The most working-class anarchist group is...
- Thread starter ernestolynch
- Start date
charlie mowbray
The Enforcer
But whenever wasn't capitalism triumphant during it's coupla hundred years of existence?
charlie mowbray
The Enforcer
Yes it did, but they were brief moments in its history. That's not to say it can't eventually be destroyed but right now capitalism in its market form is triumphant and in the process has won out over its state capitalist variant.
audiotech
wav, aiff, mp3, ogg, flac
LLETSA said:
Cossetted bollocks more like. Difficulties dumping your we did more than you schoolyard mentality learned in Militant school don't you think? If you've dumped the ideology why not the all the crap?
My misunderstanding of the IWCA as a 're-run of municipal socialism' is because I'm still not clear where it does stand? I don't hear much in the way of explanation from you after all.
My piles are and always have been fine thanks.
Ideology?LLETSA said:
You haven't quite grasped it. Anarchism is not an "ideology" in as much as it tries to impose the "truth" on others, but more an explanation of what's going on. I am part of a "living movement" because all round the world I see people struggling against hierarchy, against authority and against government.montevideo
New Member
fuck it
reallyoldhippy said:Ideology?
And against decomposing hippys.
That goes without saying.swarthy thug said:
MC5 said:
Read the site yourself, even better send off for an information pack.
reallyoldhippy said:Ideology?
Anarchism isn't an ideology? No set of rules or ideas that constitute what it is to be an anarchist? That's what it seems like to those of us who aren't anarchists!
Where was/is this non capitilist system ? russia no, cuba no, north korea no, china no, albania no. All have/had a class system, wage labour, production for profit, money ect, all the things that exist in our own capitilist society, very different kinds of places to here to be sure, but still capitilist. So where does it, has it existed ?
charlie mowbray
The Enforcer
Ah trained at the Militant cadre school. No, it wasn't non-capitalist, it was a form of capitalism, state capitalism. Or are you still gripped by the dead hand of ideology?LLETSA said:
charlie mowbray said:
I've never been in Militant.
You don't have to be in the grip of ideology to recognise that capitalism had actually been abolished throughout that part of the world where the Communists were in power. Where was the profit motive? The economy was planned to meet social needs (how successfully these were met is a different question.) State functionaries were paid a wage - most of them not a significantly bigger one than the workers. Their privileges came in the form of perks and special treatment, but the gap in wealth wasn't as wide as that which exists under capitalism.
Before you make that headlong rush to accuse me of Stalinist sympathies consider this: the Communist- ruled countries carried out the only serious attempt that has been made so far to organise a social and economic system within which most of the rules of capitalism did not apply.
It is far too easy, not to mention lazy, to dismiss the Soviet experiment and all that followed from it as just another form of capitalism. It doesn't let those who claim it off the hook, because everybody else - including, crucially, those who administered the Communist system and those who lived under it - agree that it was an attempt to live outside the capitalist system.
LLETSA said:
Promotion within the bureaucracy (and for a period under Stalin not getting shot/jailed) was dependent on meeting your production quotas. A profit motive of sorts you could claim.
LLETSA said:
This is a huge claim to make and outside of some very limited periods very, very hard to produce evidence for. For most of the time the economy was planned to meet the targets set for the bureaucrats. More often that not these targets were to do with industralisation and militarisation rather than social needs.
This also raises the question of who identifies what a 'social need' is and how it is filled.
LLETSA said:
Depends by what you mean be 'wealth'. If you mean money in the bank your right but this is because most consumer goods were in short supply. Having money is of little use if you have nothing to spend it on. Having goods was far more dependent on having access to special sources of supply then having money. In other words access to the party shops, allocation of better housing etc.
I guess this really boils down to as what you see as the important rules of capitalism to overcome when you talk of a socialist society. For anarchists ending the division between boss and worker would be as important as the more abstract equalisation of wages (Although in fact even under Lenin there were some 200 different categories of wage/ration access).
For a good part this is because we recognise that if you leave a minority with power over the majority then that power in itself will be used by that minority to enrich themselves to the loss of the majority. Formal legal forms are quite secondary to that process as was demonstrated by the Bolsehvik experiment.
But your right to say its an important experiment to examine.
sipriano said:
On the contrary: Russia da, Cuba si, North Korea er...yeah, Albania po.
The class system in those countries was/is not the same as that which exists under capitalism, if it can even be called a class system in the real sense of the word. There was the state bureaUcracy and its offshoots and the workers. No owners of the means of production.
Wage labour? Maybe - but the vast majority, including the state bureaucracy was paid a fixed amount. Whether this increased or not was the decision of state planners, not market forces or even of individual capitalists - of whom there were (officially) none.
No production for profit: one gripe of the pro-market reformers who gained the upper -hand in the late-eighties/early nineties was that the state-run economies were so sick because there was nobody interested in seeing that enterprises made a profit. If an enterprise was failing it would not go to the wall but be bailed out from the state coffers.
LLETSA said:
To claim the whole of republican Spain transcended capitalism is going to far. For the most part the anarchists had to work within a pretty rotten political compromise. That said for a period of up to 2 years over quite a significant area not only was the market (and frequently money itself) abolished but so too was the division into bosses and workers. Because the Spanish revolution involved both (and indeed economically also went quite a bit further than the 'war communism' period in Russia) even mainstream historians describe it as the greatest experiment in workers self management the world has yet seen.
BTW I think Ernie deserves some sort of troll of the year award for kicking off the thread.
JoeBlack said:
As I said to Charlie, don't mix me up with admirers of the system. I deliberately didn't go into the disparity between the official claims of the system and the realities, although the very fact that very many social needs were actually met demonstrates the huge amount of sincerity in the official aim. The hijacking of production targets for their own ends by bureaucrats was incidental to this and had many causes.
Again - don't confuse me with an admirer of the system it ran, but when the party identified those social needs it did so with both its own interests and the elevation of people from working class backgrounds to positions of influence in society in mind.
I never said that these were socialist societies. What I said was that it is all too easy to dismiss them as just another varient of capitalism. As if Communism could have consumed the lives of so many millions without a genuine desire to construct an alternative to capitalism and the belief- including among the highest leaders - that they were actually doing so. These people were not stupid; they knew that what they were involved was not merely a huge conjuring trick, and the best of them recognised that the system constantly fell short of its claims.
LLETSA said:
I don't - I do however think its a mistake to confuse the Russian experiment with any sort of libertarian socialism. It's failings were very much the failings of a command economy no matter what the motivations of those making the decisions.
And I feel that the 'state capitalist' label first used in the early 20's by libertarians as a short hand for this new system is quite useful as a summary. You can if you wish then have a taxanomic arguments about what you mean by capitalism and what aspects of this the USSR contained. Its actually much more useful to have that argument seperated from a defence of the actual regime.
JoeBlack said:
Nowhere have I said that I regard the Communist -run system as in any way 'libertarian socialist' and nowhere have I defended the regimes. (What's more, I have actually said this more than once in my posts!) But the state capitalist label is useless in as much as it is used as a cover for various kinds of socialist and anti-capitalist, enabling them to avoid being implicated in the only significant non-capitalist experiment that has so far taken place. Whether their organisations can be formally implicated or not is neither here nor there - nobody who is opposed to capitalism will ever avoid coming under pressure from their opponents regarding the crimes of the Communist regimes.
Similar threads
