- 27 Dec 2016 20:00
#14755363
To push back a little bit against my friend and the honored gentleman quetzalcoatl, I think my narrative may not have been clear enough.
To begin with, the general premise you have correct in what I was attempting to convey. The problems that we are discussing are a result of capitalism, and while it is possible to change the problems that result from it (like child labour being moved from the imperial powers to somewhere we don't have to see it) the reason these kinds of issues exist at all are a result of capitalism.
I would also push back against the idea that there was "no hint of a communist revolution." Certainly there had been throughout the world, I don't think anybody could argue against that. Within the imperial powers, I think we also need to remember that when they were at their weakest, the people were at their strongest in attempting to destroy capitalism. The easiest place to put this was as World War I was wrapping up and in the inter-war years.
The French military were singing the Internatonale and marching under red flags. The British were putting down the communist movement that inspired the Bolsheviks in Ireland. The Americans had red guerrillas throughout the West and bombs being detonated in cities. Central Europe was engaged in unofficial war against the communists. Red Berlin was the most culturally important place on the planet while Chinese peasants turned against their masters and started to learn about Marx. And dozens of other examples, even in the conservative American heartland (this is a map of just the Socialist Party making advances):
Even if we are to look at far less extreme times that were still strained by comparison, like 1968, you have armed Maoists in California, Trotskyists building barricades in Paris, and Stalinists working with students in Britain.
Communism is the specter haunting Europe, and now the rest of the world. When people can't ignore what's going on any further, they tend to see things for what they are.
Left-wing literature has been exploding for the last year or two (1, 2, 3, 4)—and for good reason. It is incorrect to say that there were no communist revolutions, certainly false to say that there was no hint of them in the major powers in the past, and probably wrong to dismiss the interest in Marx today.
I was not criticizing the utility of the New Deal. I am ultimately a result of it via my grandparents that benefitted from it. I was only attempting to contextualize the racial component in the United States.
Nor am I saying that Japanese concentration camps were needed for the success of the New Deal, nor lynching of blacks, nor Jim Crow, nor anything else.
But the fact was that all of these things hemmed in the New Deal to one particular set of people. The left side of liberalism will say that this was an unfortunate racial dynamic that needs to be addressed. I think the Marxist would ask why racial dynamic existed in the first place and how it related to the means of production.
I'm not an Americanist, but I could take a few stabs at it:
In the case of Asian exclusion, this was a fear of capital leaving the nation on the one hand, and the fears of the established working class being undercut (and their own actions served to undercut themselves further).
In the case for blacks it was, to some extent, the problem that Toussaint ran across when he liberated the slaves in Haiti—economic production needed to continue. He was able to put many back to work in the fields for virtually no money on the reasonable promise they'd try to find another solution, in the US they used a certain amount of terror to address the problem.
In these situations, it was the premise of capitalism that was the issue. Especially in the 19th/20th century examples in the US, there was no shortage of land and production the like of which the world had never seen. That there was such cruelty and want came from how this was distributed. The New Deal attempted to address this within the limitations of not changing the premise that created the issues to begin with. And so an imperfect racialized solution that, in a dialectic way, reflected the imperfect and racialized question.
I'm not an accelerationist. I do agree with you that that any advancement for the working people is a good advancement and should be fought for. I also agree with you that getting people off their butts is the number one priority.
On this forum I can go off into long diatribes about history and whatnot, but in actual life, my part of the struggle has been to keep my mouth shut about it (for the most part) and organize labour and unionize where I can. This doesn't directly make Marxists, but there can be no debate about proletarian revolution until there's a sense of a working class that has rights and responsibilities.
I find this a little silly. Of every single thing humans have ever put together, capitalism is the only thing that will remain forever?
If it helps, we do see capitalism perhaps "mutating" as a result of its contradictions in the same way that feudalism's own form and contradictions "mutated" into capitalism. But this will mean some violence, just as Charles I didn't simply reason that the confused, contradictory, and despotic steps to parliamentary rule was going to lead to an end to the evils of feudalism.
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!
quetzalcoatl wrote:My takeaway from TiG's post is that no effective change is possible without a communist revolution (being equivalent to ending slavery in the nineteenth century). This is demonstrably false. Massive social and economic changes (including ending slavery) have occurred in capitalist nations with no hint of a communist revolution.
To push back a little bit against my friend and the honored gentleman quetzalcoatl, I think my narrative may not have been clear enough.
To begin with, the general premise you have correct in what I was attempting to convey. The problems that we are discussing are a result of capitalism, and while it is possible to change the problems that result from it (like child labour being moved from the imperial powers to somewhere we don't have to see it) the reason these kinds of issues exist at all are a result of capitalism.
I would also push back against the idea that there was "no hint of a communist revolution." Certainly there had been throughout the world, I don't think anybody could argue against that. Within the imperial powers, I think we also need to remember that when they were at their weakest, the people were at their strongest in attempting to destroy capitalism. The easiest place to put this was as World War I was wrapping up and in the inter-war years.
The French military were singing the Internatonale and marching under red flags. The British were putting down the communist movement that inspired the Bolsheviks in Ireland. The Americans had red guerrillas throughout the West and bombs being detonated in cities. Central Europe was engaged in unofficial war against the communists. Red Berlin was the most culturally important place on the planet while Chinese peasants turned against their masters and started to learn about Marx. And dozens of other examples, even in the conservative American heartland (this is a map of just the Socialist Party making advances):
Even if we are to look at far less extreme times that were still strained by comparison, like 1968, you have armed Maoists in California, Trotskyists building barricades in Paris, and Stalinists working with students in Britain.
Communism is the specter haunting Europe, and now the rest of the world. When people can't ignore what's going on any further, they tend to see things for what they are.
Left-wing literature has been exploding for the last year or two (1, 2, 3, 4)—and for good reason. It is incorrect to say that there were no communist revolutions, certainly false to say that there was no hint of them in the major powers in the past, and probably wrong to dismiss the interest in Marx today.
quetzalcoatl wrote:The critique of the New Deal based on its lack of universality is particularly shortsighted. Change never occurs systemically - it occurs locally and is propagated. There is no sense in which it is true that concentration camps (for example) were a prerequisite for the success of the New Deal economic changes.
I was not criticizing the utility of the New Deal. I am ultimately a result of it via my grandparents that benefitted from it. I was only attempting to contextualize the racial component in the United States.
Nor am I saying that Japanese concentration camps were needed for the success of the New Deal, nor lynching of blacks, nor Jim Crow, nor anything else.
But the fact was that all of these things hemmed in the New Deal to one particular set of people. The left side of liberalism will say that this was an unfortunate racial dynamic that needs to be addressed. I think the Marxist would ask why racial dynamic existed in the first place and how it related to the means of production.
I'm not an Americanist, but I could take a few stabs at it:
In the case of Asian exclusion, this was a fear of capital leaving the nation on the one hand, and the fears of the established working class being undercut (and their own actions served to undercut themselves further).
In the case for blacks it was, to some extent, the problem that Toussaint ran across when he liberated the slaves in Haiti—economic production needed to continue. He was able to put many back to work in the fields for virtually no money on the reasonable promise they'd try to find another solution, in the US they used a certain amount of terror to address the problem.
In these situations, it was the premise of capitalism that was the issue. Especially in the 19th/20th century examples in the US, there was no shortage of land and production the like of which the world had never seen. That there was such cruelty and want came from how this was distributed. The New Deal attempted to address this within the limitations of not changing the premise that created the issues to begin with. And so an imperfect racialized solution that, in a dialectic way, reflected the imperfect and racialized question.
quetzalcoatl wrote:Having been involved in labor all my life, it is particularly frustrating to be told that the existence of particular evils precludes any advancement elsewhere. The barriers we face getting people to get off their butts are high enough already without that kind of crap.
Massive changes will continue to occur, and occur without benefit of communist revolution. The only pertinent question is who controls these changes and who benefits. This is the province of politics. The notion that politics is 'only' an interim solution until revolutionary change can be effected is self-indulgent. All our interim solutions are aggregated and become the real world as we see it.
I'm not an accelerationist. I do agree with you that that any advancement for the working people is a good advancement and should be fought for. I also agree with you that getting people off their butts is the number one priority.
On this forum I can go off into long diatribes about history and whatnot, but in actual life, my part of the struggle has been to keep my mouth shut about it (for the most part) and organize labour and unionize where I can. This doesn't directly make Marxists, but there can be no debate about proletarian revolution until there's a sense of a working class that has rights and responsibilities.
quetzalcoatl wrote:Capitalism will not die. It will not be defeated nor eliminated. There will be no revolution, whether televised or not. It can only evolve and mutate. The question of politics is this: can its evolution be guided or molded, or are we helpless in the face of historical forces?
I find this a little silly. Of every single thing humans have ever put together, capitalism is the only thing that will remain forever?
If it helps, we do see capitalism perhaps "mutating" as a result of its contradictions in the same way that feudalism's own form and contradictions "mutated" into capitalism. But this will mean some violence, just as Charles I didn't simply reason that the confused, contradictory, and despotic steps to parliamentary rule was going to lead to an end to the evils of feudalism.
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!