Re: Getting there (was: Critical support to King George?)
On Mon, 25 Aug 2003, Jurriaan Bendien wrote: What would Lenin say if he was alive today ? He would say, the real problem is different, it is, how can you mobilise a very large mass of people for the purpose of instating a governmental power that can begin the transition to socialism ? If you just forget about rhetoric, and put the question this way, three prerequisites are rather obvious: for that mobilisation to occur, (1) you need to know what would actually appeal to and consciously unite that large mass, as they really are, You say that Lenin would say the problem is different. Is that really so? Are we not, in some ways, closer to the conditions of 1917 then we were in 1987? There is the question of foreign capital with its interference which was an issue for the workers in St.Petersburgh just as it is now for SE Asian peasant farmers fighting against the WTO, GM seed and foreign imports as well as for US car and steel workers fighting against foreign imports. Mobilise a large mass of people - that has been happening over the last ten years against meetings of the WTO, IMF etc. The Return to the Streets demo in Lndon got Blair really worried - indeed the previously mentioned demos provoked a reaction in Genoa which was reminiscent of the Czar's reaction to demonstrations. However, in all those demos, socialists were not at the centre, did not organise and mobilise the masses - no socialist message came out clearly. People talk about ATTAC or Bov, but not about socialism. (2) you need to have a clear understanding of where you want to take that mass to, exactly; And _show_ you have a clear understanding. That was the genius of Lenin and Trotsky and is the genius of Castro. To be able, not just to write, but to stand up speak clearly and banter. Some socialists parties have an answer for every issue but no clear strong line. The extreme right win more votes than the left becuase of their unashamed clarity. (3) you need to devise an overall strategy and organisational forms, which take that mass from where they are now, to your goal. ouch that hurt! We have econmoic recession, high unemployment and a disastrous war and we are unprepared. It may sound a very simplistic rule of thumb, but the overwhelming bulk of radical thinking is not systematically oriented to these questions, and that is the main reason why socialist movements fail, although of course we can invent millions of reasons for failure. Indeed if you deconstruct what they are actually doing, you find that they focus mainly on strategies of failure and apologies and moralisms, rather than going systematically, step by step, through the requirements, on the basis of the most advanced knowledge we have for the purpose of solving these problems, in order to devise strategies for success. Yes, look at success. Bov burns down a McDonalds, goes to jail for it, leads and talks at anti-globalisation demos but how many people could even name the leader of the PCF in france or the PDS in Germany despite the fact that they had a prescence in parliament, but Bov had none? Because people can understand what he says and what he is talking about. If we now consider the international working class statistically or culturally, we can easily conclude that, whatever be the process of cultural homogenisation resulting from the internationalisation of capital, and whatever be the social-structural similarities of the positions of workers, a worker in China lives in a completely different world from a German worker, and from the point of view of a Chinese worker, the German worker might well be perceived as a member of the bourgeoisie, given the cultural and economic gap involved. But they both enjoy kung-fu films etc. Culture used to be our strong point. Ken Loach could do much better than he does already if had the backing of more sponsors. The problem? too fragmented. We need a cultural programme and that could really be global - as Hollywood and even Hong Kong and Bollywood have discovered. Maybe our artists should re-think the value of small workshops and film projets and consolidate and solidarise on a larger scale? Because that is where values are being taught - in films and, believe it or not, still in literature. Why hasn't anyone grabbed the copyright of Donovans song The Universal Soldier and re-released it just before the Iraq war? And that was just an example so don't harp on my choice! In a world of the internet, mass media and mobile phone communication, communications become highly reflexive, and the utilisation of conscious awareness changes, the psychological changes are profound. The classical distinction between statements about objective facts or events, and (inter-) subjectively meaningful statements becomes blurred or disappears. Once again - clarity or the K.I.S.S. principle (keep it simple stupid) Lenin would recognise the world we are in - and realise at
RES: [PEN-L] Getting there (was: Critical support to King George?)
-Mensagem original- De: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] nome de Ben Pincas Enviada em: quinta-feira, 28 de agosto de 2003 05:51 Para: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Assunto: Re: [PEN-L] Getting there (was: Critical support to King George?) On Mon, 25 Aug 2003, Jurriaan Bendien wrote: What would Lenin say if he was alive today ? that large mass, as they really are, Ben Pincas: You say that Lenin would say the problem is different. Is that really so? Are we not, in some ways, closer to the conditions of 1917 then we were in 1987? I think that socialists are fighting against globalisation, in each nation attacking the question in nationalist terms, when our internationalist origins and goals should push us to fight for a democratisation of globalisation. The triumph of revolutionary socialism today, and even of reformist social democracy, depends on the creation of supranational entities that will regulate the international flux of capital and work against global inequalities. For instance, a world governmente with one person, one vote. Renato Pompeu --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.512 / Virus Database: 309 - Release Date: 19/08/03
Re: Critical support to King George?
--- Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: (In John Oakes's highly informative The Ruling Race: a history of American Slaveholders, I just discovered that the Crown Governor General of Virginia offered freedom to any slave or indentured servant willing to fight for the counter-revolution. But wait, isn't emancipation supposed to be a goal of a bourgeois democratic revolution? Hard to keep track of these things.) The Brits also offered to free slaves who fought with them in the War of 1812. There is a line in full version of the Star Spangled Banner referring to the hireling and the slave, that is, the Hessian mercenaries and the Brit-emancipated blacks, as enemies of the Americans. jks __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
Re: Critical support to King George?
andie nachgeborenen wrote: The Brits also offered to free slaves who fought with them in the War of 1812. There is a line in full version of the Star Spangled Banner referring to the hireling and the slave, that is, the Hessian mercenaries and the Brit-emancipated blacks, as enemies of the Americans. I believe the tactic of freeing slaves of the enemy has been around as long as there have been slaves and warfare. It never had anything to do with ideology. Carrol jks
Re: Critical support to King George?
--- Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: andie nachgeborenen wrote: The Brits also offered to free slaves who fought with them in the War of 1812. There is a line in full version of the Star Spangled Banner referring to the hireling and the slave, that is, the Hessian mercenaries and the Brit-emancipated blacks, as enemies of the Americans. I believe the tactic of freeing slaves of the enemy has been around as long as there have been slaves and warfare. It never had anything to do with ideology. Carrol jks * That refers to Lincoln too? Mike B) = * Cognitive dissonance is the inner conflict produced when long-standing beliefs are contradicted by new evidence. http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
Re: Critical support to King George?
When the people rise in masses in behalf of the Union and the liberties of their country, truly may it be said, 'The gates of hell shall not prevail against them.' --Abraham Lincoln, from the February 11, 1861 Reply to Governor Morton
Re: Critical support to King George? (from PEN-L)
I believe the tactic of freeing slaves of the enemy has been around as long as there have been slaves and warfare. It never had anything to do with ideology. Carrol That refers to Lincoln too? Mike B) Historian James McPherson has a book on Antietam that argues that the Emancipation Proclamation was announced after Union losses forced Lincoln to adopt a make-or-break effort that involved big political risks. McPherson is an interesting figure. He represents that wing of American scholarship that puts the most revolutionary spin on the Northern leadership, despite the evidence here of Lincoln's waffling. This has endeared him to the WSWS website, a Healyite sectarian outfit that does have excellent analysis of movies and other topics that are not compromised by their dogmatism. You can read interviews with him at: http://www.wsws.org/sections/category/history/h-mcpher.shtml Here's a quote from Salon.com review of his Antietam book: What made Antietam different from other engagements, according to McPherson, was that it decided the fate of the country in at least two lasting respects. Prior to the battle, Lincoln performed an excruciating tightrope act, suspended between a northern political mosaic that exerted crosscutting pressures from various quarters for and against emancipation as a Union war policy and a need to keep border slave states and Northern Democrats in his war coalition. Lincoln himself stated: If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong, but he knew the limits of both his constitutional power and his political base too well to jeopardize the war effort by being aggressive on freeing the slaves. Five days after Antietam, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. He had tried half-measures before then, however; as Union generals, without Lincoln's official approval, began to confiscate slaves as war contraband, Lincoln would urge the border-state representatives to accept government compensation -- literally, payment for their former property - in return for a gradual emancipation of their slaves. It didn't work -- but Lincoln's efforts prompted some great rhetoric from the master orator [Gradual emancipation] would come gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything. Will you not embrace it? You can not, if you would, be blind to the signs of the times. full: http://www.salon.com/books/review/2002/09/17/mcpherson/index1.html -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Re: Critical support to King George?
I doubt that in the real world there's ever a one-to-one correspondence between class interests -- including the goals of the bourgeois democratic revolution -- and the interests of any given individual in power or struggling for power. Because of the relative autonomy of the state and ideology, real-world politics in effect reflects the pluralistic competition of a wide variety of interest groups each of which is pushing complex goals (class goals, those of patriarchy, those of racial supremacy, personal advancement, religion, etc.) Thus, royalist forces might free slaves (which might be seen as going against their royalist goals) if it turns out to serve tactical or strategic advantage. In another kind of case, Lincoln freed the slaves -- in areas he didn't actually control -- as a strategic maneuver, but one that fit with the growing power of the abolitionists and the punish-the-South crowd (the later radical Republicans). It's likely that he wouldn't have freed the slaves if the political forces against it had been really strong. Again, the Emancipation Proclamation -- and the specificities of its implementation -- represent the combination of different political forces. Of course, the theory of political pluralism is woefully incomplete. The competition takes place within the context of what Althusserians call the social formation (a bunch of different and interacting societal modes of production). With the growing domination of industrial capitalism (based on the proletarianization of the direct producers), the balance of political power was shifting away from merchant capital (which often profited directly from slavery) to industrial capitalists (who didn't). Even so, the story of the US Civil War was more than some simple struggle within the ruling classes. Old-fashioned Marxist histories (such as Hacker's TRIUMPH OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM, even though he repudiates Marxism in the preface) didn't apply a theory where there's a rising class that as a unified force embraces the goals of the bourgeois democratic revolution and then these goals were imposed -- as if capitalist history were a conscious product of the capitalist class. Rather, the various conflicts that produced the Civil War and similar events had the unplanned -- and often unwanted -- objective effect of promoting the development of industrial capitalism. And this was not a predetermined process: it's possible the South could have won (though, economically, it would have lost in the long run, IMHO). The only case in Marx where there's a class that consciously embraces its class interest and remakes the world in its image is the proletarian revolution, where the class-in-itself becomes a class-for-itself. Of course, this hasn't happened in practice yet. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: andie nachgeborenen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2003 7:15 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Critical support to King George? --- Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: (In John Oakes's highly informative The Ruling Race: a history of American Slaveholders, I just discovered that the Crown Governor General of Virginia offered freedom to any slave or indentured servant willing to fight for the counter-revolution. But wait, isn't emancipation supposed to be a goal of a bourgeois democratic revolution? Hard to keep track of these things.) The Brits also offered to free slaves who fought with them in the War of 1812. There is a line in full version of the Star Spangled Banner referring to the hireling and the slave, that is, the Hessian mercenaries and the Brit-emancipated blacks, as enemies of the Americans. jks __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
Re: Getting there (was: Critical support to King George?)
The only case in Marx where there's a class that consciously embraces its class interest and remakes the world in its image is the proletarian revolution, where the class-in-itself becomes a class-for-itself. Of course, this hasn't happened in practice yet. In Marx's own time, the working class comprised perhaps two-fifths of the population, and had a clear cultural and historical identity. But, in the developed capitalist countries, the working class now comprises four-fifths of the population, and no longer has the same clear cultural and historical identity, not withstanding sentimental rhetoric. Of course, you can talk about the working class as an objective social-structural fact (all those people socio-economically forced to work for a living, lacking other assets or means of life, plus direct dependents on their personal income, that would make working as such a voluntary choice). But the point is, that this is not a meaningful common factor which can inspire political unity, except in special conjunctures, and even in those conjunctures, a mode of political organisation is assumed which can assert that common factor. Already in the Poverty of Philosophy, Marx remarks that really a social class which isn't aware of its common interests is not really a class at all, but just a mass. Faced with this fact, what is it that Marxists actually do ? They tend to do four things: they seek to elaborate a socio-political tradition anyhow, and propagate this; they seek to analyse the social and economic structure; they seek to build political organisations based on Marxist ideology; they seek to intervene in cultural themes and political issues from a Marxist perspective, in a battle for ideological hegemony. But this isn't a very adequate strategy, which leads to very little result. Why ? Because the real problem is different, and for that you have to step out of conservative 19th century models of Marxist politics, and Marxist language, and clear the way for some fresh thought. What would Lenin say if he was alive today ? He would say, the real problem is different, it is, how can you mobilise a very large mass of people for the purpose of instating a governmental power that can begin the transition to socialism ? If you just forget about rhetoric, and put the question this way, three prerequisites are rather obvious: for that mobilisation to occur, (1) you need to know what would actually appeal to and consciously unite that large mass, as they really are, (2) you need to have a clear understanding of where you want to take that mass to, exactly; (3) you need to devise an overall strategy and organisational forms, which take that mass from where they are now, to your goal. It may sound a very simplistic rule of thumb, but the overwhelming bulk of radical thinking is not systematically oriented to these questions, and that is the main reason why socialist movements fail, although of course we can invent millions of reasons for failure. Indeed if you deconstruct what they are actually doing, you find that they focus mainly on strategies of failure and apologies and moralisms, rather than going systematically, step by step, through the requirements, on the basis of the most advanced knowledge we have for the purpose of solving these problems, in order to devise strategies for success. Therefore you can talk and write till you are blue in the face, you can fancy yourself very radical, and it may indeed generate some personal satisfaction or revenue for some, but you don't get anywhere much with your radicalism. All you get is jibes to the effect that if you know all this, why aren't you successful ?. If we now consider the international working class statistically or culturally, we can easily conclude that, whatever be the process of cultural homogenisation resulting from the internationalisation of capital, and whatever be the social-structural similarities of the positions of workers, a worker in China lives in a completely different world from a German worker, and from the point of view of a Chinese worker, the German worker might well be perceived as a member of the bourgeoisie, given the cultural and economic gap involved. On the other side, if you compare, say, American capitalism with Indian capitalism, you realise that capitalism functions in a completely different way in these countries. You can talk about capitalism and the fact that both countries are capitalist, but it does not mean very much because in reality the real experience of living in these countries is worlds apart. Now, we can of course go on talking about globalisation in a fragmented, eclectic sort of way, but this misses the real problems by a mile. Paolo Giussiani wrote an article once on the globalisation of hot air and that title just about sums it up. In a world of the internet, mass media and mobile phone communication, communications become highly reflexive, and the utilisation of conscious awareness changes, the
Critical support to King George?
(In John Oakes's highly informative The Ruling Race: a history of American Slaveholders, I just discovered that the Crown Governor General of Virginia offered freedom to any slave or indentured servant willing to fight for the counter-revolution. But wait, isn't emancipation supposed to be a goal of a bourgeois democratic revolution? Hard to keep track of these things.) By His Excellency the Right Honorable JOHN Earl of DUNMORE, His Majesty's Lieutenant and Governor General of the Colony and Dominion of VIRGINIA, and Vice Admiral of the same. A PROCLAMATION As I have ever entertained Hopes, that an Accommodation might have taken Place between GREAT-BRITAIN and this Colony, without being compelled by my Duty to this most disagreeable but now absolutely necessary Step, rendered so by a Body of armed Men unlawfully assembled, firing on His MAJESTY'S Tenders, and the formation of an Army, and that Army now on their March to attack his MAJESTY'S Troops and destroy the well disposed subjects of the Colony. To defeat such treasonable Purposes, and that all such Traitors, and their Abettors, may be brought to Justice, and that the Peace, and good Order of this Colony may be again restored, which the ordinary Course of the Civil Law is unable to effect; I have thought fit to issue this my Proclamation, hereby declaring, that until the aforesaid good Purpose can be obtained, I do in Virtue of the Power and Authority to ME given, by His MAJESTY, determine to execute Martial Law, and cause the same to be executed throughout this Colony: and to ** the Peace and good Order may the sooner be restored, I do require every Person capable of bearing Arms, to resort to His MAJESTY'S STANDARD, or be looked upon as Traitors to His MAJESTY'S Crown and Government, and thereby become liable to the Penalty the Law inflicts upon such Offenses; such as forfeiture of Life, confiscation of Lands, . . And I do hereby further declare all indented Servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to Rebels,) free that are able and willing to bear Arms, they joining His MAJESTY'S Troops as soon as may be, foe the more speedily reducing this Colony to a proper Sense of their Duty, to His MAJESTY'S Crown and Dignity. I do further order, and require, all His MAJESTY'S Liege Subjects, to retain their Quitrents, or any other Taxes due or that may become due, in their own Custody, till such a Time as Peace may be again restored to this at present most unhappy Country, or demanded of them for their former salutary Purposes, by Officers properly * to receive the same. GIVEN under my Hand on board the Ship WILLIAM by Norfolk, the 7th Day of November in the SIXTEENTH Year of His MAJESTY'S Reign. http://collections.ic.gc.ca/blackloyalists/documents/official/dunmore.htm Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
