IMT
New member
I attempted to reply to midcan5’s thread in the ‘Above Plain Politics Forum,’ but was prohibited from so doing by forum design. So this is my reply to that thread, Socialism Reconsidered.
Dear midcan5:
I printed and read your linked article on the APP forum. My thoughts are as follows.
That neither Obama nor Occupy could ‘give the idea of fraternity any real substance' might suggest that 'the space of political possibility' INDEED contracted. If said reforms were supposed to be the 'fix' for Capitalism, it didn't take.
‘Things Can Only Get Better’ and ‘Let’s Change the Future:’ citing no more than such slogans, Jonny Thakkar postulates that activist bases seem to go through ‘the same emotional cycle.’ He offers no shred of explanation to why this is so. Are we to believe this because Jonny Thakkar tells us this? Moreover, is another analysis is possible?
The Populist Party in the 1890s, the Progressive movement of the early 20th century, Robert La Follette's Farmer-Labor Party of Wisconsin in the 1920s, similar groups in Minnesota and the Dakotas, and Henry Wallace’ Progressive Party in 1948 have this in common. All collapsed or dissolved into the Democratic Party. Why? Perhaps the Democratic Party is where reform movements go to die.
The Vietnam War, the violent attacks on labor in the 1980s, war on the Middle East as stated policy, the staggering growth of social inequality – we have seen opposition rise and fall in each case. There was Eugene McCarthy and Bob Kennedy in 1968, followed by George McGovern in 1972, followed by Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, then Howard Dean in 2004, and now it is Bernie Sanders. Is Thakkar's 'emotional cycle' the only 'explanation?'
In 1920, no less a figure than Leon Trotsky gave prescient warning of and insight into this so-called ‘cycle’ in 'Terrorism and Communism:' His words are at least as true ninety-six years later.
“The capitalist bourgeois calculates...'at the right moment I will bring into existence opposition parties, which will disappear tomorrow, but which today accomplish their mission by affording the possibility of the lower middle class expressing their indignation without hurt therefrom for capitalism.'”
This equally contradicts John Kenneth Galbraith’s puerile speculation that the ballot can break this ‘cycle.’ J.K. Galbraith's remarks seem somewhat supportive of the socialist adage that US history reads like the illustrated version of Marx’ manifesto.
This is no ‘emotional cycle,’ [whatever Thakkar’s fallacious nomenclature/category means]. This is a political process whereby the ruling elite defuses significant opposition by containing and dissipating it within the Democratic Party.
Thakkar’s supposition that US legislation satisfies no one and will therefore bend toward centrism willfully ignore the very deep investment of the US bourgeoisie in both big-money parties.
Thakkar should consider the possibility that working class people are disillusioned with US governance because the agenda does not change for THEM however elections go. It is the PERCEPTION that Sanders is socialist which makes him popular with youth. But youth will see through him also. The bourgeoisie fears deeply that youth will sweep far past Sanders’ so-called ‘socialism.’ When they do, the state will turn guns on its own people. It has nothing else left.
Social vision is in short supply because the nation as a whole is exhausted even as the ruling class steers us toward massive military budget increases in advanced stage preparation of discretionary war on Russia, China, or both. Thakkar speaks of the exhaustion of the so-called ‘left.’ The left is not alone in exhaustion. Listen to right wing Republicans! Listen to your Libertarian neighbor! Their every other statement begins, ‘I’m so tired of – followed by the latest assault on working people. The whole nation is staggering.
Again, this is bourgeoisie driven politics. The ruling class is safe while the nation bickers on partisan lines. And it is all over the JPP forum. On signalmankenneth's thread, I began saying that Democrats and Republicans at all levels of government, together with the MDWQ and the EPA are answerable for the disaster at Flint. But no sooner was I saying that it was NOT lead but the bourgeoisie driven Austerity Agenda that poisoned Flint, and the 'Flint Residents ... Poisoned Water Bills' thread was abandoned. We haven't yet learned how to get past our bickering in order to fix anything.
Yet IF we can’t get past that, whatever will all our voting accomplish? Unless or until we change the way we do things and begin educating ourselves and studying the role of class in our history – YES, class in United States history – there is no way forward for us.
Thakkar says some curious things about socialism. Thakkar sees socialism largely as a system of production, rather than a system of production, of distribution, of exchange and of consumption. For another perspective on socialism, see Marx’ Critique of Political Economy. Yet Thakkar defines socialism with just two scant lines. Two. He then proceeds to rule by fiat that between 1946 and 1951, Great Britain had ‘an unequivocal socialist government’ because key industries and health care were under state operation.
This is astonishing! No revolutionary socialists regard those five years as an era of socialist government! They don’t even regard Stalinist Russia and/or various associated East European regimes as socialist regimes. Today, Venezuela is arguably the world's most socialist country. Yet even Marxists who live there cannot decide whether it is a Capitalist or socialist country. Thakkar says that ‘socialism’ used to mean something. True! So when did Russia and these East European ‘socialist’ countries abolish the coerced extraction of surplus value from labor? When did those nations abolish wage slavery, commodity production, currency, rent, interest, the market – in short, the essential components of Capitalism? Does Thakkar think that because it is the state which organizes some key businesses [largely in the interests of the bourgeoisie] that this somehow constitutes an unequivocal socialist government? By what conceivable metric does Thakkar conclude that Great Britain had socialism at that time?
For the record, Thakkar describes not socialism but state-run Capitalism. And state run Capitalism proved itself all the disaster that the US right-wing claims it to be, and largely for those same reasons.
And please, please – how, pray-tell, does one get to be a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University and not know these things?
Thakkar states:
‘If the term socialist had been used to refer to liberals in mid-century Europe, in contrast, people would have needed a new term to describe the real socialists.’
I honestly found this amusing. The term ‘socialist’ has so long been associated with the ‘left’ that socialists found it necessary to develop a new term to describe the left, hence the term ‘pseudo-left’ and the theoretical/historical story behind it.
Socialism is dead, Thakkar tells us! It is dead in Europe, it is dead in the US!
For another opinion, consider The Emergence of Class Struggle in the US, A World Convulsed by Crises, and On the Threshold of a New Year.
Joseph Kishore’s article states:
‘Beyond the confines of the top five or ten percent of the population, the state confronts an angry, dissatisfied and increasingly hostile working class. Broad sections no longer look to the political system as a mechanism for addressing any of their grievances. This has immense revolutionary implications.’
Indeed!
And those broad layers of society which no longer look to the political mechanism for addressing any of their grievances? Thakkar wants to guide them back into the political system. That is why he has written. That is why he tells us that unions have a vital role to play in industrial democracy. In reality, the recent assault on autoworkers and steelworkers show that their respective unions are entirely at the disposal of their corporate handlers, and serve to police the labor pool in corporate interests. That is why action OUTSIDE unions [such as the Detroit teachers] is now necessary. This is also why Thakkar closes with the ‘industrial to a service economy’ rhetoric. Translation? No genuinely productive work, but more low paying, low hours, no benefit, wage slavery service jobs, ensuring poverty into perpetuity while boosting profits.
For 100 years, anti-socialism has enjoyed the uncontested status of a civil religion in the US. But after a century of silence, the bourgeoisie has HAD to allow socialism to enter the civic discourse, even if only in the pseudo-leftism of Senator Sanders. This was necessary because as Kishore says, youths are abandoning our political order in droves.
Yet this is a calculated risk. Youths are intelligent. When they see the ‘bait and switch’ – and they till – the younger generation sweep far, far past Sanders' very modest and ill-defined reformist posturing into a genuinely socialist program. And when this discussion is hosted, it won’t be on Thakkar’s premises, on Republican premises, or Democratic Party premises. It will be on the basis of socialist premises.
And I for one can’t wait for that discussion to happen.
The Republican Party will be what the Republican Party is. That is a good thing. It belongs to socialists to build a mass movement. That mass movement must be shaped into a wedge to smash into the Democratic Party, so that its adherents become revolutionary socialists or else join the Republican Party. These dynamics cannot be interrupted. These are exciting times!
Since WWI, Capitalism has been in convulsion. Capitalism is finished. Capitalism has no forward, progressive role in history. Capitalism is mired in unending war. Capitalism long ago gave up on its own. Flint Michigan alone is a scathing indictment of the whole, Capitalist system. Capitalism has four policies – War, Famine, Pestilence and Death. Having endured the devastation of two world wars, genocide and pogroms, democracy across Europe is collapsing into military-police dictatorships. The post WWII system of relations is breaking apart under the weight of the refugee crisis precipitated by continuous bombing of ME countries, which is necessary to save Capitalist nations from economic collapse. European borders are again being manned with soldiers. Tanks will follow. They are rearming for war, and economic and political rivalries will push them into ever increasing conflict. Europe looks very much as it did prior to WWI. Capitalism has no solutions. These are Capitalism’s death throes. In fact this has been so for some time as stated in the 1938 Transitional Program by Leon Trotsky.
No, Mr. Thakkar. Socialism is not dead. It is anything but dead.
The only question is whether World War III or the world socialist agenda will be first to gain ascendancy.
IMT
Dear midcan5:
I printed and read your linked article on the APP forum. My thoughts are as follows.
That neither Obama nor Occupy could ‘give the idea of fraternity any real substance' might suggest that 'the space of political possibility' INDEED contracted. If said reforms were supposed to be the 'fix' for Capitalism, it didn't take.
‘Things Can Only Get Better’ and ‘Let’s Change the Future:’ citing no more than such slogans, Jonny Thakkar postulates that activist bases seem to go through ‘the same emotional cycle.’ He offers no shred of explanation to why this is so. Are we to believe this because Jonny Thakkar tells us this? Moreover, is another analysis is possible?
The Populist Party in the 1890s, the Progressive movement of the early 20th century, Robert La Follette's Farmer-Labor Party of Wisconsin in the 1920s, similar groups in Minnesota and the Dakotas, and Henry Wallace’ Progressive Party in 1948 have this in common. All collapsed or dissolved into the Democratic Party. Why? Perhaps the Democratic Party is where reform movements go to die.
The Vietnam War, the violent attacks on labor in the 1980s, war on the Middle East as stated policy, the staggering growth of social inequality – we have seen opposition rise and fall in each case. There was Eugene McCarthy and Bob Kennedy in 1968, followed by George McGovern in 1972, followed by Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, then Howard Dean in 2004, and now it is Bernie Sanders. Is Thakkar's 'emotional cycle' the only 'explanation?'
In 1920, no less a figure than Leon Trotsky gave prescient warning of and insight into this so-called ‘cycle’ in 'Terrorism and Communism:' His words are at least as true ninety-six years later.
“The capitalist bourgeois calculates...'at the right moment I will bring into existence opposition parties, which will disappear tomorrow, but which today accomplish their mission by affording the possibility of the lower middle class expressing their indignation without hurt therefrom for capitalism.'”
This equally contradicts John Kenneth Galbraith’s puerile speculation that the ballot can break this ‘cycle.’ J.K. Galbraith's remarks seem somewhat supportive of the socialist adage that US history reads like the illustrated version of Marx’ manifesto.
This is no ‘emotional cycle,’ [whatever Thakkar’s fallacious nomenclature/category means]. This is a political process whereby the ruling elite defuses significant opposition by containing and dissipating it within the Democratic Party.
Thakkar’s supposition that US legislation satisfies no one and will therefore bend toward centrism willfully ignore the very deep investment of the US bourgeoisie in both big-money parties.
Thakkar should consider the possibility that working class people are disillusioned with US governance because the agenda does not change for THEM however elections go. It is the PERCEPTION that Sanders is socialist which makes him popular with youth. But youth will see through him also. The bourgeoisie fears deeply that youth will sweep far past Sanders’ so-called ‘socialism.’ When they do, the state will turn guns on its own people. It has nothing else left.
Social vision is in short supply because the nation as a whole is exhausted even as the ruling class steers us toward massive military budget increases in advanced stage preparation of discretionary war on Russia, China, or both. Thakkar speaks of the exhaustion of the so-called ‘left.’ The left is not alone in exhaustion. Listen to right wing Republicans! Listen to your Libertarian neighbor! Their every other statement begins, ‘I’m so tired of – followed by the latest assault on working people. The whole nation is staggering.
Again, this is bourgeoisie driven politics. The ruling class is safe while the nation bickers on partisan lines. And it is all over the JPP forum. On signalmankenneth's thread, I began saying that Democrats and Republicans at all levels of government, together with the MDWQ and the EPA are answerable for the disaster at Flint. But no sooner was I saying that it was NOT lead but the bourgeoisie driven Austerity Agenda that poisoned Flint, and the 'Flint Residents ... Poisoned Water Bills' thread was abandoned. We haven't yet learned how to get past our bickering in order to fix anything.
Yet IF we can’t get past that, whatever will all our voting accomplish? Unless or until we change the way we do things and begin educating ourselves and studying the role of class in our history – YES, class in United States history – there is no way forward for us.
Thakkar says some curious things about socialism. Thakkar sees socialism largely as a system of production, rather than a system of production, of distribution, of exchange and of consumption. For another perspective on socialism, see Marx’ Critique of Political Economy. Yet Thakkar defines socialism with just two scant lines. Two. He then proceeds to rule by fiat that between 1946 and 1951, Great Britain had ‘an unequivocal socialist government’ because key industries and health care were under state operation.
This is astonishing! No revolutionary socialists regard those five years as an era of socialist government! They don’t even regard Stalinist Russia and/or various associated East European regimes as socialist regimes. Today, Venezuela is arguably the world's most socialist country. Yet even Marxists who live there cannot decide whether it is a Capitalist or socialist country. Thakkar says that ‘socialism’ used to mean something. True! So when did Russia and these East European ‘socialist’ countries abolish the coerced extraction of surplus value from labor? When did those nations abolish wage slavery, commodity production, currency, rent, interest, the market – in short, the essential components of Capitalism? Does Thakkar think that because it is the state which organizes some key businesses [largely in the interests of the bourgeoisie] that this somehow constitutes an unequivocal socialist government? By what conceivable metric does Thakkar conclude that Great Britain had socialism at that time?
For the record, Thakkar describes not socialism but state-run Capitalism. And state run Capitalism proved itself all the disaster that the US right-wing claims it to be, and largely for those same reasons.
And please, please – how, pray-tell, does one get to be a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University and not know these things?
Thakkar states:
‘If the term socialist had been used to refer to liberals in mid-century Europe, in contrast, people would have needed a new term to describe the real socialists.’
I honestly found this amusing. The term ‘socialist’ has so long been associated with the ‘left’ that socialists found it necessary to develop a new term to describe the left, hence the term ‘pseudo-left’ and the theoretical/historical story behind it.
Socialism is dead, Thakkar tells us! It is dead in Europe, it is dead in the US!
For another opinion, consider The Emergence of Class Struggle in the US, A World Convulsed by Crises, and On the Threshold of a New Year.
Joseph Kishore’s article states:
‘Beyond the confines of the top five or ten percent of the population, the state confronts an angry, dissatisfied and increasingly hostile working class. Broad sections no longer look to the political system as a mechanism for addressing any of their grievances. This has immense revolutionary implications.’
Indeed!
And those broad layers of society which no longer look to the political mechanism for addressing any of their grievances? Thakkar wants to guide them back into the political system. That is why he has written. That is why he tells us that unions have a vital role to play in industrial democracy. In reality, the recent assault on autoworkers and steelworkers show that their respective unions are entirely at the disposal of their corporate handlers, and serve to police the labor pool in corporate interests. That is why action OUTSIDE unions [such as the Detroit teachers] is now necessary. This is also why Thakkar closes with the ‘industrial to a service economy’ rhetoric. Translation? No genuinely productive work, but more low paying, low hours, no benefit, wage slavery service jobs, ensuring poverty into perpetuity while boosting profits.
For 100 years, anti-socialism has enjoyed the uncontested status of a civil religion in the US. But after a century of silence, the bourgeoisie has HAD to allow socialism to enter the civic discourse, even if only in the pseudo-leftism of Senator Sanders. This was necessary because as Kishore says, youths are abandoning our political order in droves.
Yet this is a calculated risk. Youths are intelligent. When they see the ‘bait and switch’ – and they till – the younger generation sweep far, far past Sanders' very modest and ill-defined reformist posturing into a genuinely socialist program. And when this discussion is hosted, it won’t be on Thakkar’s premises, on Republican premises, or Democratic Party premises. It will be on the basis of socialist premises.
And I for one can’t wait for that discussion to happen.
The Republican Party will be what the Republican Party is. That is a good thing. It belongs to socialists to build a mass movement. That mass movement must be shaped into a wedge to smash into the Democratic Party, so that its adherents become revolutionary socialists or else join the Republican Party. These dynamics cannot be interrupted. These are exciting times!
Since WWI, Capitalism has been in convulsion. Capitalism is finished. Capitalism has no forward, progressive role in history. Capitalism is mired in unending war. Capitalism long ago gave up on its own. Flint Michigan alone is a scathing indictment of the whole, Capitalist system. Capitalism has four policies – War, Famine, Pestilence and Death. Having endured the devastation of two world wars, genocide and pogroms, democracy across Europe is collapsing into military-police dictatorships. The post WWII system of relations is breaking apart under the weight of the refugee crisis precipitated by continuous bombing of ME countries, which is necessary to save Capitalist nations from economic collapse. European borders are again being manned with soldiers. Tanks will follow. They are rearming for war, and economic and political rivalries will push them into ever increasing conflict. Europe looks very much as it did prior to WWI. Capitalism has no solutions. These are Capitalism’s death throes. In fact this has been so for some time as stated in the 1938 Transitional Program by Leon Trotsky.
No, Mr. Thakkar. Socialism is not dead. It is anything but dead.
The only question is whether World War III or the world socialist agenda will be first to gain ascendancy.
IMT
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Regards.
