Ask a Red, Second Edition

[muhtesem insan]

... It is the party's position not to support violence, including terrorism. ...

This whole "hang on forever in the mountains and one day we'll sweep it all away" attitude is really a Maoist position. In other words, a waste of time.

Are you (and the party) oppose violence at all costs? Or do you believe in future (or under different circumstances) it could be justified?

How is Stalin seen by US communist? Is he "comrade stalin", an evil maniac or something between?

 

[zjintz]

It's a pretty cool place, for what it's been though and still struggles with. Compared with the state most of Latin America has been left in, no thanks to American meddling, Cuba's socialist experience shines as a reasonably successful story. There are always calls for expansion of personal freedoms, and I think the trend is going in that direction.

I don't know if this questions were asked before...

What do you think about the fact that Fidel Castro was so much time on charge?

Why did immigrants pick U.S.A over socialist countries?. Or did the U.R.S.S receive as much immigrants as USA in the XX century?.

 

[Traitorfish]

For purposes of diversity, I'm going to give a left/council communist perspective on some of the same issues.

2) What position does take communists in elections? Do they vote their candidates even though they know they're not gonna eleceted? Or boycott the elections finding it pointless? Or choose lesser of the evils?

The leftcom perspective varies, but it's generally agreed that in the absence of any substantial working class party, electoral politics are not the way to go. Left-wing parties without this particualr class character to end up simply acting as the "left of capital", which, while there is some use to that- I certainly envy the Germans their Die Linke- it's generally better left to liberals and socdems while the class strugglists get on with something else.

3) In Turkey left fractions fight with each other more than they fight with fascism? Is it same over there (aka. trotskysts vs leninists)

The UK isn't as bad as some countries, because the only substantial leftist parties are Trots, so while they can get quite catty at times, they're generally on the same broad page. For whatever reason, the M-Ls disappeared in the UK after 1991, and the Maoists were never really here to start.

So the system wouldn't be democratic at all then, if there aren't political parties? How would leaders, ministers, etc. be selected and by whom?

Leftcoms place a strong emphasis on workers' councils- not just on mass-assemblies like soviets, but also on more direct workplace and neighbourhood assemblies, with direct assemblies electing recallable delegates- rather than non-recallable representatives- to progressively broader assemblies, with functions being delegated upwards in a strictly subsidiatarian, as-necessary manner. The "state", such as it was, would compromise of the autonomous municipality- a city or, in many cases, an area of a city- which would administer the overwhelming majority of government functions. (The "social republic" imagined by earliest 20th century communists tends to be regarded as an relic of early Radical politics in the workers' movement.) Of course, all of this is merely speculative, derived to the extent that it is possible from historical examples, left communism stressing that the forms of communist social and political organisation are developed through organic historical processes, namely social revolution, rather than brought into being through an act of willpower.

 

[warpus]

It would not be parliamentary, but rather direct democracy. All politics is local anyway. Once again, this is a very long way off. If there were an overthrow of capitalism tomorrow, and I lived to a hundred years old, I would never see communism. Perhaps my kids would not either. It took hundreds of years for capitalism and liberalism to replace feudalism and pre-modern mentalities.

K, makes sense.

So once capitalism crashes to the ground, what sort of transition period can we expect? Obviously the world will be in a lot of chaos when this happens - are communists preparing for this by organizing some sort of a.. plan? How will we get from capitalism to socialism?

 

[Traitorfish]

K, makes sense.

So once capitalism crashes to the ground, what sort of transition period can we expect? Obviously the world will be in a lot of chaos when this happens - are communists preparing for this by organizing some sort of a.. plan? How will we get from capitalism to socialism?

I don't think that it's accurate to view it as capitalism collapsing of its own accord, and then communists stepping in to fill the breach with some messianic blueprint- as much as that may have been the vision of the Official CPs for most of the last century. Capitalism will not suffer a natural death short of human civilisation collapsing; what occurs, rather, are crises of sufficient severity that bring the struggle of capitalism and labour to the point of total incompatibility. Labour, if organised effectively, advances against capital, but in a period of crisis it finds the material basis on which to build compromise falling away underneath it, until the only way to advance is to subjugate capital entirely, to establish itself as the social hegemonic category. This brings the contradictions of capitalism to an absolute head- why would labour be satisfied with administering a system of social relations that exist for the purpose of exploiting labour?- and lead to the reconstitution of social relations on socialist grounds. Not a blind process, as some anarchists might believe, but also not a mechanical one, instituted from above by some party or faction. Instead, it would occur in what you might call an "organic fashion", the reshaping of society from the bottom-up in a way which is both a concious project and a true historical process, in the sense that it does not constitute an attempt to artificially impose a new model onto society through an act of will. Planning, and I hope this doesn't sound like a cop-out, is simply not possible, because we cannot know with any certainty what the future holds. (Even this discussion of the inevitability of crisis is a conclusion drawn from observed movements within society, something like "that apple is falling, so it will hit the ground" rather than "that apple will fall on 28th June at 4:12PM".) All we can do is "steer", and that itself isn't something that can be carried out on behalf of the working class in a substitutionist manner by some high-and-mighty party leadership, but through a democratic mass organisation of the working class. As such, the task of communists is the mass organisation of the working class- I personally tend to be pluralistic about this bit, considering the form (party, revolutionary union, whatever) secondary to the content, although others take a narrower line, for whatever reasons may apply. (If any of that does not seem to make self-evident sense - and I realise that this is quite likely- please feel free to say as much.)

Or, at least, that's the leftcom view. Cheezy may differ to some extent, and, certainly, I know that he maintains Lenin's clearer distinction between socialism and communism, an elaboration on Marx's "higher" and "lower" phases of communism, while leftcoms follow conceive of these phase as internal to a single communist mode of production.

 

[civver_764]

It would not be parliamentary, but rather direct democracy. All politics is local anyway. Once again, this is a very long way off. If there were an overthrow of capitalism tomorrow, and I lived to a hundred years old, I would never see communism. Perhaps my kids would not either. It took hundreds of years for capitalism and liberalism to replace feudalism and pre-modern mentalities.

Eh that's not necessarily the case. Human progress has been going forward at relatively exponential rate. There's been much more change from 1800 to 2000 than from 1000 to 1800, for instance. Especially with the ever growing presence of the internet(which is incredibly important, in that it enables a growing connectivity of the world entirely independent from the people who rule it) and the technology revolution in general, hundreds of years is much too pessimistic.

Also want to strongly echo Traitor's point that we have no way of predicting things, and no real desire to.

 

[Traitorfish]

Eh that's not necessarily the case. Human progress has been going forward at relatively exponential rate. There's been much more change from 1800 to 2000 than from 1000 to 1800, for instance. Especially with the every growing presence of the internet(which is incredibly important, in that it enables a growing connectivity of the world entirely independent from the people who rule it) and the technology revolution in general, hundreds of years is much too pessimistic.

The point about technology here is important, and something which I think is missed in those Marxisms drawing primarily on the era of Marx or of Lenin. It was self-evident at that point that a state of material post-scarcity (in the broader sense of abundance sufficient to allow the "abolition of work", rather than in the narrower sense of allowing free-access) was some distance away at the very best, and so that a proletarian revolution would need to advance across the no-man's land of what you might cal "scarcity communism", which as far as I can tell is more or less what Lenin's intermediate stage of "socialism" consisted of. Today, however, that's not so certain, and it may turn out to be the case that this period would be relatively brief, requiring only the dissolution of the social barriers to post-scarcity, and not the long haul across the material barriers that was true a century ago. (The supremely uneven development of different regions present an obvious complication to this, of course.) That is, I imagine, something that can only be definitely established through the process of social reconstitution itself.

 

[Quackers]

How would you describe the condition of the working class materially in the United States and Britain today and...70 years ago in the 1930s. Would you say class consciousness is more widespread amongst the proletariat today then it was in the 1930s? How about solidarity amongst the working class?

What are the mistakes individual Reds and Red political parties have made in the past, which have set back your agenda?
What do you make of the fall of the SU?

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Are you (and the party) oppose violence at all costs?

I would hope the Party would not be, but I do not know. I know that it does not advocate revolution in lieu of democratic participation.

Or do you believe in future (or under different circumstances) it could be justified?

Yes I do.

How is Stalin seen by US communist? Is he "comrade stalin", an evil maniac or something between?

Opinions run the gamut of "worst person ever" to "champion of the working class."

I don't know if this questions were asked before...

What do you think about the fact that Fidel Castro was so much time on charge?

I don't know the specifics of his country's internal situation like he does, but I can only imagine that it was, at least in part, because he was following the Soviet example, and both required and expected considerable aid from them, such that he felt obliged to mirror their example even if he did hold contrarian ideas. I do not know that he did. However, it is worth noting the speaking out that Castro has done in the last few years, against mistakes of the socialist regime, such as the persecution of the Catholic Church and of homosexuals.

Why did immigrants pick U.S.A over socialist countries?. Or did the U.R.S.S receive as much immigrants as USA in the XX century?.

There was a large immigrant influx into the Eastern Bloc from partner countries in the Third World, particularly African nations. They ran very big student and worker exchange programs, designed to serve as a counterpoint to neo-imperialist influence and aid.

It is also worth noting that many African Americans left the United States in the 1920s-40s for the Soviet Union, where they were treated as equals and their expertise was valued.

For purposes of diversity, I'm going to give a left/council communist perspective on some of the same issues.

Much appreciated. Worth noting that I don't disagree with most of what you say, it is merely a different approach, a different set of eyes.[/QUOTE]

K, makes sense.

So once capitalism crashes to the ground, what sort of transition period can we expect? Obviously the world will be in a lot of chaos when this happens - are communists preparing for this by organizing some sort of a.. plan? How will we get from capitalism to socialism?

TF did a good job of explaining the idea of exploiting crises to overthrow the system.

However, as he notes below, his and my views differ. On the one hand, I can certainly appreciate the leftcom approach; I do, after all, heavily support the Paris Commune of 1871, and appreciate their example, which Marx himself lauded as being just the sort of thing he was talking about. On the other hand, I do see a definitive difference between socialism and communism which apparently originates from Lenin (?).

If I may, socialism is the process of building communism. It is a transitory stage, kind of like mercantilism in relation to feudalism and capitalism. Since it is the process of turning capitalism into communism, it will exhibit characteristics of both...

*I would like to make clear that the following statements are my personal opinion, and represent only speculation on my part. I don't pretend to be a soothsayer, that is the job of vulgar economists, after all.*

...For example, there may still be private ownership of businesses and property, there may still be different political classes (in fact there certainly will be, since a large part of the success of communism will be the absorption of the property-owning classes into the great body of working men and women), and certainly class conflict as well as a State. I believe that the demands of destroying capitalism will require a very strong government, though not necessarily a non-democratic one. After all, we are destroying peoples' right to property and they will not give it up easily. If the imaginations of writers like Jack London have given us any glimpse of this period, it will be a chaotic time. The wish "may you live in interesting times" is, after all, a curse.

I should really emphasize Lenin's point that our job is to destroy capitalism and lay the foundations for socialism. Once that is done, it will be the job of our progeny to build socialism into communism. Because of this, many of us simply don't give extensive thought to something so far off as the mature socialist--> communist transition, we worry about how to bring down capitalism: exposing the contradictions of the system, the corruption of the characters involved, and organizing the working masses along class-conscious lines of allegiance. We won't be around for it, and don't even know how the socialism part will precisely turn out! It will be a historical social process, just like capitalism was.

Or, at least, that's the leftcom view. Cheezy may differ to some extent, and, certainly, I know that he maintains Lenin's clearer distinction between socialism and communism, an elaboration on Marx's "higher" and "lower" phases of communism, while leftcoms follow conceive of these phase as internal to a single communist mode of production.

Eh that's not necessarily the case. Human progress has been going forward at relatively exponential rate. There's been much more change from 1800 to 2000 than from 1000 to 1800, for instance. Especially with the ever growing presence of the internet(which is incredibly important, in that it enables a growing connectivity of the world entirely independent from the people who rule it) and the technology revolution in general, hundreds of years is much too pessimistic.

Also want to strongly echo Traitor's point that we have no way of predicting things, and no real desire to.

A big part of destroying the social order of capitalism will be changing the social paradigm, and that happens best at the generational level. The present generation may accept big changes at some level, but only the generation that grows up knowing nothing but a society with those changes and mindset will truly accept it and develop it further. Racial and gender relations in our country should serve as an excellent vindication of my theory. That is why you cannot simply wish away our institutions, no matter what the fanciful writings of that character in your signature may say, because culture is much deeper than formal social structures. It is formative to peoples' characters and understanding of the world. We have to change that in order to change people, and that takes a long time.

 

[Traitorfish]

How would you describe the condition of the working class materially in the United States and Britain today and...70 years ago in the 1930s.

In the sense of quality of life, it's obviously increased hugely, even if that improvement can almost entirely located in the post-war era. In the sense of class struggle, though, we're in little better a position, and future prospects look even worse. Post-war corporatism may maintain some relics that give what's left of the unions a bit of clout, but at this point the unions so often represent the unions rather than the workers- a claim to a stake in capital, rather than labour against capital- that even that only counts for so much. Added to the fact that the Labour Party, a compromised and collaborationist but still basically working class party in the 1930s is now as "bourgeois" a party as the US Democrats, I'd have to conclude that the working class is not faring well. But, things have a way of failing to stay the same, so I suppose we'll just see.

Would you say class consciousness is more widespread amongst the proletariat today then it was in the 1930s? How about solidarity amongst the working class?

Class conciousness is a tricky thing to deal with, because it can't be reduced down to individual psychology, but is something that exists collectively, between rather than within workers. (This itself reflects the fact that class is not an individual category, but an historical one that only exists when individuals come together as social producers.) This means that it fluctuates far more rapidly than any particular set of party allegiances might, and varies significantly on a regional and sectional basis, so it's hard to say that it was at X point in such-and-such a period and is at Y point today. All that can be objectively measured is its concrete impact in terms of organisation and actions, so the only generalisations that I can really make is to say that the organisational conditions for the formation of class conciousness were broadly superior in the 1930s to what they are now, and so that it tended to emerge more frequently and with greater strength than it does today.

What are the mistakes individual Reds and Red political parties have made in the past, which have set back your agenda?

Pretty much the entire history of Official Communism 1924-1991 is more or less one long mistake, with the occasional admirable moment. After the revolutionary period of the early interwar era faded, the Official Communist parties ended up as the far-left wing of capital, appropriating rather than articulating workers' struggles, and at times even acting to reign them in (the ultimately conservative role of the French party in both the 1936 and 1968 strike waves is probably the most blatant example). Honestly, I prefer the post-1991 CPs, who at least admit to be nothing more than a left-alternative party, rather than posing as something revolutionary when they are nothing of the sort.

What do you make of the fall of the SU?

In itself, not very much. The Soviet model had already demonstrated itself to be unsustainable- the Austrians are right insofar as a market simply cannot take that much state meddling and come out in good shape- and reforms were tardy and ineffective, so it collapsed.

A big part of destroying the social order of capitalism will be changing the social paradigm, and that happens best at the generational level. The present generation may accept big changes at some level, but only the generation that grows up knowing nothing but a society with those changes and mindset will truly accept it and develop it further. Racial and gender relations in our country should serve as an excellent vindication of my theory. That is why you cannot simply wish away our institutions, no matter what the fanciful writings of that character in your signature may say, because culture is much deeper than formal social structures. It is formative to peoples' characters and understanding of the world. We have to change that in order to change people, and that takes a long time.

That's also very true. It can't be forgotten that society isn't just a material state of affairs, but a subjective one, and the two do not follow each other in a perfect mechanical harmony; it has to develop organically, even in communism. As you say, historical processes will certainly continue; no Fukuyaman "end of history" for us!

Edit: Don't think that this has been answered.

What is your take, and the 'generic communist' take on the United Nations?

My take is that the UN is more or less what it's supposed to be, a mediator between sovereign states, albeit with the usual cynical qualifications about the balance of power between different actors. Where I depart from the normal view is in how I understand "sovereign state" as used in this context (i.e. I ain't fur it, I'm agin it), rather than the UN's relationship to them. I'm not sure if there's a "generic" communist take, though- in my experience it tends to come back to the "sovereign state" thing, which is again something that varies between tendencies. Brezhnevites will be open to it, Maoists and old-school Stalinists will tend to accept it in principal, but question it in practice, and most leftcoms are where I am. Leninists and Trotskyists seem to vary too much to generalise.

 

[Quackers]

I was hoping to hear your personal opinion concerning the fall of the SU.

What do Reds think about non-industrial low wage officer labour?
Surely, there must have been some split where there should be a convergance. A sweaty, dirty man in his overrals might not be the natural friend of a clean-cut clerk in a cheap office suit - but they get paid the same and get "exploited" by capitalist overlords.

 

[Traitorfish]

I was hoping to hear your personal opinion concerning the fall of the SU.

Well, I'd say that it was a good thing insofar as it provided some measure of civil liberties, and bad insofar as it tore the intestines out of the various national welfare states. Whether you regard that as good or bad overall depends on how you interpret the prospects of democratic reform with the SU, and I can't say that I know enough about the period to offer any definitive judgements..

What do Reds think about non-industrial low wage officer labour?
Surely, there must have been some split where there should be a convergance. A sweaty, dirty man in his overrals might not be the natural friend of a clean-cut clerk in a cheap office suit - but they get paid the same and get "exploited" by capitalist overlords.

Entirely so, yes. Workers are defined not by the fact that they do a certain kind of work, but by their role within the reproduction of capitalist society, and that's the same whether your wielding a spade or a pen. The distance between the two can't be attributed to any one source, with ideology, organisation and simple geography all playing their part. But I don't think that this ever really took the form of a "split", because the proletarianisation of manual and non-manual labour were two broadly distinct processes, and so each group inherited a different self-conception of itself and of its position within society. (Although most modern white collar workers come from blue-collar backgrounds, it's the internal continuity of the occupation that tends to define the self-conception of its members in this regard.) But, that's hardly set in stone, and with the recent strike action bringing out teachers and street-cleaners side by side, I'd say that it's far from impossible to overcome.

 

[WWTVICTOR]

How do you see and define socialism?

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

I was hoping to hear your personal opinion concerning the fall of the SU.

First, the Soviet Union did not "fall," it was dissolved.

Second, it was the greatest humanitarian disaster of the Twentieth Century.

 

[civver_764]

I'm really curious to hear you expand on that last part.

As for me, I don't see the Soviets as much better than the Americans in the Cold War era, but I'm willing to be proven wrong.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

I'm really curious to hear you expand on that last part.

As for me, I don't see the Soviets as much better than the Americans in the Cold War era, but I'm willing to be proven wrong.

The dissolution of the Soviet state included its extensive welfare system and the complete destruction of its economy. Millions were put out of work, and the life expectancy in Russia dropped by twenty years. Whole cities were almost completely abandoned as their industries shut down overnight. The ruble collapsed seven years later. Wealth disparity and income discrepancy skyrocketed. The area now suffers from negative population growth and still hasn't recovered from the oligarch mess. On top of that, add in the explosion of AIDS and Tuberculosis and the spiraling alcoholism epidemic.

There was a fantastic documentary that came out a few years ago, by the BBC I believe, about the state of post-Soviet society, but alas, I cannot seem to find it. When I do, I will post it here.

 

[Lone Wolf]

To be fair, "the effects of the USSR's dissolution were bad" doesn't mean that "the USSR itself was good".

 

[Masada]

The dissolution of the Soviet state included its extensive welfare system and the complete destruction of its economy. Millions were put out of work, and the life expectancy in Russia dropped by twenty years. Whole cities were almost completely abandoned as their industries shut down overnight. The ruble collapsed seven years later. Wealth disparity and income discrepancy skyrocketed. The area now suffers from negative population growth and still hasn't recovered from the oligarch mess. On top of that, add in the explosion of AIDS and Tuberculosis and the spiraling alcoholism epidemic.

you missed the millions of elderly people dying part.

 

[Lone Wolf]

you missed the millions of elderly people dying part.

Well, this is kinda implied by the life expectancy dropping?

 

[muhtesem insan]

I'll ask something more personal. How it's to feel being a communist and ve citizen of the leader of the capitalist bloc. For me, it's easy to hate USA and blame for everything.