Ideology

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chlamor
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Ideology

Post by chlamor » Sat Jan 06, 2018 3:26 pm

Without ideology, you've got jack.

Libertarianism, Green jobs, Social Democracy like Sweden, Unearth the conspiracy, Go back to REAL American Values, Election Reform, Financial Reform, Tax Reform, Monetary Reform, Reform Reform.

Resignation, Depression, Human Nature, Hope, Spirituality, Smoke Pot, Smoke your Left Foot.

Resign, Quit, Move, Cry, Give Up, Become Reactionary, Sing the Blues.

It's like watchin' a Pinball Tournament.

Without ideology - A way to see the world, a perspective, a beginning and an end that makes rational sense, a way to discriminate - you've got jack.

Positivity-Self-Improvement-Buying Green-"If only the Constitution were enforced"- Regulated capitalism- Re-naming all the streets- Getting money out of politics- Ballot access- Making water flow uphill towards money

Without partisanship, and a consciousness as to why you maintain that loyalty, you don't have squat.

There are no such things as Taxpayers, Americans, Members of the Middle-Class, Liberals, Conservatives, White People, Independents, or people "from the West"...

OR, those things exist only to the same extent as there are Hoosiers, NASCAR Fans, or those who have completed a Weight Watchers course.

All people are not the same.

There are people who work to live and are dominated by that work.

And, there are people who live by the work of others and dominate those who work for them.

Everything else stems from this.

If you don't know which side you are on, you don't have squat.

===============

Think about political discussion (and politics is always a "discussion"). Think about it in either the narrow terms of the "left" websites you visit or in the larger sense of politics in America, as a whole. What is the basis... the most fundamental basis ... for debate? What is the common language of that "debate"?

You can fill in the gory details of the problem: on the one hand, anything goes; on the other hand anything is acceptable and must be accepted (in the name of tolerance). Opinions are personal, categories are arbitrary and foggy, and the only basis for commonality is a very loose and changing list of policy statements that could just as easily be their opposites. It is not just mysticism and pop-theories that are at issue. There is a century worth of slogans, assumptions, "facts" which are "well known" or "commonly known"... Even simple logic is not required.

Yes, class perspective is the key to it but the political chaos extends so far that even that is tough to put your finger on in a practical way.

Materialism, "cold" pursuit of the "truth" for practical reasons, basic class partisanship, a method for determining what is correct and accurate and what is not, agreement on these methods and the history from which these are derived - these are the most rudimentary tools of a political movement.

Otherwise, everything just spins...

like water in a toilet bowl...

just to be dumped into the sewer...

and get piped into the Idea Treatment Plant...

only to go through the same cycle once again...

It ain't "philosophy"... It's a common language and method... very rigorously adhered to... at a hundred different levels of sophistication...
but fundamentally starting with the soldiers' quote in John Reed:

"If you aren't for one class, you are for the other..."


- anaxarchos

chlamor
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Re: Ideology

Post by chlamor » Sat Jan 06, 2018 3:31 pm

And the philistines pop their heads up:

However prettily embroidered, an ideology is still a strait-jacket. Look back at human history and you will find one ideology after another enslaving humanity. Much better to have ideas than an ideology.

Best to be for neither class. The moment we start dealing with one another as a "class" is the moment we begin plotting to enslave each other for our exclusive benefit. Of course, a classless society is almost a contradiction in terms. Marx envisioned such a thing; but it turned out to be the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time. His communism was intended for an industrial society - not an agrarian society; so naturally it failed. You can't choose a society from column A, then an ideology from column B - and try to match them. Life doesn't work that way.


Here:

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/human ... will-make/

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blindpig
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 06, 2018 6:08 pm

chlamor wrote:
Sat Jan 06, 2018 3:31 pm
And the philistines pop their heads up:

However prettily embroidered, an ideology is still a strait-jacket. Look back at human history and you will find one ideology after another enslaving humanity. Much better to have ideas than an ideology.

Best to be for neither class. The moment we start dealing with one another as a "class" is the moment we begin plotting to enslave each other for our exclusive benefit. Of course, a classless society is almost a contradiction in terms. Marx envisioned such a thing; but it turned out to be the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time. His communism was intended for an industrial society - not an agrarian society; so naturally it failed. You can't choose a society from column A, then an ideology from column B - and try to match them. Life doesn't work that way.


Here:

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/human ... will-make/
Anything but Communism
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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kidoftheblackhole
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Re: Ideology

Post by kidoftheblackhole » Sat Jan 06, 2018 9:49 pm

chlamor wrote:
Sat Jan 06, 2018 3:31 pm
And the philistines pop their heads up:

However prettily embroidered, an ideology is still a strait-jacket. Look back at human history and you will find one ideology after another enslaving humanity. Much better to have ideas than an ideology.

Best to be for neither class. The moment we start dealing with one another as a "class" is the moment we begin plotting to enslave each other for our exclusive benefit. Of course, a classless society is almost a contradiction in terms. Marx envisioned such a thing; but it turned out to be the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time. His communism was intended for an industrial society - not an agrarian society; so naturally it failed. You can't choose a society from column A, then an ideology from column B - and try to match them. Life doesn't work that way.


Here:

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/human ... will-make/
Its such a mess that it is mush. I suppose the irony here is noteworthy -- "Abandon all perfidious ideology"..sayeth the Ideologue -- and also the gnawing concern. He knows who is coming for him (Karl Marx, age 199 and still kicking) and he has eyes on..

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Sat Dec 08, 2018 12:03 pm

The only thing that unites us is class
Socialists must avoid the trap of bourgeois identity politics if they are to make headway in uniting the working class against capitalism.
Proletarian writers

Friday 7 December 2018

Image

This text is an excerpt from a speech made by a member of the central committee to the party’s eighth congress in September.

The speech was part of a long discussion on the topic of identity politics in general and LGBT+ activism in particular. At the end of the discussion, the central committee’s emergency motion on identity politics was overwhelmingly adopted by the congress. Other motions on the topic, asking the party to adopt LGBT+ activism into its programme, were overwhelmingly voted down.

The reason for our debate today is a phenomenon I first encountered as an academic doing a masters then a PhD in the humanities. For the last eight years, I have been employed to lecture on LGBTQ identities, queer theory and identity politics in performance.

In 1995, there was a huge shift in the humanities – a moment I can clearly locate in the trajectory of my own studies, which coincided with the beginning of my training for a degree in languages and linguistics in Europe. This shift was consolidated when I started my postgraduate programme in Britain, in the belly of western capitalist education.

The first thing that I was taught, as a student and later as part of the academic staff in the early 2000s – based on books that had been published years earlier, as a result of the 1960s and of what Euroleftism considered to be ‘the end of class struggle’ – was that we do not need to talk about class in the humanities; that it is no longer ‘trendy’ to consider ‘the grand narrative of class’, and that such ideas had expired after May ’68.

Instead, I was told, we needed to talk about ‘identity’ based on a notion of ‘difference’. I needed to acquaint myself with the full philosophical movement that focuses on difference; which no longer talks about things that can rally people around a shared reality, or material conditions that people can have in common, but declares this a ‘failure’ from the start, arguing that it is useless to try to find things in common with others.

I was taught that this understanding of ‘failure’ should be the basis of contemporary humanities and culture, and that there is no need to study ‘positivist’ sciences like sociology with its rigid categories any more; that there is no need to research sociological explanations for cultural phenomena, because this leads to ‘deterministic’ conclusions. Instead, you need to go straight to poststructuralist theories, ideas about ‘deconstruction’, and postmodern philosophers like Jacques Derrida to address ‘difference’, as the only idea that unites people.

This was the conclusion of my postgraduate studies: we are united only in our individualism. I can still get paid today, or have flight tickets offered by universities to give lectures on ‘queer studies’ – which I can try my best to transform into opportunities for class analysis, but believe me, that is not easy.

Of course, I am hourly-paid with no permanent contract, as a woman lecturer, because university businesses where I worked have in place a positive discrimination policy, which ticks boxes when hiring a man who self-identifies as a ‘woman’ and who can get a lecturer’s position that makes much more financial sense to the university’s management than paying for my maternity leave. One needs to compare the material basis of my existence and the identity of a man who calls himself a woman, and who has studied Derrida of course, as I have. This man has all the philosophical backing, plus the university funding to bolster his position and call my class concerns a ‘failing project’ like the project of the Enlightenment (this is what they teach in postmodernism – the end of logic; the end of history; the futility of social struggle and resistance).

Are we in this party because we agree with what Karl Marx said? Do we understand the need to escape from this capitalist education that disables us; that disables our ability to unite and to understand what we have in common and act upon it; that teaches us to fetishise our loss? I have been offered various jobs to talk about my ‘loss’, about what makes me different, as a woman; to talk about rape and the traumas of the ‘patriarchy’. One can land academic careers by being ‘anti-patriarchal’ and by considering oneself to be ‘a class on our own’. But we are not in this party because we believe we are a class on our own, and nobody who is Marxist Leninist should believe that.

One can definitely make more money teaching others to believe that they are a class in themselves, but we are here because we defend the truth, not careers. We defend Stalin because we defend the historical truth, not because Stalin sets us apart as being ‘different’. I am sure that nowadays some can come to this party to be ‘themselves’; as another ‘radical’ way of fetishising their ‘identity’ and declaring themselves ‘different’ to other gay or other lesbians or other ‘gender fluid’ people they know. Defending Stalin can become another way to self-identify.

But we are not here to defend our individual identities; we are here to really find what made communist society happen. If we want to help people who are in a state of loss, in a state of dependency, then we have to be ‘a communist’ and dare to talk about the things that are the alternative to what they teach us.

First, we have to become aware of exactly what lies and fallacies the ruling class are teaching us, and how these ideologies disable us whilst cloaking themselves in a narrative about individual ’empowerment’, ‘agency’ and ‘self-liberation’. They teach us that we have more ‘agency’ as a ‘hybrid’, ‘fluid’, individual, unattached to biology or material groundings, precariat.

They teach us that it is actually unfashionable to expect to enjoy retirement, a pension or permanent housing; it is trendy to be ‘nomadic’; it is creative to live in precarity, and not to have a permanent job. They teach us to love ‘change’ and to dislike ‘stability’; to unite with others in loving our ‘lack’ – what capitalism has stolen from us.

They teach us to love the inflictions of capitalism, the traumas of exploitation; they teach people to think that this attitude is revolutionary. But it is false consciousness and nothing else. They make a parody of the working class. This ideology segregates us, isolates us in lonely, passive crowds of ‘I’. They teach us to hate what is healthy and instead love our illnesses.

The moment of truth came for me when I was denied my PhD award. My thesis was a critique of New Labour’s ‘inclusive’ education. In it, I talked about students’ disability and, apparently, I made the ‘mistake’ of failing to link disability with identity politics, instead talking about it in terms of class. I argued that bourgeois education oppresses children not because they are physically or mentally disabled but because they are working-class children. I argued that capitalism defines bourgeois identity as ability; people are seen as able when they belong to the bourgeoisie and submit to its ideology. Capitalism considers working-class identity to be a disability, and tries to ‘manage’ it and integrate it into its system of exploitation, not to alleviate it or cure it.

The moment I started to draw such conclusions, the examiners challenged my methodology on ‘ethical grounds’ and denied me my doctorate. I had to resubmit my thesis, because, according to the examiners, I was ‘labelling’ people by calling them ‘working class’. The only truthful identity – a sociological reality that I was able to prove with lots of statistical evidence – was censored as ‘labelling’. I was forbidden to talk about the class of my students, but I could conduct a survey on the ‘sexual desires’ of primary school kids without any problems.

I am in this party because communism is the only discourse, the only philosophy, the only way to talk about things as they are and rally people not around their ‘lack’ but around their only collective identity, the only one that we have, that which is based on our class. We are not here to fetishise our traumas, as we live them under capitalism.

In a communist society, people experience themselves and others differently, as in a society like Cuba’s. We cannot compare ourselves with Cuba. Cuba has been developing along a socialist path; the people are in power; they pass legislation relevant to their society and its place in the international sphere. Cuban kids at schools are not taught what our kids are taught. The state and the socialist government filter things very differently because the economy is not the same we have here. Cuban laws on LGBTQ cannot be compared to dominant British policy. As British workers we have to focus on what is happening in our own country and look for an alternative education to the one we are getting.

We have to reinstate the things that unite us and not the things that divide us. The only thing that unites us is class, and if you care about the welfare of gay people, raped women, disabled children, etc, you have got to declare the only agency they have is if they act collectively in an organised political manner based on their class interests, and not some vague idealism.

If you care about oppressed people’s dignity then you have to convince them to unite with others and demand power; to demand all the things we discuss in our party congress resolutions.

Marxism Leninism is the only way to guarantee that the working people’s struggle will be successful. As Marxist Leninists we don’t patronise people; we don’t tell them that what they are going through is something that they should wear as an identity, because such isolating identities disable them. We have a responsibility towards people who suffer, and we have to defend them by telling the truth.

‘Transgender rights’ are bourgeois ideology. The whole issue confounds reality. It is pure idealism because the reality is that we cannot choose our identity at will. It is an illusion, a mistake and a crime to teach people to think that they can choose like this, under capitalism.

We are here to help them dispel their bourgeois illusions, and our own first, however taxing and painful that can be.

https://www.cpgb-ml.org/2018/12/07/news ... -is-class/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by kidoftheblackhole » Mon Dec 10, 2018 11:22 pm

Could definitely be punched up but pretty good for an opener..

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blindpig
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 18, 2018 2:16 pm

Letter: Identity politics v class politics
If our political activities don’t threaten imperialism, we need to think again about what we are doing.

Monday 17 December 2018

Regarding the present much-discussed issue of identity politics, I think the most important matter here is how to organise for a socialist transformation in our society.

The CPGB-ML correctly argues that this can only be achieved by organising the working class to seize power. Anything that detracts from this is objectively reactionary. Identity politics seems to be absorbing a lot of the energy of the working-class movement. The question posed is: does this help or hinder the struggle for socialist transformation?

Real oppression is homelessness, hunger, destitution, war, poverty, police brutality, anti-trade-union laws, etc. While we talk about identities, are we seriously challenging this oppression?

We all are very concerned when minorities are targeted and scapegoated by the state and by the ruling classes organising the far right, especially in times of crisis, as an extra-legal arm to attack workers on identity bases. The movement has always seen such tactics as a means to divide the class whilst promoting supremacist ideas, ie, the survival of the ‘fittest’, as natural, which ultimately expresses itself in the most vile imperialism and war.

Historically it has been the working-class movement that has fought racial oppression, realising that ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’. The key critical question is this: Can the movement defeat racism, sexism and homophobia if it is divided on these issues, and can real lasting solutions be found for these within a capitalist society, which promotes competition and division, as well as a ruling class that seeks to divide the working masses?

We can only appeal to the working class on the basis that an injury to one is an injury to all. The issue that unites us is being members of the working class suffering the same injustices. We cannot achieve this unity by seeking to elevate our differences to the fore, taking the focus off the class enemy that enjoys its privilege at our expense and uses those differences to divide us.

This is the Marxist position, which argues that the key contradictions in society are class-based, and that class is determined by our relationship to the means of production. You only have to read the Communist Manifesto, written in 1848, in which Karl Marx and Frederick Engels turned identity issues into class conflict.

Hand on heart everybody: is the current identity-political activity class based, and, more importantly is it threatening imperialism?

If not, then, as Marxists, how do you expect to defeat oppression without the unity of the working class? This is how we should approach this issue if we are serious.

https://www.cpgb-ml.org/2018/12/17/news ... -politics/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Wed Dec 19, 2018 12:00 pm

Where to Begin?
by worker
https://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2018/12/wh ... begin.html

“...they take from Marxism all that is acceptable to the liberal bourgeoisie, ...cast aside only the living soul of Marxism, ‘only’ its revolutionary content.” VI Lenin The Collapse of the Second International

Standing with me on a cold corner with a sign urging bank disinvestment, a venerated comrade reminded me of the lasting value of Vladimir Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?. Food for thought: while we read this classic in our political youth, does it retain its relevance as we gain experience and mature?

What Is To Be Done? began as a promissory note to expand a polemical sketch written in May of 1901 entitled “Where to Begin.” The question lingered in Lenin’s mind for nearly a year before the lengthy pamphlet emerged.

What Is To Be Done? is not an easy read. It is filled with esoteric references to journals, personalities, and events specific to turn-of-the-last-century Russia, as well as unusually named political tendencies. It is easy to confuse the various “Rabochaya” or “Rabocheye” (workers’ newspapers) or forget the meaning of “Economism,” “Narodnism,” or “legal ‘Marxism’.”

But Lenin’s goals can be put rather simply:

● Identify the political trends or tendencies that are obstacles to advancing to socialism.

● Establish conditions necessary for the advancement to socialism.

“Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.” Martynov “The movement is everything, the final aim is nothing.” Bernstein

For Lenin, the epigrams pronounced by A.S. Martynov and Eduard Bernstein-- a German theoretician of socialist gradualism-- were symptomatic of an infection to the body of revolutionary socialism. For those “socialists,” socialism was simply the product of the struggle for reforms, an inevitable final step or stage in the evolution of the workers’ movement. Set in motion, political and economic struggle would-- on its own-- through “timid zigzags” (Lenin’s characterization) ultimately lead to socialism.

In Lenin’s words, they and their adherents imagine that movements “...pure and simple can elaborate, and will elaborate, an independent ideology for itself, if only the workers ‘wrest their fate from the hands of the leaders’.” They submit that it is bureaucratic and foot-dragging trade union and political leaders who retard the natural evolution of reformism toward discarding capitalism and constructing socialism.

Democracy+continual reforms=socialism, in the minds of Martynov, Bernstein, the French socialist Millerand, the German socialist Georg von Vollmar and their ilk.

Lenin regards these views as a sharp departure (revision) of the theory of revolutionary socialism, a departure based upon the unjustifiable faith in spontaneity. He views ‘spontaneity’ as a key concept in understanding both the potential of struggle and its limits. Using the industrial strikes of 1896 in Russia as an example, he shows that the working class movement and the people’s movement will always generate a fight back, a response to exploitation and oppression. But it will always be limited to immediate grievances and immediate remedies without the further introduction of a conscious element, a leap to attacking capitalism itself. The idea that spontaneous political motion will, by itself, find its way to socialism is a false and harmful illusion.

Defiance, resistance, sabotage, demonstrating, civil disobedience, etc. are largely spontaneous responses of individuals or groups; strikes, planned actions with demands, political initiatives, and other collective actions are often spontaneous, in Lenin’s sense, but “nothing more nor less than consciousness in an embryonic form.” Because they have elements of planning and goals, though limited and immediate, these struggles offer the potential for more radical, more profound change. They lack only ideology, organization, and a program of advancement, elements that must come from a united, disciplined, and committed group of socialist partisans. Those partisans must bring a vision beyond simple reformism to provide the tools for overthrowing the grip of capitalist social and economic relations.

[R.M. writing in Rabochaya Mysl says:] “That struggle is desirable which is possible, and the struggle which is possible is that which is going on at the given moment. This is precisely the trend of unbounded opportunism, which passively adopts itself to spontaneity.” (Lenin) [my emphasis]

The embrace of spontaneity as the wellspring of political and social change is identified by Lenin with withdrawal from the struggle for qualitative change, from meaningful engagement with the source of exploitation and oppression. This surrender to “realism,” pragmatism, the “possible” is opportunistic because it courts respectability or an easy legitimacy and compromises the fight for the liberation of working people from the chains of exploitation to garner the nearest goals of the closest moment.

“We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic [socialist] consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labor legislation, etc. The theory of socialism… arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia.” (Lenin)

Lenin’s distinction between trade-union consciousness and socialist consciousness holds true, over a hundred years later. No events since have shown Lenin’s assessment to be wrong. No working class or popular movement has taken up socialism without its introduction from outside the movement, typically through a socialist political organization. In a world dominated by the ideology of capitalism, in the course of “the drab ordinary struggle,” the idea of socialism is alien. It is the task of dedicated socialist revolutionaries-- armed with a program and of one mind-- to bring socialist consciousness to the popular movements.

Those like the Russian acolytes of Bernstein in Lenin’s time-- the Economists, the “legal” Marxists, the Socialist Revolutionaries-- “...kneel in prayer to spontaneity, gazing with awe (to take an expression from Plekhanov) upon the ‘posterior’ of the proletariat.”

The Communist movement coined the term “tailism” to more politely capture Plekhanov’s vivid description of political opportunism. Slavishly deferring to the “drab, everyday struggles” of the trade union movement or the spontaneous peoples’ movement will get us no closer to socialism.

Political forces will invariably arise that promise to spur spontaneous action by the popular masses through acts of terrorism; they intend to “excite” the working class, to give it “strong impetus” to press its supposedly latent radicalism. For Lenin, this is equally a departure from sound revolutionary strategy. Like reformism (Economism), the anarchism of the act (early Narodism and the Socialist Revolutionaries) fails to recognize a role for determined agitating and organizing the people for the overthrow of capitalism and the building of socialism.

Revolutionaries are not aloof from the fight for democratic reforms: “He is no Social-Democrat [revolutionary] who forgets in practice his obligation to be ahead of all in raising, accentuating, and solving every general democratic question.” [Lenin’s emphasis]. But Lenin also emphasizes that this practice must not “for a moment [conceal] our socialist conviction.”

But revolutionaries should not be confused into thinking that the fight for democratic reforms is more than it is: “Trade-unionist politics of the working class is precisely bourgeois politics of the working class.” [Lenin’s emphasis]

“Give us an organization of revolutionaries, and we will overturn Russia!”

Lenin’s famous proclamation is not an idle boast, but a concise statement of the necessity of an organization of committed, dedicated revolutionaries placing the struggle for socialism above all.

The task before the revolutionary movement is to develop and maintain working class leadership of the popular movements while shedding the patronizing attitude of delivering only that which is “accessible” to the masses. Recognizing the “excellently trained enemy,” Lenin insists that revolution must be a profession, combining the skills of propagandist, organizer, and agitator. The revolutionaries must develop tools: leaflets, pamphlets, books, etc., but most importantly a national organ (newspaper, website, etc.) that serves as a collective propagandist, agitator, and organizer, a tool for raising a definitive political line and rallying and making contact with followers.

Of course socialist revolutionaries must come together as an organization, as a party, as a vehicle for overthrowing capitalism. A loose-knit, independent scattering of even the most dedicated revolutionaries could hardly pose a threat to the forces and resources defending capitalism and its ruling class. That party must bring to the masses a program, a road map leading to socialism above all else.

Lenin stresses that a revolutionary organization cannot be seduced by the sirens of “primitive” or “toy” democracy, the false radicalism of direct representation so often advocated by young intellectuals and anarchists. Lenin cites the experiences of Sidney and Beatrice Webb (Fabian Society) and Karl Kautsky (German Social Democratic Party)-- two sources at odds with Leninism-- on their negative practical experiences with the folly of strict referenda democracy. Lenin recognized that direct democratic decision-making under the harsh, war-like conditions imposed by battling capitalism was sheerly utopian.

These are the answers that Lenin gave in his time to the question What Is To Be Done?

Twenty-first Century Relevance?

Does Lenin’s revolutionary theory hold relevance for the struggles of today?

Over generations, Lenin’s insights, admonitions, strategies, and tactics have been muted, diluted, or revised by many prominent left-wing thinkers in capitalist countries. The seduction of parliamentary politics, the burnished image of bourgeois democracy, doubts about the working class as a force for change, the rise of cultural and life-style radicalism combined with many other factors to distract the left from the revolutionary socialist program. The Cold War and the demonization of Communism further prodded the US and much of the academic and student Western European left to distance itself from Leninism. The ABC phenomenon-- Anything But Communism-- became deeply embedded in the “radicalism” of the late twentieth century. A “new” left-- purposefully new in order to dissociate from Leninism and Cold War ostracization-- sought new forms of radicalism, new approaches to struggle, new types of organizations.

Ironically, the New Left found answers that already failed in the past, in the kinds of politics toward which Lenin had earlier targeted his ideological weapons. And today’s US and European left reproduces many of the same tendencies.

It has been a common thread weaving through the US left that so-called participatory democracy is the foundation of radical politics and emancipatory or empowering for oppositional movements. From the New Left of the sixties to the Occupy and Indignados movements, this approach has been foundational. The fetish for procedure has not only overshadowed establishing a common program, but often blocked the achievement of one.

Organizationally, the insistence upon participatory democracy is stiflingly rigid. It fails to acknowledge the various types of democracy: direct, representational, ballot, referenda, etc.; it fails to recognize the appropriateness of the different types by time, place, and circumstance; and it fails to grasp the organizational fit of different democratic modes.

Accordingly, obsessive participatory, direct democracy becomes an obstacle to the establishment of an effective revolutionary organization charged with the tasks of building a movement for socialism to face the gale forces of the immensely powerful resources and the security apparatuses of a ruthless ruling class. Revolutionary movements must respect democratic norms, but not the cult of procedure that Lenin mocks as “toy” or “primitive” democracy.

Occupy and similar movements have floundered on the rocks of organizational chaos grounded in procedural sectarianism, a failure to establish efficient and effective leadership channels. Many once-promising movements fall as quickly as they rise without the appropriate, effective democratic standards.

It is a commonplace with today’s left to assume that removing the brakes that are thought to be restraining broad movements-- typically bureaucratic, entrenched leaders-- will in itself unleash worker or mass action. On this view, existing popular institutions-- trade unions, political parties, advocacy organizations, etc.-- only need fresh, democratically elected leaders to unleash the march toward a better world, towards socialism. Rather than tackling the difficult task of planting the germ of socialist thought into the movements, modern-day US leftists too often expect to see the idea of replacing capitalism-- the commitment to socialism-- flower spontaneously.

History knows of no serious challenge to capitalism emerging automatically, without the intervention of a revolutionary organization. Nonetheless, many in the US left deny the necessity or the desirability of a Leninist “organization of revolutionaries.” Instead, they count on the magical, spontaneous emergence of a socialist consciousness where none existed before. Swayed by Cold War dogma, they unthinkingly fear the ogre of “vanguardism.”

Despite many lifetimes of shredded hopes of taming capitalism by working for change within the Democratic Party, a new generation of idealistic youth are placing their hopes in the Democratic Party and a class collaborationist trade union movement. They follow modern day “legal” Marxists and other theorists of social democracy who ask them to “kneel in prayer to spontaneity,” expecting a radical vision to spring forth without the intercession of a revolutionary organization. Tailing bourgeois institutions and workers’ organizations umbilically linked to bourgeois institutions can only bring bourgeois politics, paraphrasing Lenin.

With dissatisfaction and anger growing, with confrontation intensifying, and with more and more institutions and authority discredited, the need for effective responses grows. Over a hundred years ago, Lenin’s famous pamphlet What Is To Be Done? cleared much of the ideological underbrush, discarded most of the false roads and missteps foiling a movement for socialism.

Today, these false roads, missteps, and ideological thickets again block the road to twenty-first-century socialism.

What Is To Be Done? demonstrates the need for a political organization of ardent, committed revolutionaries, united with a program to overthrow capitalism. Since the retreat of Communism, Leninism has unfortunately been discarded by many on the left. But the wisdom of Lenin’s pamphlet is needed now more than ever.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 12, 2019 12:18 pm

Book Outline: Friedrich Engels and the Basis of Socialist Governance
12 january, 2019 by stalinsmoustache, posted in engels, socialism in power, socialist state
This work began as a chapter in my book, The Socialist State: Philosophical Foundations, but it eventually became a monograph in its own right. Why? Engels provides some of the key bases for understanding later developments of socialist governance. This is the outline of the book:

Friedrich Engels and the Basis of Socialist Governance

The argument of this book is that Friedrich Engels (more than Marx) provides the philosophical seeds for understanding the later development of socialist governance, if not the socialist state as such. The process of discovering these insights moves from reasonably familiar texts concerning states as they have existed thus far to quite unfamiliar and unstudied texts – especially from Engels’s later writings. The book covers the following topics: the state as a ‘separated public power’; socialist force (Gewalt) and the dictatorship of the proletariat; from abolition to the dying away of the state; the enmeshed apparatus of socialist governance.

The proposed work is significant not only because it will assist in identifying the philosophical origins of the historical reality of socialist governance, but also because such a detailed analysis of all the relevant texts by Engels has not – surprisingly – been undertaken before now. The closest that one finds is Hal Draper’s somewhat biased and incomplete five-volume work, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution (1977-2005). While Draper’s work is the most thorough in relation to textual analysis (as such material was available at the time), it is driven by an agenda that not only dismisses actual historical socialist states, from the Soviet Union to China, but also by a studied avoidance of important features of the texts. It also has a tendency to downplay the contribution of Engels and thus material that actually provides the philosophical basis for such forms of governance.

Other works on Marxist approaches to the state not only focus on Marx and largely ignore Engels, but do so with an agenda that stresses the Paris commune and ignores material on dictatorship of the proletariat and the use of force. Further, many such works assume – based on partial and selective reading – that both Engels and Marx held to the view that immediately after a communist revolution, the state would wither or ‘die away’, with the consequent assumption that the historical development of socialist governance goes against the theoretical view of Marx and especially Engels. This book begins to show that such a view is partial and thus mistaken.

The method deployed is simple but profound: careful and close attention, in original languages and translation, of all the relevant texts. Only by this method is one able to develop a complete analysis.

Chapter Outline

Introduction

The introduction has two main tasks. The first is to provide an overview of Marx’s reflections on the Paris Commune and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Based on an earlier study (Boer, ‘Marx’s Ambivalence: State, Proletarian Dictatorship and Commune’. International Critical Thought), it presents a tension in Marx’s thought between the two, a tension he began to resolve in terms of a narrative from the dictatorship of the proletariat to the commune. He began to do so, but never resolved it, so the task fell to Engels. The second task of the introduction outlines the argument of the four chapters of the book.

Chapter 1: From ‘Separated Public Power’ to Gewalt

The first chapter deals initially with Engels’s programmatic observations on hitherto existing states, which would set the subsequent agenda not only for Marxist studies of such states, but also the Weberian tradition (Weber’s definition of the state borrows heavily from Engels). Apart from noting the key features of this analysis, which involves the core idea of the state as a ‘separated public power’, the chapter focuses on Engels’s shifts between seeing such states state as semi-autonomous, as instruments of a particular class in power, or as shaped in their very nature by the class in question. Engels moves between these three overlapping approaches, depending on the point he seeks to make, but he tends in more detailed work to opt for the third: that the nature of the state is determined by the class in power. This position emerges particularly in a relatively ignored work, ‘The Role of Force in History’. Here Engels offers an analysis of Bismarck in Germany that is a close companion to Marx’s ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’, with the specific point that the bourgeoisie was able to shape the state in its image indirectly, even when it did not hold the reins of power. Even more important is the emergence of a core category, Gewalt. The word is difficult to translate, so a study of Engels’s texts reveals the senses of force, power and violence. This provides a rather new angle, not only on his proposal that hitherto existing states may be defined as a ‘separated public power [Gewalt]’, but that ‘The Role of Gewalt in History’ is vitally important.

Chapter 2: Socialist Gewalt and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

The key finding of this chapter is Engels’s emphasis on proletarian Gewalt, in both the revolutionary process and in the early stages of the construction of socialism when power is gained through a revolution. The concrete manifestation of this socialist Gewalt is the dictatorship of the proletariat, which Engels (like Marx) defines carefully not as an individual dictatorship (as with Bakunin) or by a small band (Blanquist), but as a collective dictatorship by the majority, the workers. On this basis, Engels’s important contribution was to go beyond Marx in identifying the Paris commune with the proletarian dictatorship. Although suggested in the early 1870s, he does so clearly in the 1890s. The context was a struggle with the moderates of the increasingly large German Social Democratic Party, which tried to dispense with the dictatorship of the proletariat in its program and work within bourgeois democracy. In light of later tendencies in European communism to downplay the proletarian dictatorship and idealise the Paris commune (for example, with ‘Eurocommunism’ and the tendency among some European Marxists), Engels explicit argument that the commune was the exercise of the proletarian dictatorship, even that it did not go far enough in exercising such a dictatorship, is a timely warning. The chapter concludes by analysing Engels’s explicit usage of ‘socialist Gewalt’ itself, both before and after a revolution. Crucially, Engels points out that political power also has economic influence and potency (Potenz).

Chapter 3: From Abolition to the Dying Away of the State

Engels is responsible – in the third edition of Anti-Dühring – for coining the phrase, ‘dying away’ of the state (often translated as ‘withering away’). This chapter analyses how this emphasis arose, an emphasis that is also described as the eventual dissolution or gradual disappearance of the state as a spearated public power. The chapter has three parts. To begin with, it examines how Engels (like Marx) shared the view of ‘primitive anti-statism’: the idea that the state would need to be actively ‘abolished [abschaffen]’ as one of the first acts after a revolutionary seizure of power. The second part analyses the life-and-death struggle with Bakunin and the Anarchists, whose position was clarified only in the 1870s. A key component of their platform was the abolition of the state as the first revolutionary act, which Bakunin attempted in Lyons in 1870. Indeed, the incident at Lyons – in which Bakunin decreed the abolition of the state only to be arrested shortly after and bundled out of town – was a key moment when both Engels and Marx realised that such abolition was futile. Thus, the third part of the chapter examines how the emphasis on the dying away of the state arose, with Engels clearly indicating that it would be one of the final outcomes of socialism in power, after the proletarian dictatorship had transformed economic and social structures. Only then – eventually and gradually – would the state as a separated public power dissolve as a natural process. This may take a long time indeed.

Chapter 4: The Enmeshed Apparatus

The final chapter analyses how Engels envisaged the construction of socialist governance – with the caveat that he had never experienced this process directly and could draw only from the brief experiment of the Paris commune. It begins by studying Engels’s extensive work on ‘pre-state’ formations, where he identifies complex structures of governance, elections, representative bodies, sovereignty and Gewalt. Further, the chapter offers a careful analysis of the important text, ‘The Mark’, which dealt with the German tradition of the Markgenossenschaft. This tradition influences German law today, in which common rights still apply to farmland. For Engels, this practice is a relic of ‘pre-state’ formations, in which land was held in common, although it was modified in light of subsequent developments. The important argument – directed at peasant farmers – is that the communism of the future would entail a dialectical transformation (Aufhebung) of what is sometimes called ‘primitive communism’. But what should this organisation of the future be called? Given Engels’s definition of the state as a ‘separated public power’, he cannot call it a ‘state’. Instead, he uses the terminology of ‘social organisation’ and ‘administrative functions’, which may also be called the ‘enmeshed apparatus’. In other words, many functions of governance would be needed, a situation that can be described as the need for the apparatus of governance without separation from society. Or, as Engels puts, the organs of social organisation and governance ‘stand in the midst of society [steht eben mitten in der Gesellschaft]’. This means that a socialist state would not be alienated from society but thoroughly enmeshed within it, so much so that one cannot speak of ‘state’ and ‘society’ as distinct elements. In this light, the term ‘socialist governance’, or perhaps ‘enmeshed state’, are to be preferred.

Conclusion

The conclusion to the book outlines the way Engels’s contribution provides the philosophical basis for future developments of socialist governance, or what is now called the ‘socialist state’. This process entails drawing out philosophical insights from historical and anthropological studies, which has been the concern of the book as a whole. These insights include: the need for socialist Gewalt (dictatorship of the proletariat, which is one with communist society) in constructing socialist society and economics; the dying away of the state as a long-term and gradual process; the enmeshment of the apparatus of governance within society, so that it is no longer possible to distinguish state from society or indeed from the economy. Implicit in these points is a progression, with a strong socialist Gewalt as the means for transforming economic and social realities, as well as providing the basis for beginning the process of the dying away of the state as a separated public power. This process is gradual and long-term, entailing that as hitherto known forms of the state fade away, new types of governance arise, types that are enmeshed within society rather than separated from it. This may be seen as a socialist Aufhebung of the state. Subsequent historical developments in actual constructions of socialism – from the Soviet Union to China – would be faced with new problems, for which new solutions were and are needed. But Engels’s contribution was to provide some important bases for such developments. Or, as Engels put it in 1890, ‘So-called “socialist society” is not, in my view, to be regarded as something that remains crystallised for all time, but rather being in process of constant change and transformation like all other social conditions’.

Important Texts by Engels

Note: For the sake of rapid identification, English titles are provided here, although the book works with original texts.

1872. ‘The Congress of Sonvillier and the International’. MECW 23: 64-70.

1872. ‘The General Council to All Members of the International Working Men’s Association’. MECW 23: 205-10.

1872. ‘The Congress at The Hague (Letter to Enrico Bignami)’, MECW 23: 271-76.

1872-1873. ‘The Housing Question’. MECW 23: 317-91.

1873. ‘On Authority’. MECW 23: 422-25.

1873. ‘The Bakuninists at Work: An Account of the Spanish Revolt in the Summer of 1873’. MECW 23: 581-94.

1873-1874. ‘Varia on Germany’. MECW 23: 599-610.

1877-1878. Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science. MECW 25: 3-309.

1880. ‘The Socialism of Mr. Bismarck’. MECW 24: 272-80.

1880. ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’. MECW 24: 281-325.

1882. ‘On the Early History of the Germans’. MECW 26: 6-57.

1882. ‘The Frankish Period’. MECW 26: 58-107.

1882. ‘The Mark’. MECW 24: 439-56.

1883. ‘Engels to Philipp Van Patten in New York (Draft). London, 18 April 1883’. MECW 47: 9-11.

1883. ‘On the Death of Karl Marx’. MECW 24: 473-81.

1884. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. In the Light of the Researches by Lewis H. Morgan. MECW 26: 129-276.

1884. ‘The Decline of Feudalism and the Emergence of National States’. MECW 26: 556-65.

1887-88. ‘The Role of Force in History’. MECW 26: 453-510.

1891. ‘Introduction to Karl Marx’s The Civil War in France’. MECW 27: 179-91.

1891. ‘A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Programme of 1891’. MECW 27: 217-32.

1894. ‘On the Association of the Future’. MECW 26: 553.

1894. ‘The Peasant Question in France and Germany’. MECW 27: 481-502

1895. ‘Introduction to Karl Marx’s The Class Struggles in France’. MECW 27: 506-24.

Works by Marx and Engels:

1872. ‘Preface to the 1972 German Edition of The Manifesto of the Communist Party’. MECW 23: 174-75.

1872. ‘Fictitious Splits in the International. Private Circular from the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association’. MECW 23: 79-123.

1872. ‘To the Spanish Sections of the International Working Men’s Association’. MECW 23: 211-13.

1872. ‘Resolutions of the General Congress held at the Hague from the 2nd to the 7th September, 1872’. MECW 23: 243-253.

1873. ‘The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men’s Association. Report and Documents Published by Decision of The Hague Congress of the International’. MECW 23: 454-580.

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 17, 2019 2:27 pm

BOURGEOIS DEMOCRACY VERSUS SOCIALIST DEMOCRACY
Posted by Joaquim Marques de Sa | Dec 22, 2018 | Featured Stories

Bourgeois Democracy versus Socialist Democracy
Bourgeois democracy and socialist democracy — The representativeness issue

By Joaquim Marques de Sa

There is probably no concept so manipulated and misrepresented by the bourgeoisie – the historical designation of the capitalist class [1] — as the concept of democracy. The misrepresentation starts out with the representativeness issue.

I.
Bourgeois democracy is one of the political forms of the state in capitalist countries. It is characterized by the existence of a number of political rights of the people, such as the constitution of parties, the free election of representatives to an Assembly with legislative powers and, in the case of republics, the election of the President.

There have been and still are in capitalism political forms of the state virtually empty of rights. In Nazism the law was dictated by the Fuhrer — the “Fuhrer principle”, officially enshrined by the Nazis. Between the bourgeois democracy with the broadest rights one may think of and the Fuhrer principle void of rights, spans a whole spectrum of political forms of capitalism. Bourgeois democracy is a slice of that spectrum.

In the common perception — which reproduces the dominant formation and information in bourgeois democracies — there can be no better democracy than bourgeois democracy. One of the tenets of this perception is precisely that bourgeois or “Western” democracy is “democracy” tout court; i.e., the mentors of capital absolutize bourgeois democracy as the concrete fulfillment of abstract and ideal democracy.

Lincoln defined democracy as the “rule of the people, by the people, and for the people.” This ideal definition was, however, very far from being fulfilled either by Lincoln and his followers or any bourgeois democracy.

Why?

II.
In order to answer the question, one has first to take into account that in societies of antagonistic classes, in which one class exploits the work of the others, a “neutral” State, at the service of the “common good”, above the classes, does not and cannot exist. As soon as in the ancient world relations of production arose based on the private ownership of the means of production, and with them classes arose, the State also emerged as an instrument of the ruling class to maintain and reproduce the exploitation of the work of the dominated classes, regardless of the political forms assumed by the State.

In the article “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It” [2], Lenin raises the question: “And what is the State?” To which he answers: “It is an organization of the ruling class”.

Let us consider ancient Athens, where “democracy” was born, which in Greek means “power of the people,” thus apparently satisfying Lincoln’s definition. A totally idealized and truncated idea of the Athenian democracy, which supposedly inspired the absolute, “Western”, democracy, has been taught to the young people of the “Western democracies” up to this time. There are demographic estimates for 317 BC, in the last phase of the Athenian democracy [3]. From a total population of 493,000 inhabitants, only 63,000 were Athenian citizens; 400,000 were slaves and 30,000 were foreigners. From the citizens, only men, 21,000, had political rights. Slaves, despite being the main producers, had no political rights whatsoever, as they were considered mere instruments of production.

But even the 21,000 men who could participate in the People’s Assembly were divided into four classes according to the amount of land they owned. Only the wealthiest class, of the large landowners (about 3% of the citizens), had all the political rights, and the rank of General was reserved to them. Furthermore, only the members of the two wealthiest classes (about 10% of the citizens) could participate in the Supreme Council of the State (Areopagus) and in other institutions, such as the courts. Military institutions also have the mark of class: the second class in terms of wealth was that of knights; the third class, which corresponded to the middle peasantry, was that of the infantry; the fourth class, of the poor peasants, was that of the oarsmen of the triremes.

At its historical birth democracy already reveals the class limitations of political representativeness: Athenian democracy favored the largest landowners, who drew huge incomes from the labor of multitudes of slaves. These huge incomes afforded the largest landowners to control state institutions and coercive organs: courts and army. It also afforded them a decisive influence on the elections and all state policies, including the colonizing policies of Athens. In short, the Athenian State was the State of the largest land and slave owners. Athenian democracy favored the interests of the exploiters, a very small fraction of the people.

This limitation of democracy is present in all socioeconomic formations based on social classes with antagonistic interests — interests that cannot be reconciled within the framework of relations based on private ownership of the means of production and circulation. In feudalism, the existence of Cortes and Parliaments does not alter the situation of economic dominance, therefore political domination, of the high nobility that owns the large dominions of land and, at a later stage, productive and mercantile infrastructures. In capitalism, the existence of parties and elections does not alter the situation of economic domination, therefore political domination, of the bourgeoisie, the ruling class. It is the bourgeoisie who holds the economic levers, financial capital inclusive. She also has the monopoly of the instruments of violence: army, police, etc.

Consequently, when we hear about democracy, the first question to ask is: democracy for whom? Equivalently: Which is the ruling class of the State?

III.
Let us consider the multipartyism of bourgeois democracy. It is postulated by the mainstream media, controlled by big corporations, as the sine qua non stamp of democracy. However, the fact that there are two or more parties in bourgeois democracy does not imply that the respective State can be guided by different ideologies. The ideology of the capitalist State is only one, and its main dogmas turn around the market economy, the private property, the alleged separation of powers — in spite of the fact that all powers act in articulation to defend capitalism — and so on. Multipartyism, even when the party of the proletariat [4] is represented in the parliament, does not ensure the acting expression of different ideologies; it only ensures the acting expression of specific points of view and interests of sectors of the bourgeoisie.

Multipartyism is used by bourgeois politicians to sell the illusion that all wills of the people enjoy equal opportunities of ruling. Yet, in reality, only one will dominates: that of the big bourgeoisie. This is particularly clear in the extreme case of two-party systems as in the US.

The bourgeois parties use the elections of bourgeois democracy to elect representatives of capital in a framework of selling the illusion of multipartyism. In the bourgeois elections there is really no popular mass participation, with grassroots popular assemblies proposing candidates for their merit. It is not the people who elect, but the parties who elect. The electoral campaigns of the bourgeois parties are theatrical shows selling delusions with pompous phrases and demagogic promises, resorting to all the advertising tricks that large companies use to influence consumers. The promises can be made with impunity since deputies in bourgeois democracies are not accountable to the voters and cannot be recalled [5] by them.

The setting up of shows, the mass manipulation of consciences by the media, publicity, propaganda, etc., the corruption of leaders of yellow trade-unions, who are offered jobs and funds to support bourgeois parties, cost money. In bourgeois elections money is frequently a decisive factor. The bourgeoisie understands this perfectly and replicates in the political field what takes place in the economic field. It invests in this or that party in order to sell it to the consumers in the electoral market.

The commodification of politics is inherent to the monopoly of the capitalist view. The bourgeois democracy is democracy for the capitalist class; therefore, the adjective. It stands far away from “the government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

IV.
In bourgeois democracy, the bourgeois class dominates all other classes, as in all political forms of the bourgeois State. It is not because it is “democratic” that it will refrain from imposing misery wages on millions of workers, unemployment and precariousness, strenuous work rhythms, unregulated hours and relocation of workplace without respect for families, enriching herself to levels never seen before at the expense of others. Nor does it refrain from applying all the coercive and repressive means she controls whenever democracy or democratic rights are viewed as obstacles or threats to her interests.

Given that every State represents an economic domination — hence, political and social domination — of one class over all other classes and social groups, it does in fact represent a class dictatorship, even if the political form of the State is democratic. The term “dictatorship” does not have here the usual meaning. It does not refer to the tyranny of an individual or a clique (despotism). It instead refers to the exclusive ruling, using all possible levers — economic, political, military, social, etc. — of one class.

On May 28, 1926, the democratic government of the Portuguese bourgeoisie put no opposition to the advance of a military march from Braga to Lisbon to impose “order”; a march supported by an important sector of the Democratic Party (banking, high-trade and industry), large landowners and clergy. Frightened by the rise of proletarian consciousness and proletarian struggle (news of the October Revolution had arrived to Lisbon and the Portuguese Communist Party had been formed in 1921) the military march allowed the bourgeoisie to discard democracy and make way to fascism. She continued doing what she had done before: the repression by the police of the workers’ strikes and by the National Republican Guard of the rural workers’ struggles in the Alentejo fields. But she did it now with greater vigor and with no obstacles: with arbitrary arrests, assassinations, concentration camp, etc. This is one of countless demonstrative examples of why, from a class standpoint, any bourgeois political regime is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. And of how the bourgeoisie is always ready to discard democracy when she feels that she can no longer govern with it.

The bourgeois dictatorship does not manifest itself only in major events. It also manifests daily in innumerable «small» events. At the moment of writing, we read from the newspapers of the Portuguese democracy: 1) CT, a woman worker in a cork firm was fired. The Court requires the firm to reinstate her. The firm complies, but punishes the worker by compelling her to load and then unload a pallet with the same 15 kg sacks throughout the day. It also obliges CT to use a toilet other than that of the colleagues, where she has to hold a towel at the door for privacy, and controls the toilet paper she uses. CT goes into stress and becomes debilitated. Following a trade-union complaint, a state agency confirms the facts and fines the firm. The firm’s lawyer says he will appeal to the Labor Court and if need be to the European Court. 2) Two truck drivers are punished by the boss for participating in a workers’ plenary and go on strike. Deprived of the subsidy of risk and overtime payment, their monthly wage lowers to 600 €, barely above the national minimum wage.

In both cases profit dictates the law. While bourgeois dictatorship falls daily on the workers, to the bankers of the Portuguese democracy, who stole millions upon millions, nothing substantial happens. The supposedly independent judiciary power is linked by thousand threads to the defense of capitalist profit. This power is independent, indeed; independent of workers’ intervention.

At the top of the imperialist pyramid are countries with democratic regimes where the bourgeoisie, besides exploiting the work of the autochthonous workers, draws enormous profits from the imperialist plunder of weaker countries, particularly of the Third World, by various means, including financial subjugation. At home, immigrants are compelled to take the harder and worse paid jobs. With the huge profits sucked from emigrant capital and immigrant labor, the bourgeoisie corrupts trade union leaders and maintains well-paid “middle-class” strata (intelligentsia too) and workers’ aristocracy, turning them into staunch defenders of capitalism and replicators of imperialist and anti-communist propaganda. It thus succeeds in maintaining a relative social peace. Although such countries have democratic regimes (in some of them with very little democracy), they also are bourgeois dictatorships. We see this in the police interventions and charges in workers’ strikes and concentrations, in the criminalization of demonstrators in Spain and other countries, in Macron’s expressed will to ban demonstrations of workers, etc.

V.
Although bourgeois democracy is one of the forms of dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, there is an important aspect that should not be overlooked. The existence or non-existence of democratic rights in a bourgeois State is not irrelevant to the workers and other sections of the population.

Democracy in any socio-economic formation is always a conquest of the exploited classes. In ancient Athens, democracy was only achieved after a whole series of struggles of the poor peasantry. The ruling classes always tend to install despotic regimes to ensure maximum exploitation of labor. When constrained to democratic regimes, they seek to restrict and empty democratic rights, and whenever they see their privileges threatened, they do not hesitate to discard democracy and impose tyrannical regimes.

Within bourgeois democracy the proletariat and its vanguard party (the party that brings together the most conscious and politicized members of the proletariat) are vitally interested in striving not only to maintain but also in broadening democratic rights — political, economic and social. In addition to short-term objectives of improving living conditions, the struggle to strengthen democratic rights favors popular intervention and participation, serving as a school for the proletariat and for other classes and social strata interested in allying with the proletariat in the struggle against the bourgeoisie for long-term objectives, namely the conquest of socialism.

For all these reasons, the vanguard party of the proletariat is the most consistent party in the struggle for democracy. It is not only the history of struggle against fascism that abundantly proves this statement. The present reality, with the attack of the neoliberal reaction to the rights of the toiling masses, which in many countries is carried out by pro-fascist regimes, reveals the communist and workers’ parties as parties that are at the forefront of the struggle for democracy.

The Weimar Republic, set up in Germany after the First World War, was poor in democratic rights, largely because of the Social Democrat party; a party that had crushed the labor movement in blood and was complacent towards the enemies of bourgeois democracy, monopolists and landowners. In October 1922, Clara Zetkin expressed in the Reichstag the Communists’ attitude to Weimar’s democracy: “We have no illusion about the value of this little democracy for the working class, but though it is little we do not underestimate it.” She then turned to the nationalists and went further: “While you are only reflecting on how you could undo this beginning of democratic construction, we are ready to protect and defend against you this poor democracy; and everyone will see that this little piece of democracy has no more faithful or more determined supporters than the Communists.” The German Communist Party was indeed the only party that fought against Nazism.

VI.
Socialism is the first historical stage in the construction of a classless society. In socialism there are still classes — the proletariat and the peasantry – and social strata – e.g., the intelligentsia –, but they are not antagonistic. As the main means of production (including land, mines, energy, etc.) and circulation become property of the workers’ State, become social property, the bourgeoisie and landlords cease to exist. Socialism, therefore, breaks away with the past, with the existence of antagonistic classes, with the exploitation of man by man.

In opposition to capitalism, the socialist State is able to represent and secure the interests of the laboring masses, the overwhelming majority of the people. This is so, because: a) in socialism the surplus labor is socially appropriated, is owned by all and not by a few (as in capitalism where the capitalist draws the profit from surplus labor); economic planning, which is only possible with socialism, affords freeing society from economic crises and increase economic development and social welfare at high rates. The only major opposition to concretizing these benefits comes from imperialism: wars (physical and economic), aggressions, subversion and economic blockades.

Whereas in capitalism democracy is something exogenous to the system of the bourgeoisie – if not imposed by the exploited classes, from outside and against the logic of the system, bourgeoisie can live without it –, democracy is an endogenous condition of socialism. Socialism can only exist with the support, participation and commitment of the overwhelming majority of the people. In socialism what counts are the people, the social needs, not money. The stronger the socialist democracy, with the participation and commitment of the people led by the proletariat and its party, the better socialism will achieve its objectives and will stand better against imperialist aggressions.

In socialism there are classes, but they are not antagonistic. There is also State. This is the State of the proletariat and its allies. With variations, according to the concrete conditions of each socialist country, we find among the allies the peasantry and the progressive intelligentsia. What are the tasks of the socialist State and government? They can be grouped into two broad groups: (1) economic, organizational, and administrative construction, as in any State, but now serving the interests of the overwhelming majority of the people rather than a tiny minority of exploiters; 2) the defense of socialism against internal and external enemies.

The rupture of socialism with the past will occupy an entire historical epoch. It is not in half a dozen years or in a few decades that the weight of centuries is over. After the full overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat and its allies — in a struggle headed by the proletariat, the most revolutionary class since it has nothing to lose and has a world to gain [6] –, there will stay for a long time remnants of the exploiting classes and monetary-mercantile relations which may foster the emergence of a new bourgeoisie. Imperialism strives to mobilize these remnants and this new bourgeoisie to defeat socialism. The socialist state has therefore to repel the threat of internal and external enemies. Democracy for the people but subduing of the bourgeoisie. As in other socio-economic class formations, socialist democracy is also a class dictatorship: the dictatorship of the proletariat. [7]

The dictatorship of the proletariat refers not only to the tasks of group 2, but also those of group 1, as Lenin observes [8]: “But the essence of proletarian dictatorship is not in force alone, or even mainly in force. Its chief feature is the organisation and discipline of the advanced contingent of the working people, of their vanguard; of their sole leader, the proletariat, whose object is to build socialism, abolish the division of society into classes, make all members of society working people, and remove the basis for all exploitation of man by man.”

In addition to those who reject the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat out of their class positions and elitism, there are many who do not accept it because they take the term “dictatorship” out of the class context and, in addition, conceive democracy as bourgeois democracy. We have already seen, however, that bourgeois democracy is only one of the political forms of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Socialist, proletarian democracy is the political form of proletarian dictatorship. For this reason, the expression “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat” is correct, though it may seem an incongruity. It is democracy for the proletarian class (and its allies) which exercises dictatorship over the bourgeoisie. Democracy is always democracy for one class (and its allies) and dictatorship over another (or others). In fact, there can only be either bourgeois dictatorship or proletarian dictatorship. He who rejects one necessarily accepts the other, though he may not be aware of it.

VII
The tasks of surveillance and combat against internal and external enemies, as well as the tasks of building socialism, are rather complex. They demand the unity of action of the proletariat, of the people around the proletariat, and in mobilizing and conducting wills engaged in correctly solving those tasks by an experienced party, vanguard of the proletariat, armed with a scientific theory. This theory is Marxism-Leninism. History has proved that it is only possible to build socialism with the leading role of the proletarian vanguard party, the communist party (may have other names) faithful to Marxism-Leninism.

In the capitalist countries the bourgeois parties direct the State in the interests of the bourgeoisie and against the proletariat. In socialism the communist party directs the State in the interests of the proletariat and working masses against the bourgeoisie.

One of the frequent criticisms of capitalist mentors against socialism is that it is impossible to have democracy with a single party. Yes, that is impossible in capitalism. In socialism is possible. The question, in fact, boils down to what is meant by “party”. The understanding of “party” in capitalism is necessarily different from the understanding in socialism.

In capitalism the exploiters have parties which express different opinions on the best way to exploit the toiling masses. Moreover, capitalism has antagonistic classes, needing antagonistic parties to represent them. Socialism has no exploiters and no antagonistic classes. There are in socialism no antagonistic, irreconcilable interests that need representation.

In socialism the interests of the workers are unified: to defend socialism, to improve living conditions, to progress socially (more education, more culture, etc.), to better apply science and technology, to make life more dignified defending moral values based on work. The communist party directs and guides decision-making towards these goals. It does so because the communist party itself comes from the toiling masses; the overwhelming majority of its militants are proletarians. Communist militants are not paid for the tasks of leading and guiding the popular masses, unlike the bourgeois parties. The communist party is not a “political party” in the “common sense”, the bourgeois sense of the term. It is simply the advanced and militant guard of the proletariat and the toiling masses. The communist party only directs and guides as far as it defends the interests of the people and enjoys their confidence. If it loses the distinctive features of a communist party, socialism is in danger, capitalist restoration lurks.

In capitalism the bourgeois parties conceal from the people their leading role. In socialism the leading role of the communist party is openly stated because it enjoys the support and confidence of the people. A Cuban Professor said in this respect that in the capitalist world there are many parties, but only a small group governs, whereas “In Cuba there is a single party that directs the policies, but it is the population who governs from the social and mass organizations in democratic structures.”

VIII.
Cuba offers an example of socialist democracy. Democracy with direct representativeness of the toiling masses.

There are several websites about elections in Cuba and the Cuban political system. In addition to the central organ of the Cuban Communist Party (CCP), and wikipedia (this one with usable information on a pro-US background), we will quote citations from an article of the Australian GreenLeft Review website.

In Cuba there are several parties [9] but only the CCP, revolutionary party of the toiling masses, is enshrined in the Constitution as a leading party. The CCP (or any other party) does not participate in the electoral process. It does not nominate or propose candidates, nor does it campaign for candidates. “This system avoids many inequities and imbalances inherent in its party-political based counterparts and ensures a fairer and more – rather than less – democratic electoral process.”

In Cuba, all members of representative bodies are elected, accountable to grassroots organizations and subject to having the mandate revoked for poor performance. The masses control the activity of state agencies, deputies and officials.

There are only a few deputies whose job is solely state tasks. With the exception of those few, no member of any body receives money for serving the people. Every deputy goes on with his/her life and his/her work. “Participation in politics in Cuba is essentially a part-time (but nonetheless time-consuming), unpaid and voluntary act of public service, rather than a materially motivated career choice. It involves self-sacrifice and effort.”

The first phase of the elections begins at the assemblies of neighborhood. Each neighborhood assembly, “in an open and transparent community process”, selects candidates to run for the election of the Municipal Assembly of the respective neighborhood. “Candidates can neither – nor do they need to – raise nor spend any funds or offer any favours on election campaigns. All candidates – regardless of their political, social or economic status – are granted equal access to all voters and media.” Information about each candidate (experience, qualifications, ability, etc.) is posted in public spaces to which all voters have access. Let us also note that, given the size of a neighborhood, the merits of the candidates are or can easily be known to voters.

“People are encouraged to participate in the democratic process, which is very well organized, supervised and secure. Voting is not obligatory, but more than 90% of the electorate have traditionally participated voluntary in the polls.” In fact, electoral participation reaches levels above 95%, contrasting to what happens in bourgeois democracies (e.g. 49% in the USA and 55% in Portugal).

Voters may vote for one, for some, or all of the candidates in the ballot paper. Each candidate must have more than 50% of the votes to be elected. If the quota of elected candidates is not reached, a second round is held.

In the second phase, the Provincial Assemblies and the National Assembly of People’s Power (NAPP) are elected. Provincial and national candidacy commissions prepare lists of candidates based on the elected neighborhood candidates.

The candidacy commissions are composed of qualified members of mass organizations: Cuban Congress of Trade Unions, Federation of Cuban Women, National Association of Small Farmers, student federations, etc. The selection of candidates is based on merit, popular acceptance, patriotism, ethical values and dedication to socialism. In the case of the NAPP, mass organizations can nominate candidates in less than half of the total number.

Voters can veto a candidate, because if a candidate does not have more than 50% votes, a new candidate will have to be chosen. All elections are held by secret ballot. Suffrage is granted to citizens over the age of 16 who have not been found guilty of any crime. Candidates must be 18 years or older.

The NAPP elects by secret ballot the President (who must be a candidate elected by a neighborhood and by a Municipal Assembly) and, on proposal of the President, a Council of State of 31 members, with specific executive and legislative powers, among which the definition of the economic plan. The President presides over the Council of State.

The highest executive power resides in the Council of Ministers, formed by members of the Council of State and ministers appointed by the President. The Council of Ministers implements policies discussed and authorized by the NAPP, which is the supreme body of People’s Power to which the Council of State and the Council of Ministers are accountable.

“Prior to approving any significant new laws, the legislators often consider thousands of proposals, suggestions and concerns, raised by millions of citizens at hundreds of nationwide grassroots meetings and internal consultations of mass organisation. Informed popular opinion does not determine political decision-making, but it is given a degree of due consideration absent in most other supposedly “superior” systems ” Citizens can also propose laws as long as the proposal is made by at least 10,000 citizens with the right to vote.

“Cuba’s unique and sovereign electoral model ensures that no elected deputy or appointed official is in a position to offer political or administrative favours in return for monetary or material reward. The Cuban model is probably more corruption-free than any global counterpart […] It is a democratic and electoral process from which a lot can be learned and within which there is a lot to be lauded.”

It should be noted that if the majority of the people were against socialism they could very simply propose and vote for their anti-socialist candidates. As Fidel Castro said, “Who prevents them from doing so? This means that our democratic-revolutionary system inexorably presupposes the majority of the people. ”

Cuban socialist democracy is incomparably closer to the “government of the people, by the people and for the people” than any bourgeois democracy.

The direction and orientation of the CCP is made through the activity of its militants in the factories and popular organizations, through the discussion of proposals, civic example, study, explanation, and the connection to the masses to know what their problems are in order to propose just solutions. This is the only way to win the confidence of the masses in the CCP and in their own strength to solve problems and manage the State. How different all this is from the power of the money of a scarce minority, exercised through the bourgeois parties!

IX.
Contrary to bourgeois democracy, which whenever it can removes or empties democratic rights — this is observed at a global level in the present time –, in socialist democracy the will of the communists is always to improve socialist democracy, leading the working masses to increasingly participate in state administration.

In the USSR, the Constitutions of 1918 and 1924 — at a time when the proletariat and poor peasants were engaged on a titanic struggle against the bourgeoisie, large landowners, kulaks and foreign interventionists – prevented certain categories of people from voting: capitalists of any kind, priests and monks of any religion who took religion as a profession, and servants and agents of the repressive organs of Tsarism. The Constitution of 1936 — in a phase of consolidation of socialism –, on the proposal of Stalin supported by other leaders (Molotov, Kirov, Kaganovitch and others), enshrined the universal suffrage. In addition, Stalin proposed the improvement of electoral democracy (e.g., with the introduction of alternative lists of candidates) but his proposal was rejected by the First Secretaries of the CPSU [10].

In Cuba, the new Project of Constitution, available on the Internet, is currently being submitted to discussion by the Cuban people. The Project mentions the CCP in only 2 of 755 articles:
“ARTICLE 5. The Communist Party of Cuba, unique, Martian [11], Fidelist [12] and Marxist-Leninist, the organized vanguard of the Cuban nation, sustained on its democratic character and the permanent connection with the people, is the superior leader of the society and the State.
It organizes and guides the common efforts for the construction of socialism. It works to preserve and strengthen the patriotic unity of the Cubans and to develop ethical, moral and civic values.
ARTICLE 6. The Union of Young Communists, an organization of the Cuban vanguard youth, counts on the recognition and encouragement of the State, contributes to the formation of young people in the revolutionary and ethical principles of our society and promotes their active participation in the construction of socialism.”

Notes

[1] V.I. Lenin, A Great Beginning. Heroism of the Workers in the Rear (“Communist Subbotniks”), June 28, 1919: “Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy.”

[2] V. I. Lenin, The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, October 1917.

[3] J. M. Williams, Solon’s Class System, the Manning of Athens’ Fleet, and the Number of Athenian Thetes in the Late Fourth Century, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik Bd. 52 (1983), pp. 241-245; Miriam Valdés Guía, Julián Gallego, Athenian “Zeugitai” And The Solonian Census Classes: New Reflections And Perspectives, Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte Bd. 59, H. 3 (2010), pp. 257-281.

[4] In capitalism, “The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour power and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labour…” Fredrick Engels, Principles of Communism, 1847

Usually, proletariat is understood to be the working class, and this is the interpretation in socialism when there is neither capitalist profit nor unemployment.

We use “party of the proletariat” in the sense of the proletariat’s vanguard party, armed with Marxism-Leninism for the revolutionary transformation of society.

[5] The right to recall representatives was first proposed by Antoine de Saint-Just, a Jacobin revolutionary.

[6] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, February 1848

“Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

[7] From: The Programme of the Communist International. Comintern Sixth Congress, 1929 (MIA):

The dictatorship of the proletariat is a stubborn fight-bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, pedagogical and administrative-against the forces and traditions of the old society, against external capitalist enemies, against the remnants of the exploiting classes within the country, against the upshoots of the new bourgeoisie that spring up on the basis of still prevailing commodity production.

[8] Lenin, Greetings to the Hungarian Workers, 27 May, 1919.

[9] Besides the CCP, there are: Christian Democratic Party, Democratic Socialist Current, Democratic Social-Revolutionary Party, Democratic Solidarity Party, Liberal Party and Social Democratic Co-ordination.

[10] See detailed discussion in: Grover Furr, Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform. Part One and Part Two in: Cultural Logic, volume 8, 2005 (https://clogic.eserver.org/cultural-log ... ume-8-2005)

[11] Martian: faithful to the principles of popular sovereignty of the Cuban hero José Martí.

[12] Fidelist: faithful to the revolutionary principles and connection to the people of Fidel Castro, principles which have been guiding the Communist Party of Cuba since its birth.

The bilingual ( Portuguese and English) blog of Joaquim Marques de Sa is at <<http://revolucaoedemocracia.blogspot.co ... racia.html>>. He can be reached at <<revdem2012@gmail.com>>.

https://mltoday.com/bourgeois-democracy ... democracy/
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