Are these mingy little beasts really the champions of the working class? - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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As either the transitional stage to communism or legitimate socio-economic ends in its own right.
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#15062510
from the book THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER which Orwell wrote in 1937 and which the so-called "Socialists" and Communists tried to have suppressed from publication:

Part Two: Chapter 11

"...The ugly fact is that most middle-class Socialists, while theoretically pining for a class-less society, cling like glue to their miserable fragments of social prestige....The Coles, Webbs, Stracheys, etc., are not exactly proletarian writers...Sometimes I look at a Socialist — the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation — and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed. The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy; what they desire, basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard. Take the plays of a lifelong Socialist like Shaw. How much understanding or even awareness of working-class life do they display? ... You get the same thing in a more mealy-mouthed form in Mrs Sidney Webb's autobiography, which gives, unconsciously, a most revealing picture of the high-minded Socialist slum-visitor. The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we', the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them', the Lower Orders..."
#15062611
Sometimes when I listen to these people talking, and still more when I read their books, I get the impression that, to them, the whole Socialist movement is no more than a kind of exciting heresy-hunt — a leaping to and fro of frenzied witch-doctors to the beat of tom-toms and the tune of "Fee fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of a right-wing deviationist!"
#15062725
Ter wrote:In the city where I studied, students preferred to join the Trotzkyist movement instead of the Stalinists because in the former group the girls were prettier and easier to fuck.

Don't forget the Anarchists. If you're into posh totty, and I must admit I am, despite my strong Republican principles I must confess I wouldn't kick Meghan or Kate out of bed, then Anarchism is the ideology for you. Just check out you're nearest squat.
#15062728
Sivad wrote:
Sometimes when I listen to these people talking, and still more when I read their books, I get the impression that, to them, the whole Socialist movement is no more than a kind of exciting heresy-hunt — a leaping to and fro of frenzied witch-doctors to the beat of tom-toms and the tune of "Fee fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of a right-wing deviationist!"



They're kids.

This is the result of a century of oppression of the Left. They simply don't have the organisation. Left wing organisations get attacked or degraded. It's not as obvious and the days when they would be attacked with baseball bats and chains, but it also hasn't stopped.
#15062979
skinster and Louis Allday wrote:George Orwell was an anti-communist snitch who wrote a list of people he suspected of being Communists (or Communist sympathisers) & gave it to the UK Government’s anti-Communist propaganda unit, the Information Research Department.


It kills me how commie kids will spout this kind of shit without any sense of irony at all. The gulagists were the biggest snitches there ever were(just google "stasi"), the whole of gulagist culture from top to bottom was one giant snitch fest. These motherfuckers were snitching out their friends, their neighbors, their own families to the secret police for generations before Orwell made his list. Public denunciation was a national pastime in the gulagist republics. And unlike in the capitalist west, when you got snitched out you didn't just get blackballed from prime gigs within the establishment, you got black-bagged by the secret police in the middle of the night and either summarily executed or interned in some fucked up gulag forever.

And even today the commie kids are still snitchin, they snitch people out on social media and try to get them fired from their jobs and harassed in their homes. They snitch out their proffessors and classmates for thoughtcrime, if they had their way society would devolve into one giant never-ending struggle session. Their whole political strategy is snitchin out anyone and everyone who hasn't fully internalized their militant twaddle.

They call Orwell a homophobe, and maybe he was, but their man Stalin made homosexuality a crime and ruthlessly persecuted homosexuals. They say Orwell was a racist but the Soviets went on systematic campaigns of mass ethnic cleansing.

So it's not just my little personal home irony meter your breaking here, you broke the heavy duty irony meter designed to handle industrial loads of hypocritical sanctimony.


And I can't really say that I blame Orwell for naming the names of agents and sympathizers for insane mass murdering totalitarian bigots. Feeding gulagist pigs to capitalists pigs isn't a crime in my book, I say let the swine eat the swine and we'll all be better off.
#15062980
Sivad wrote:Feeding gulagist pigs to capitalists pigs isn't a crime in my book, I say let the swine eat the swine and we'll all be better off.


Capitalist pigs are definitely better, at least they are more honest and know that leaving some space for others is useful.
#15062982
skinster wrote:the incredible Paul Robeson


an incredible piece of shit maybe. the guy was a full on Stalinist, he eulogized that fucking monster while real civil rights leaders were condemning gulagism. Robeson didn't mind mass dehumanization so long as everybody got the same equal gulag treatment irrespective of race, class, or gender. Robeson wasn't a champion of the oppressed, he was a champion of the gulag.
#15062997
It's incredible that critiques of Stalinism -- 'gulagism' -- are invariably one-sided, to the point of being obviously propagandist. Consider that the USSR's degenerated workers state, such as it was, was still considered a rival to the Western / European capitalist paradigm and to Western Civilization itself.

If any proffered criticism of Soviet-Union heavy-handedness is laid side-by-side next to the barbarities of *Western* civilization, we'd have a fairer comparison between the two societal / civilizational approaches.

I'll add that the Cold War paradigm boils down to exactly that -- *rivalry* -- and nothing else. While I don't geopolitically apologize-for this-or-that nation-state, the reality around the end of the 19th century was that of geopolitical *rivalry*, between the industrialized, established Western powers and the up-and-coming regionalist empires like Germany and Japan. (For example the right-wing term 'crony capitalism' is simply referring to a tighter integration between commerce and state, which trades off a 'freer' domestic civilian civil liberties domain for the efficiencies of an overall *guided*, planning-type nationalist administration, over its nationalist businesses, so as to industrialize and better-compete with the West.) (Consider the relative composition and statuses of the societies of Scandanavia versus North Korea, today.)

U.S. imperialism, too, has plenty of battlefield and gulag-type victims, too -- an area of history not usually explored due to the prevailing paradigm of U.S. exceptionalism, triumphalism, and hegemony. For example:



A sustained and widespread massacre of Filipino civilians followed. All food and trade to Samar were cut off, with the intention of starving the revolutionaries and the civilian populace into submission. Smith's strategy on Samar involved widespread destruction of land and towns to force inhabitants to stop supporting the guerrillas and turn to the Americans out of fear of starvation. He used his troops in sweeps of the interior in search for guerrilla bands and in attempts to capture Philippine General Vicente Lukbán, but he did nothing to prevent contact between the guerrillas and the townspeople. American columns marched across the island, destroying homes and shooting people and draft animals. The exact number of Filipino civilians killed by US troops will never be known. Littleton Waller, in a report, stated that over an eleven-day period his men burned 255 dwellings, shot 13 carabaos, and killed 39 people.[16] An exhaustive research made by a British writer in the 1990s put the figure at about 2,500 dead; Filipino historians believe it to be around 50,000.[17] As a consequence of his order in Samar, Smith became known as "Howling Wilderness Smith".[18]

Regarding the massacres in Bud Dajo, Major Hugh Scott, the District Governor of Sulu Province, where the incidents occurred, recounted that those who fled to the crater "declared they had no intention of fighting, ran up there only in fright, and had some crops planted and desired to cultivate them."[19] The description of the engagement as a "battle" is disputed because of both the overwhelming firepower of the attackers and the lopsided casualties. The author Vic Hurley wrote, "By no stretch of the imagination could Bud Dajo be termed a 'battle'".[20] Mark Twain strongly condemned the incident in several articles he published,[21][22] and commented: "In what way was it a battle? It has no resemblance to a battle. We cleaned up our four days' work and made it complete by butchering these helpless people."[23]

A higher percentage of Moros were killed than in other incidents now considered massacres. For example, the highest estimate of Native Americans killed at the Wounded Knee Massacre is 300 out of 350, a death rate of 85%, whereas in Bud Dajo, there were only six Moro survivors out of a group estimated at 1,000, a death rate of over 99%. As at Wounded Knee, the Moro group included women and children. Moro men in the crater who had arms possessed melee weapons. While fighting was limited to ground action on Jolo, use of naval gunfire contributed significantly to the overwhelming firepower brought to bear against the Moros. During the engagement, 750 men and officers, under the command of Colonel J.W. Duncan, assaulted the volcanic crater of Bud Dajo (Tausūg: Būd Dahu), which was populated by 800 to 1,000 Tausug villagers.[24][25][26]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes



---


Moving on the timeline, we can readily ask why the Allies weren't more proactive in shutting down the Nazi war machine early-on, instead of allowing Western 'intelligence' to go to waste, allowing the descent into a preventable all-out World War II, and civilizational polarization, thus *necessitating* the USSR's wartime state, and its gulags.



The Polish government-in-exile in London first reported crimes in the Auschwitz complex to the western public in 1941.[1] Information about tortures inside this camp was published in the same year in New York in a government report from occupied Poland titled The Polish White Book[2] The Auschwitz camp was also noted in The Black Book of Poland a 750-page report published in 1942 in New York by the Ministry of Information of the Polish government-in-exile, describing atrocities committed by Germany in occupied Poland in twenty-two months between the invasion of Poland in September 1939, and the end of June 1941. Both were printed in New York by The Greystone Press and G.P. Putnam's Sons[3][4]

In 1942, Lieutenant Jan Karski reported to the Polish, British and U.S. governments on the situation in occupied Poland, especially the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto and the general systematic extermination of the Poles and Jews nationally. He did not know about the murder by gas, repeating the common belief at the time that deported Jews were being exterminated with electricity.[5] Karski met with the Polish government-in-exile, including the Prime Minister, Władysław Sikorski, as well as with members of political parties such as the Socialist Party, National Party, Labor Party, People's Party, Jewish Labour Bund and Zionist Party. He also spoke to Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, and included a detailed statement on what he had seen in Warsaw and in Bełżec. In 1943 in London he met the author and journalist Arthur Koestler. He then traveled to the United States and reported to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR reacted to Karski's report by inquiring jokingly into animal rights abuses (specifically, horses). His report was a major source of information for the Allies.[6]

The Polish Government — as the representatives of the legitimate authority on territories in which the Germans are carrying out the systematic extermination of Polish citizens and of citizens of Jewish origin of many other European countries — consider it their duty to address themselves to the Governments of the United Nations, in the confident belief that they will share their opinion as to the necessity not only of condemning the crimes committed by the Germans and punishing the criminals, but also of finding means offering the hope that Germany might be effectively restrained from continuing to apply her methods of mass extermination.

— Edward Bernard Raczyński (1891–1993) Note to United Nations, 10 December 1942.[7]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_bombing_debate
#15063003
I find it curious that communism or socialism is the only political ideology that requires an interim period.

Constitutional monarchy? Happens instantly.
Democracy? Once it's instituted, people can argue about votes but it basically happens instantly.
Autocracy? Instant.

Even the more obscure things like fascism, anarchy, once you have instituted them, there they are.

But communism? "That wasn't real communism", every time. Strange!
#15063006
Thai Traditionalist wrote:I find it curious that communism or socialism is the only political ideology that requires an interim period.

That's an excellent point that I don't think I've really heard expressed that way before. Personally I don't buy the distinction between political and religious ideologies. Islam and Christianity both have an interim period.
#15063008
Thai Traditionalist wrote:
I find it curious that communism or socialism is the only political ideology that requires an interim period.

Constitutional monarchy? Happens instantly.
Democracy? Once it's instituted, people can argue about votes but it basically happens instantly.
Autocracy? Instant.

Even the more obscure things like fascism, anarchy, once you have instituted them, there they are.

But communism? "That wasn't real communism", every time. Strange!



The reasoning is that a worldwide revolutionary proletarian uprising would face sustained resistance from the bourgeoisie, and so a hierarchical, centralized workers state -- to sufficiently take-on and defeat such bourgeois structures of power -- would be a necessity, hence that 'interim', or 'transitional' period.

A civilizational / global civil-war to overthrow *class* relations would not only be historically unprecedented (except for the incomplete *Bolshevik* Revolution), but it would also differ from past bourgeois-*internecine* conflicts that have merely replaced one faction of control, with another.

The working class faces the task of self-organizing in its own collective best interests, a form of social organization that isn't already existing or ready-made.

Here's a relevant article:


Britain leaves the European Union: Against nationalism, For the United Socialist States of Europe!

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/0 ... s-j31.html


And, for afterwards:


Emergent Central Planning

Spoiler: show
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#15063024
Rich wrote:That's an excellent point that I don't think I've really heard expressed that way before. Personally I don't buy the distinction between political and religious ideologies. Islam and Christianity both have an interim period.


Socialism / Communism is really a religion more than a practical nuts and bolts political arrangement like monarchy, democracy etc. In socialism there are all sorts of things you are supposed to believe without evidence and prophecies about the future which is just like other religions. There is nothing like that in monarchy, democracy etc.
Last edited by SolarCross on 31 Jan 2020 16:57, edited 1 time in total.
#15063032
SolarCross wrote:
Socialism / Communism is really a religion more than an practical nuts and bolts political arrangement like monarchy, democracy etc. In socialism there are all sorts of things you are supposed to believe without evidence and prophecies about the future which is just like other religions. There is nothing like that in monarchy, democracy etc.



No, this contention is a stereotyped cliche. *Personally* I happen to think that religion pertains more to *lifestyle* than to the society-generalized 'macro' realm, but religion can also be seen as socially-*controlling* and thus is 'politics' as well, for a full societal cross-section paradigm of social existence.


‭History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

Spoiler: show
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Socialism / communism, on the other hand, is a decidedly *political* domain of reasoned axioms (like a dispersed array of poles stuck vertically in the ground), that can be objectively shown to favor *working class* interests, over bourgeois / *ruling-class* interests, no matter the historical period of recorded human history.

Here's an instance of the objectively *differing* class interests at work that is addressed by Marxism / socialism / communism:


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show
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