[Marxism] Police revolt against the Mayor during Occupy Oakland
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Not as serious as the current NYPD revolt, but there are similarities in a police force throwing the mayor under the bus. This article also looks much deeper at how the police operate as an independent political institution, as a self serving bureaucracy, primarily to the benefit of its staff and its leadership, not unlike any government bureaucracy. The police are a permanent institution, unlike politicians who come and go, and are therefore often more powerful than City Hall. http://libcom.org/library/who-gives-orders-oakland-police-city-hall-occupy _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The sociology of Leninist organizations
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * http://libcom.org/library/sociology-leninist-organizations Leninists believe that there needs to be a revolutionary workers’ organization in order for the working class to challenge the capitalist system. Realizing that it is difficult to build a revolutionary workers’ organization, Leninists have often built an intermediate form instead, recruiting and convincing individuals to the idea of building such an organization in the future. The disparity between recruiting people to ideas and building working class power is rarely acknowledged beyond the belief that they will get to it eventually. The fundamental flaw of the Leninist Model, as we will call it, is this notion that a revolutionary workers’ organization, or the precursor to it, can be recruited into existence. On the contrary, such an organization can only be built as a product of struggle, and yet Leninists have sought to recruit people to Marxist ideas even in the absence of struggle. The idea that a revolutionary cadre can be built by recruiting people, more often than not middle-class, rarely with any material stake in the success of the organization or the struggles they are involved in, is an idealist and moralistic conception that is completely contrary to any understanding of Marxist theory or even to the writings and experience of Lenin himself. Leninists assume, nonetheless, that because they believe this effort is at the service of class struggle that it will all work out fine, as though their organization is exempt from the forces that affect all other institutions in capitalist society. This article will attempt to provide the beginnings of a materialist analysis of how Leninists have sought to build revolutionary workers’ organizations but have more often built bureaucratic sects instead. The problem is not just that it is quite hard to build the former but also that it is quite a bit easier to build the latter. Sectarian behavior is “normal” and “natural” and Leninists have usually formalized their sectarianism with bureaucratic rules and norms rather than built structures to counteract it. This article will also attempt to bring in some theoretical tools from outside of Marxism, particularly from the sociology of organizations and social psychology, which should help enlighten rather than negate the Marxist method. We will focus on the Leninist Model, specifically the one subscribed to by the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) for the last few decades. That is, an organization which focuses on recruitment to a very specific set of Marxist ideas; which subscribes to a particular form of democratic centralism in which the leadership debates their views in secret and then present a united front to the membership, who then debate their views in secret and present a united front to the world at large; which places a high priority on recruitment to the organization itself; but which nonetheless engages in social movements including protests and strikes in order to recruit people to this project. There are problems with the rules of democratic centralism, but the problem lies not in the rules themselves. Rather, the rules merely legitimize the organizational behavior that flows inherently from the Leninist Model. The rules and norms are merely symptoms. What needs to change are the fundamental organizational methods which have distorted the behavior of Leninists without them even realizing it. Article continues here: http://libcom.org/library/sociology-leninist-organizations _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] What is a Marxist organization?
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * http://libcom.org/library/what-marxist-organization It is a commonplace on the Marxist Left that revolutionary organizations need to be rooted in the working class, so much so that “middle-class” is just as common an insult as “sectarian” or “opportunist.” Middle-class dominated socialist groups are generally aware of their class basis and strive to overcome it—noting that an organization tends to be middle-class does not tell anybody anything they did not already know. Therefore, we will look at the problem of the base of an organization from a different angle. A fundamental weakness of the organizations of the socialist Left is that their members do not have a material stake in their organizations. Members of Leninist organizations join largely because they believe in the ideas. This is certainly how they are recruited. For the groups that are able to grow larger than an irrelevant sect, the members may even join because they believe in the actions of the organization. But very few of these actions actually have a material impact on the lives and livelihoods of their members and Leninists rarely even consider that this might be a problem. For decades, Leninists of various stripes have distinguished themselves by their unique analyses of the Soviet Union, recruiting members to their theoretical model and, in some of the better cases, engaging in mass movements and even trade union activism as well. These groups could debate on end their different analyses of whether the the Soviet Union was state capitalist, or a degenerated workers state, or whether they included China, Cuba, Serbia, Albania, or North Korea among their canon. In spite of their exhaustive sociological analyses of these various bureaucracies and how they did or did not represent the will of the working class or whether a political or economic revolution could bring workers to power, these Marxists never applied the same rigorous analyses to their own organizations. Implicit was always the assumption that their organization was somehow exempt from the pressures of society such as the racist and sexist muck that we are all raised with. They also held the assumption that their organization would not succumb to the very basic pressures society applies to all organizations, bureaucracies and institutions. It is approximately one hundred and sixty years too late to begin this discussion, but better late than never. Building an organization based on people who are convinced of Marxist ideas is, to put it bluntly, not very Marxist. Marxism is not a theory of the world but a strategy to change it. To the extent that it does provide an analysis of the world–and it certainly does–it would suggest that convincing people to a set of revolutionary ideas will end in failure. Revolutionaries are made by their experience in the class struggle, not in study groups and meetings, no matter how well intentioned these efforts are. As the American socialist Hal Draper wrote, “To engage in class struggle it is not necessary to ‘believe in’ the class struggle any more than it is necessary to believe in Newton in order to fall from an airplane.” Too often, though, Marxists have engaged in building their own organizations as though they were physicists jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, confident that their in depth knowledge of the laws of gravity would protect them from disaster. It is a long way down, and may even be quite pleasant and gratifying much of the time, but eventually there is the realization that they are hurtling toward earth at thirty-two feet per second per second just like everybody else. The catastrophic failure that became of the British Socialist Workers Party is a useful case in point. The SWP did not predict that the Soviet Union would be reformed into a genuine workers’ state or that it could not be overthrown by its own working class. Their theory, confirmed (while others were left in shambles) by the fall of the Soviet Union, has done it little good in practice beyond convincing people they have good ideas. There remains the basic Marxist problem of developing an actual cadre of militants who are courageous, self sacrificing, understand the mood on the shop floor–to the extent that workers today even work on a “shop floor”–and can galvanize people into action. A debate on the website of the group Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (rs21), one of the post-SWP groupings, has seen contributions from people with several decades of experience as active, party building Leninists, asking whether “Leninism” is worth saving and whether it is even a coherent body of thought. One contribution describes
[Marxism] Nov 2014: From election to rebellion
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * November 2014 was an historic month that began with the disastrous sellout by the Chicago Teachers Union of their own membership in favor of an alliance with the Democratic Party. It ends with a national rebellion against racist police violence stemming from the killing of Michael Brown. In other words, the worst and the best of current social struggles: http://victortoils.wordpress.com/2014/11/29/november-2014-from-election-to-rebellion/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The ISO, SEIU and the billion dollar pay cut
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == A few years ago, an ISO comrade in a Service Employees International Union (SEIU) local won elected office on a reform slate. Within a year, he was publicly promoting a $1 billion pension reform concession on behalf of his own members alongside a Democratic Party mayor. The ISO, rather than reel in their comrade or lead a battle against him or even criticize his efforts turned a blind eye to the whole affair. He continues to be promoted as an important leader in the labor movement and even as an opponent of pension reform and a proponent of class struggle unionism. http://victortoils.wordpress.com/2014/08/28/the-iso-seiu-and-the-billion-dollar-pay-cut/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
