need to be in more than one country.
on cooperatives competing, thats what i mean about working under the capitalist system(well one of the things). competition in the market makes it somewhat unstable and crisis prone plus to compete buisinesses would have to increase productivity to increase profits and you'd end up exploiting yourself to survive in the capitalist system if you were producing things that is. ben and jerrys- the icecream- was an example of this. housing cooperatives do seem to work. i guess they wouldnt have to compete as much but i struggle to think of things where you wouldnt need to. im not entirely sure the ones i know of are independant- they are linked to universities but student run. to be honest i dont know all that much about credit unions so i cant really say much.
i think the most useful thing our leaders can do is nationalise things. its not exactly grassroots but its better than having assets privatised. privatisation just means that companies will be the only ones benifiting from the buisiness, their explicitly for profit only, plus there is less accountability. not that the government is the best boss you can have. and they totally are for privatisation- big buisiness all the way.

i should stop posting at 1am on uni days. you could totally say a lot on individualism. someone else can do it.

Yes, that's the one. Some of their pieces are fine, but I really don't trust a new source that praises the Castros. What do you mean the Socialist Alliance's attitude towards the cops? I understand what you're saying in your other criticisms but I'm not familiar enough with Australia.

And I know that the Socialist Alternative doesn't like them, but were I in Australia I'd probably be a member of the Greens. I'd be in the party's left wing to be sure, but I still think that they'd offer the best fit for me. Also, they're in a position where they can have some moderate short term impact, especially with regards to climate change and other environmental issues.


My problem with revolutions is that so often they become violent. I mean, look at all of the people who got killed in the previous "socialist" revolutions. And in the American Revolution. And in the French Revolution. Being a pacifist I find that difficult to excuse. Also, my dad is the owner of a medium sized business, and although I disagree with his politics he is not a bad person. But being a business owner he'd be put at risk in a revolution. Another problem that I have with the hard-line left is that they to demonise the capitalist class. I disagree with the class' existence, but I think that by and large those making it up aren't bad people. They often believe that they are doing good for society and in any case they are a product of the system in which they were raised.


Interestingly, there is a dairy cooperative that produces one of the major brands where I live. It's only a regional brand so you wouldn't recognise it. But all of the ice cream parlours use it and its the brand that my family usually buys. I agree that there are problems with cooperatives, but I'm thinking in a practical sense. There isn't the will for the radical changes that you call for so right now I think that effort would be better expended setting up cooperatives because that's one of the few things that can be done.

I don't think that housing cooperatives are that common. I think that some upscale apartment buildings are cooperative in New York. And I know that there are some cooperatives in Toronto. A project in the UK that you might find interesting is a green housing cooperative.

Credit unions have been highly successful in Canada. They aren't quite at the level of socialism that you'd like, I don't think, but they're still a huge improvement over banks. They tend to be small, with branches only spread over local or regional areas. But they have a sort of alliance so that you can get money out of another credit union's bank machine without being charged extra. The value of service varies from credit union to credit union, with some not much better than private banks and others offering superb deals. But any profits that aren't being reinvested will go to the members as dividends. And of course members vote to control policy. I'll switch to one sooner or later, but for some reason their student plans aren't as good as the ones at private banks.


I don't disagree with the idea of nationalisation, far from it. And I highly oppose any privatisation. I do advocate nationalisation, but I'm being realistic. It's not on the public consciousness yet and hardly any parties have the stomach to advocate it. I'll do my part to get it back into the public conscious but until then I'll try to make do with what I've got.

I don't think that there will ever be a revolution in the violent sense. Right now people's lives are, for the most part, too comfortable for them to them to want something that drastic. In 30 or 40 years I think that things will be a lot less comfortable and maybe there could be then. But my perspective does tend to be based off of Canada, and Canadians are horribly passive about things that they don't like. The most that I can see happening is people getting behind a radical political party. Maybe other places would be different. But right now I think that people will just look at you strangely when you talk of revolution--you'll have more luck getting through to them if, for the time being at least, you advocate something a bit more moderate.

Last edited by AstroGeek on 06 May 2012, 4:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It is just as well we are unlikely to have a real rip-roaring heads on a pike revolution. Very few revolutions have produced a better system than the one overthrown. The American Revolution ultimately produced a workable system better than monarchy, but only after a war that killed 620,000 (the American Civil War). The French Revolution was a disaster. After Robespierre came Napoleon. Very bad news. Napoleon embroiled Europe in war and it took many decades to sort his damages out. The Russian Revolution was even worse. It produced Stalin, a first class monster. The National Socialist revolution lead to the utter destruction of Germany. The Chinese Communist Revolution lead to the death of 60 million. And the revolution led by Kim Jung Il was a disaster producing an enslaved starving nation.

Looked at historically, Revolution does not have a good track record.

ruveyn

Yes, and that's why I advocate reform--which you'd realize if you'd read other parts of my post.

It's the same here. People here are much too comfortable for there to be anything of that magitude.

I'm not sure about the revolution / reform debate.

Revolution which is produced from the top to bottom or where a small group of people overtake the rest does tend to fail horribly. (as you have seen by the above examples)

If it was revolution from a bottom to the top by the vast majority, that might work. We don't know yet as we have not seen one.

In my mind, sometimes reform can be useful and sometimes it's not. Sometimes the problems are inherent in how things are structured, and in that case reform will only ever deal with part of the problem. If there is no problem in the power structure then I would advocate reform.

astrogeek: im sorry i didn't respond to this earlier. i just felt bad about stuff so i decided to stay away from people as much as possible.

by attitude to the cops i mean that when the cops went on strike they decided to put a motion forth at occupy sydney to support the police in their effort to gain better disability supports from the government. after they had harrassed us broken up the protest violently, arrested a bunch of us for protesting and generally socialists do not support the cops because they are there to protect property and enforce the status quo and all that comes with it. to even suggest that we act nice with them is just wrong.
the greens are left compared with the other 2 parties but they have been shifting more and more to the right and their left is just inactive- they have power over the gillard government because labour is a minority government but they havent used it to influence any decision- refugees or same sex marriage for example. and they like the police and their new leader is someone who did their degree at ADFA, is an economist and worked for Deutsche Bank and the bank of america. future of the greens is looking bad.
i think that if there is a revolution it will be violent. the capitalist class will not relenquish their power easily. i also think that if there is no revolution it will be violent- difficulties of our daily lives under capitalism range from alienation and poverty to struggling to survive in war torn countries when imperialist forces attack or trying to avoid being attacked by your own state and its armed forces at a picket, demonstration or walking down the street if you're ethnic. there is already violence in the world.
i think the capitalist class is right to be demonised. if they were moral beings they would relenquish their wealth and power and hand over control of the workplace to the workers. if they are of the ruling class then they cant have gotten so rich without exploiting people. i find it really amusing that there were actually studies conducted into this finding that, yes, the rich actually are less moral than the rest of us.
the petty bourgeoisie i think should still be made to hand over control of the workplace to the workers but i dont think they are bad people all the time. they can take the side of the worker at times but even if they did support workers rights they still havent got the same industrial power to do anything about their beliefs. also if they have people working under them then they must be exploiting them in some way- they cant run a successful business otherwise.
i think that, despite living in flat political times(at least here we are. europe, the middle east, latin america are more exciting right now) it is always important to talk about revolution. i dont think we will have a revolution right now or soon but you still need to convince as many people as you can about the relevance of marxism now so that in 30-40 years there's a least a group of people who know what to do when the time comes and the working class is aware of their own power and start to revolt so we dont end up like egypt now. egypt makes the case for why there should be an organised left group with the right politics making the arguments on the way forward. and even if we do live in dead political times people in the west but especially nth america were angry enough with the system to occupy everything and make their point on economic inequality and this was inspired by the worldwide political landscape- especially the indignados in spain and arab spring. plus even laid back people have histories of struggle. people always say australians are apathetic too but our history says otherwise.
reforms and protests are my idea of moderate...

kjas: i agree that top down revolutions can only fail and that it has to be bottom to the top. i think that you can use the russian revolution as an example of a bottom up revolution that worked. it did make mistakes though and since im unoriginal i'll just copy paste from a post i made months ago:

post revolution russia was socialist but only for a brief while. and it fell because of a number of reasons(not because socialism/ communism is inherantly flawed.):
1. russias economy was under developed- it did not have the wealth necessary to support a socialist state on its own because
2. you cant have socialism in one state- capitalist economies are linked and to separate your self from the others would be to destroy the economy and ensure the mass wealth capitalism produces and the different goods different countries produce cant be distributed to where they are needed. other revolutions in neighbouring countries were defeated making russia an island.
3. civil war/ a bunch of countries ganged up on russia and a lot of people died and states stopped tradding with russia.
4. the working class the state was built upon ceased to exist as they either died in war or they left the cities where they had previously been concentrated for the country to revert to farming.
5. counter revolution under stalin. state capitalism ensues.

but you probably just know that. i more just write it for my own education.

[quote="VMSmith"

but you probably just know that. i more just write it for my own education.[/quote]

In Darwinian terms, Marxism did not survive because it was not fit. Only the fit survive.

An economy that ignores human nature (which is genetically wired in) is doomed to failure. Humans are short-sighted and selfish for the most part. Use that as your starting point.

ruveyn

It was not fit to survive in that time or that place. If you were to place a human on the Earth as it was 4 billion years ago we wouldn't survive either (what with the atmosphere being unbreathable, among other things). But that doesn't make one bit of difference in terms of how we'd survive now.

VMSmith: I'll reply to you at some point. I'm just not in the right frame of mind right now for writing extensive responses.

human nature again ryuven? i think you are ignoring socialisation and history. you say humans are selfish but even with upbringing in capitalist society people still manage to do awesome things for each other. going on strike(legally or illegally) in solidarity with people in other countries(the MUA in solidarity(illegally) with the maritime union of new zealand), risking police brutality on a picket line for a struggle that will not immediately benifit them(as with the baiada picket in melbourne last year.), defying court orders not to protest for an issue that isnt even in the same country as yours( the boycott israel 19 who are currently in court for protesting peacefully- they have support from all over the world from folks like chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, pilger, anthony loewenstein and various organisations for palestine and unions), the occupy movement where people came together to stand up against corporate greed and work together to think of better ways to organise society or the egyptian revolution where christians and muslims overcame sectarian divides and protected each other from attacks. or just small things like letting people or mates crash on your couch when they have nowhere to go or lending them money when they have no way to pay rent or feeding them when they have no food or helping them with projects. i think i've pointed this out to you a lot...
i could go on. are you going to ignore that or are you going to say that helping others makes us feel good therefore helping others is a selfish act?

I have a different reading on Marx than the caricature promoted both by the West and the Bolsheviks. For me, things like the following are fundamental to understanding the future he imagined:

But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view

I'm not a Marxist but I do find his critique interesting - if dated. My own political views are basically centre-left. Or at least, they would be centre left by the standards that existed until recently, perhaps even centre right (Eisenhower was a conservative in his time, but seems mostly in line with my thinking). By some accounts building a public road now is way out there commie lunacy. It's starting to get kind of "how many fingers do you see?" and "imagine a boot" lately; everything's being turned upside down and we are entering what seems to be an age of insanity.

I am too lazy to either read these ten pages or Das Kapital, but I will say I call myself very-moderately-marxist because I strongly agree on the assertion that existence determines conscience (although Marx and his followers seem very inequal in their use of it), which I understand as one of the pillars of marxism.

Where has true and thorough equality ever existed? Where and when has a society been completely just? Why is it that people are more concerned for the welfare of their children than for the welfare of other people's children? Why is it that in an emergency, 90 percent it is every man for himself? There are a few altruists but they are in the insignificant minority. When times are good, there are those who are generous. But what about when the pinch is on? Then we see the truth.

ruveyn

I don't know who you're talking about but it sure as heck isn't Marx. It may be a caricature of him that you've picked up here and there, but ... well, read my previous post for a start.

ryuven: funny, i must just live in an area where there are many true alturists who are in a pinch cause i just seem to meet them all.

What a very American view.