Who, exactly, did I call a hypocrite? I certainly brought up the term hypocrisy to describe an attitude of not supporting the Democrats at all but still voting for them, but I don’t recall saying explicitly “You, [Dopername], are a hypocrite.” Especially since nobody has actually come out and said “I don’t support the Democrats at all but I’m still voting for them.”
Furthermore, I’d like to point out that I actually started this thread in MPSIMS, because I wanted to post an opinion on an issue that I didn’t actually think was flameworthy. Czarcasm, for some reason I haven’t been able to determine yet (my e-mail to him has so far gone unanswered), moved it here. Now, I’ve seen many a Pit thread stay quite sane and sober, and I’d hoped to keep this one that way. Alas, as soon as it showed up here we start getting “loony lefties” and “vodka shot-drinking wankers” and assertions of being out of touch with reality because hey, it’s the Pit, and Pit threads mean insults. Nevertheless there were some legitimate questions asked and arguments presented - some by posters who didn’t feel the need to throw in gratuitous barbs, and some by posters who did. Which means I gotta slog through the shit to find the real arguments. It would be nice to have a five-second-delay reading comprehension so that I might be able to clip out the Red-baiting and whatnot, but unfortunately that’s not the case. So at the same time I try to think out my answers, I get really pissed off. And pull stupid shit for which I deservedly get flamed. Like I said, I’m human, I have breaking points; that stupid shit doesn’t come out of nowhere.
I don’t think I’ve ever really laid down in one post, or even one thread, my political position. To start, I’m a revolutionary Socialist. That is, I adhere to the political and philosophical arguments of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. In that regard, I believe society has never been static, that it is always changing, and in order to understand society and to improve it we have to find the motor of that change and how it can consciously be run.
To paraphrase Marx, the history of humanity is the history of struggle. First against nature in order to become the dominant species, and then within civilization of class against class. Classes arose when the goods people produced began to consistenly exceed their need, so that some could be left over for later use. The people who first started overseeing the use of that surplus eventually became the people who used that surplus for their own benefit, and started running society so they could have more surplus to use. So, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed as time passed, humanity’s productive forces increased. Some people were tasked with laboring on those productive forces while others labored very little on those forces but reaped more of the benefits. Before feudalism it was the tribal chieftains, then it was the kings and eventually emperors, now it’s the capitalists. The transition to each phase of human history was accompanied by revolutions - first economic, then political and social. And each revolution was a conscious effort by one class to achieve dominance.
However, since each class society up until now has been replaced by another class society, the benefits and all the good stuff has been taken by the new ruling class. And the exploitation of labor (many more people making much more stuff but keeping very little of the products of their labor) has continued. And in each case, that exploitation of labor has created conflict between the classes and fightbacks on the part of one or more oppressed classes.
Marx and Engels, in examining capitalist society, found that conditions had become radically different even in 1848, when the echoes of the French Revolution were still dying down. Instead of having several classes with varying levels of possession of the means of production, capitalism had started to create only two - the workers (or proletariat) who ran the means of production but didn’t own them, and the capitalists (or bourgeoisie), who owned the means of production but didn’t physically run them. With that sharper division of classes came an ever-widening disparity in the possession of material wealth.
Instead of thinking the world was going to hell in a handbasket (Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England is an excellent introduction to the conditions back then) Marx and Engels looked for what might be able to change the world further. From their history they knew that the contradictions between classes could and would break out sharply in insurrections and revolutions, so the logical conclusion was that the next conflict would be between two very powerful classes; the capitalist class, which drew its power from its running of the state, and the working class with its power drawn from its organization and numbers.
Furthermore, Marx and Engels realized that the revolution, when it came (because those contradictions and struggles between the classes made it inevitable), could not simply be a huge chatoic wave of revolt; it needed a clear philosophy, politics, and organizations to guide it. Not from above or outside, but ultimately from within. Yes, that entailed sitting a lot in libraries (mostly on Marx’ part; Engels had a management job in his father’s factory in England which he hated until the day he retired) and doing a lot of studying, but Marx and Engels spent a lot of their time organizing among what there was on the left in Europe and seeking out working men and women who were becoming radicalized on their own.
Those ideas and thoughts have been expanded upon by later generations of political activists, like Lenin and Trotsky, and a host of others like Rosa Luxembourg and Antonio Gramsci to reflect the changing conditions of history and what those conditions required for a revolutionary organization, but the basic themes stay the same - the working class needs independent organization and independent politics in order to see a socialist revolution to its successful completion.
This is the best I can do for a thumbnail sketch of my politics; there’s far more to it than just this small bit. I hope that provides you with some sort of satisfactory explanation.
I choose the ‘both’, myself. The Democrats are a party of capitalism - they do not want to see any sort of challenge to the existing order, successful or otherwise. My politics are geared towards building exactly that challenge, one small step at a time. The Democrats’ goal is preserving society as it is; my goal is society’s radical reconstruction. To paraphrase Rosa Luxembourg - I’m not choosing a different path to the same goal if I support the Democrats; I’m choosing a different goal entirely.
So you didn’t insult and attack me personally just for the express purpose of riling me up? Why did you, then?
Wow, that compliment was shaped exactly like the back of your hand! How’d you do that?
Olentzero, suppose your revolution succeeds in the near future. It will inevitably be led not by the average proletarians but by intellectuals like yourself. Your little group of leaders suddenly has immense power at their disposal. How exactly do you plan to defy the historical precedents of the corruption that comes with such power?
That was the case with every socialist revolution to date. If there was sufficient discontent among the working class to revolt without outsider leadership egging them on to do so, there would have been a strong movement to do just that.
I strongly suggest you read up on your history of the Russian Revolution. Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution is a weighty but excellent introduction to the times by someone who was actually there. The Bolsheviks Come to Power by Alexander Rabinowitch is another. And if you can find it, volumes 1 and 2 of Tony Cliff’s biography of Trotsky provide a lot of historical background.
For a short encapsulation, however, workers’ power had been put on the agenda in Russia as early as 1905 by the workers themselves, independent of any ‘outside’ political influence. The forced abdication of the Tsar in 1917 came out of events triggered by women workers in St. Petersburg, angry over the price of bread. The conflicts of capitalist society themselves produce struggle, and movements of workers can and do spring up without any political party, mainstream or otherwise, ‘egging them on’.
Very sensible. This was anticipated in the Gulistan (the Rose Garden) by the 13th-century Persian author Sa‘di of Shiraz.
An unjust king asked a devotee what kind of worship is best? He replied:— “For thee the best is to sleep one half of the day, so as not to injure the people for a while.”
I saw a tyrant sleeping half the day,
I said:— This confusion, if sleep removes it, so much the better;
But he whose sleep is better than his wakefulness
Is better dead than leading such a bad life.
Olentzero, you are a fool. You’re not ever going to get the workers’ Marxist uprising you want to agitate for. All you will do is drive the Republican stake deeper into the heart of the Left. This has always been the biggest setback to the Left, its self-inflicted wounds. All the party purges by the Lefter-than-thou. I hope your foolish attitude has been abandonded by all as suicidal. We are RIGHT NOW in the struggle of our lives. Not in some hazy dreamed future Marxist teleology that never comes. RIGHT. NOW. The crisis calls for action and unity. It calls for Realos, not useless and self-destructive dreamers. WAKE UP.
Is there a “How to Be Like Nostradamus in Your Spare Time for Fun and Profit” pamphlet being distributed around here? I’d like a copy.
If I really wanted that I’d go out and vote Republican. I find it very hard to follow the logic behind “If you seek to build a stronger left without the Democrats, all you’re doing is weakening the left.” If the Republicans were really all that powerful, Nixon should have gotten away with a lot more shit than he did. His domestic policy was an absolute horror - and yet the left, disorganized and fragmented as it is from the Nixon and Reagan years, is still here.
Aaaaaah! AAAAAAAAHH! The Republicans are coming and THEY’RE GOING TO EAT OUR CHILDREN ALIVE!!! You HAVE to vote Democrat, you poor deluded fool! They’re the only ones who can save us because we’re too weak and ineffectual to do it ourselves!
You’re right; what was I thinking? Surely the Democrats, because they’re not quite as bad as the Republicans, are truly the saviors of humanity. Show me the way to that voting booth.:rolleyes:
If I came across as brusque I apologize. That wasn’t my intent. If you actually do pick up Trotsky’s History, even an abridged version, don’t hesitate to hit me with questions about what you’ve read before you’re done reading it. I believe my e-mail is readily available on this site.
Olentzero-
thank you for your comprehensive response. While I don’t agree with anything that you wrote, it helps illuminate your position.
However, if you’d have come out at the beginning of the thread and said that you were insane, you might have saved us all some time and effort.
Your proposal shares many of the delusions of anarchy and libertarianism, two other systems that I find to be embraced by people with little stake in the outcome of a contest between the two major parties. But I’m not going to try some sort of boogieman tactic on you, nor do I think you’re being honest when you accuse others in this thread of doing so. If you don’t find a significant difference between the two parties on most of the issues that affect the ‘working class’ then I don’t know what to do. Either you’re being willfully ignorant, or your priorities are way out of line with all of the other ‘working class’ people that I know.
The Dems are certainly not perfect. I am very liberal- and probably close to you on many issues. But in a country of 300 million, I know that my ideas are likely not going to be those of the majority, and I am happy to help those that both advance parts of my agenda and at the same time block my political enemies. I don’t need to cut off my nose to spite my face.
And yet you do anyway. What’s with the “delusions of anarchy and libertarianism” bullshit? Anarchy is not libertarianism. And libertarians are not deluded unless by “deluded” you mean “consistently liberal”. Thomas Jefferson was a liberal. You guys today are centrists. Compromisers. Fools who believe that they know how to live everyone else’s life and judge the merits of other people’s beliefs and needs. In other words, you’re deluded.
Libertarian socialism, not libertarianism, Daniel. One way to think of it is to consider the ethic of each philosophy. The ethic of anarchy (or libertarian communism) is positive constructivism. The ethic of libertarianism is noncoercion. They are not the same.
As mentioned at that link, libertarianism has described socialist anarchism for far longer than it’s described the government-limited capitalism referred to by the Libertarian party in the US. It’s not a mistake for someone to equate small-l libertarianism with anarchism.
