Lenin’s Tomb
It's the top item on the BBC Website.
It got moved down, then back up.
Have you sent a message of support yet, PD?
Not yet tony. I would like to read more about the situation first.
Excellent stuff, tony. They're back at work after being promised meaningful talks this Friday, but I see the POA head was pissed off on C4 news when they told him that a government minister had already said that the pay deal was non-negotiable. He eventually said "this government seems to want to negotiate either through the television screens or in the courts. We want to negotiate around the negotiating table."
What is this? We support better paid state bully boys now?
Probably better to unpick that, Rosa:
"better-paid" - I don't choose the level of wages as my starting point when organised (or disorganised) workers end up in a fight with the state. The point is, Brown has imposed a pay freeze, the POA has a no-strike agreement on the basis that they're supposed to be treated fairly. They realised they weren't, and went out on strike knowing full well that the personal cost could be much higher than for normal workers (cos of the no strike stuff).
"bully boys": I don't support what prison officers do. I do believe, and totally support the idea, that through workers organising into unions, we can make a start in addressing the more reactionary parts of the class.
Given that these people can be among the most reactionary, don't you think it's crucial for other workers to give them support when they fight back against the state, and end up on the same side of the law as the inmates? Don't you think it's the absolute top priority?
I want to see the consciousness of all workers raised. Which do you think is more likely to move the prison officers to the left, towards more political ways of doing their jobs, towards more solidarity with the rest of the class: Ignoring them when they become one of the first groups in recent years to stay out on strike despite a court order, or wholeheartedly support them, offering pracitcal solidarity, getting involved with support groups if the strike goes on, bringing them collections from other workers etc.?
It seems elementary to me: If even the police took the same action, I would support them, because it increases the chances of them being on the right side. It doesn't mean I don't detest the way they act when they do their job. But if I can do something to support these guys when they need it, it increases the chances of solidarity and joint action.
The entire role of socialist activists is to try to move things to the left all the time, every day, in every aspect of the way we live our lives. We're the ones who don't take reactionary positions when prison officers go on strike. We're the ones who try to pull other workers into supporting strikes like this.
Curious how Respect has come out with a statement before the SWP. Any explanations for the speed of Galloway's response and the tardiness of Socialist Worker(online)?
Toby, that's the most pathetic attempt at sectarian trouble-stirring I've seen in years.
Let me see if I can do a Toby:
Curious how Toby has come out with a sectarian sneer before saying anything about the strike. Any explanations for the speed of Toby's response and the tardiness of his solidarity?
Ooh, this is fun! What group are you in, so I can get more involved in doing nothing at all?
I enjoyed Toby's post as well. Images of someone writing logdates down in their little black book of sectariana to be pulled out gleefully for the next twenty years.
Excellent reply by Tony to Rosa. Of course a strike by "state bully boys" is a contradictory process. Now we see the fruit of Rosa's rejection of dialectics, while Tony's argument precisely uses a dialectical approach.
[By the way, does Rosa not think there are any "state bully girls"? Did she never watch Prisoner Cell Block H?]
Tony, your response to Rosa perfectly encapsulates what it means to be a trade unionist and a revolutionary - it should be nailed to every noticeboard in every workplace and union office in the country.
I posted this in the thread about Free latif.
Which comrade is going to get signatures/support from the screws union for Latif?
"Excellent reply by Tony to Rosa. Of course a strike by "state bully boys" is a contradictory process."
Oh, are they not on strike?
There's a 'whole' and 'part' problem with Rosa's intervention too ie she has allotted a role and function to prison guards and then collapsed into it, the whole personality/ideology/outlook of the individuals concerned into that function. I suggest that this is a mix of determinism and/or vulgar marxism, which ends up leaving us with that well-known text, 'Nothing Can Be Done'. The ghost of Althusser hovers over this. His 'ideological state apparatus' theory was ok-ish in giving a broad brush stroke idea of how state, ideology and capital interact but completely crap at offering any indication as to what anyone might do with this seemingly perfectly sealed system.
Did she never watch Prisoner Cell Block H?
I sincerely hope not.
And don't put 'Guest Post', tony, you're a Tombster!
Yes, I was cheering them this afternoon. Stick it up there arse indeed !!!
And at lunch time 'will you break the law?' says the BBC reporter 'Yes if it means getting our human rights back' Says POA spokesman!
Bring it on!!
Agree with Tony about screws, but the cops..? Nah, I don't think so. They are inherently tied to defending the current order. They have to be smashed as an institution, not supported in their never ending quest for more money and guns.
Look at most revolutions, the cops and security services are usually the last to surrender to the forces of the revolution.
Oh and lets be clear, a victory for the POA is a victory for the class. In the recent strike by the Glasgow social care workers, one of the real topics was the fact that many of the actions by the strikers were 'illegal'. Secondary action such as joining the Herald newspaper picket line, are supposed to be 'illegal', and the strikers knew that, but it didnt stop social care workers sticking two fingers up at the law. see www.flickr.com/photos/duncanbrown
The dam is collapsing, lets all get our shoulders behind it and help to push it over.
"And don't put 'Guest Post', tony, you're a Tombster!"
It was co-written with a non-Tombster, so I couldn't claim all the credit...
"Look at most revolutions, the cops and security services are usually the last to surrender to the forces of the revolution."
Indeed, which is why if they were engaged in a fight against the state, our role would be obvious.
"Which comrade is going to get signatures/support from the screws union for Latif?"
Anticap, I'm really hoping that isn't one of those sneery questions - you don't usually do that.
The answer to the question is: me, and every dynamic, political trade unionist and activist.
That's part of the deal - I wouldn't just turn up at a picket line and say "nice one, chaps - don't beat up black people in future, m'kay?" - I would do my best to raise the politics of the whole thing.
I might fail. Indeed, I probably would fail - it's hard even with a feisty and militant group of workers to just walk in and do stuff.
But you engage, and you continue to engage, until you find people interested in what you have to say.
I've found it really easy to get signatures and collect money from tube workers for other striking workers. I've found it easy to find really militantly anti-war people, but less easy to collect money for anti-war causes among a certain layer of tube workers.
You try, and you see, and you don't care if they are reactionary when you start. The actual point is to see who you can get to connect the Latif case with the war case with the pay freeze case with the privatised tube case with the foundation hospitals case with the criminal justice system case.
Opportunities to connect with other workers don't often arise in a way that allows you to do that simply as another trade unionist. Now the POA has gone back, lots of those opportunities may close up.
But if a militant fighting mood continues, I'll be organising support, as well as getting other workers to visit picket lines, doing collections etc. - and yes, getting support for Latif.
And I'm sure Toby will be back to ask why the word "demand" on the petition wasn't in bold italic and why this shows that the SWP doesn't act in the best traditions of Lenin (which is a good thing cos Lenin was the new Hitler but a bad thing cos Lenin wrote a pamphlet called "Font and Revolution" which showed the need to use a dialectic approach to typography).
Typical BBC... PM yesterday interviewed some poor fucking relative who had 'travelled for two hours with her kids' to see her old man who'd banged up in Wormwood Scrubs, only to be told she couldn't see him. It was painted as a really tragic story.
Did they bother to interview the wife of a Prison Officer who's just been given a shite payrise?
Did they fuck.
Did they ask anyone in the Govt WHY the payrise has been staggered?
Did they fuck.
Anyone who dares withdraw their labour is effectively accused of commiting treason.
A quick look around the more sectarian blogs shows the utterly farcical state of many on the left.
They key point people are making isn't "how can we show solidarity?" or "is it possible to influence this union now they're on the wrong side of the law?" or any other tactical, industrial, political questions.
It's "Why did the SWP say [x] in 1996 and is now saying [y]?" or, as we saw from our friend Toby, "why hasn't the SWP put out a leaflet yet?"
To paraphrase Mark Steel, I'm sure that, like all left wing activists, these groups will all turn up at the picket lines - but instead of collections and solidarity, they'll be armed with leaflets headed "Why We Are Not Supporting This Strike".
"Typical BBC"
Now now Mark - I'm sure that, in the interests of balance and neutrality, they also interviewed the relative of someone who wasn't ii prison and so hadn't travelled a long distance to see them.
Nice answer Tony.
I wasn't being sneery (well I guess I was a bit -sorry). I guess that there are comrades like Rosa (and probably older ones like myself), having been 'trained' in the 80's, that would find it difficult to even go on a screws picket line, let alone raise other issues such as solidarity with Latif.
It certainly IS a positive move when any group of workers, even those with the most reactionary roles in society, challenge the Labour government's pay freeze and challenge the anti-union laws.
On the issue of the police.
They have been on strike here in Greece several times over the last few years, sometimes even clashing with the riot police. But we don't go on their picket lines, nor their demonstrations. We do recognise that a police strike is a sign of discontent with government neo-liberal policy, but we have consistently argued and shouted on anti-war, workers demos slogans such as:
"More money for health not for the Police."
and recently with all these fires raging:
"Send the MAT (riot police) to put out fires not to attack demonstrators"
There was also a strike of prison officers a few years ago, and again recognising that this was good in the sense that it created political problems for the government, we basically abstained from the organisation of the strike.
Thing is, these are also tactical questions. The situation in Greece is very different from the situation in the UK.
Here, we're at a very strange point in the history of working class organisation and the labour movement. I think it's essential right now to give maximum support to any group of workers who are fighting back, cos it is extremely hard for them to do so. And for them to fight back and do so outside the law, it's even more important.
I think if I was to point to any great principle here, it's this: "The default position for a socialist should be to give maximum support to any group of workers who fight back against the bosses".
If people then don't think it's right to support workers engaged in a fight, it's up to them to make the case - the starting position should always be "we support them", not "tell me why I should support them".
My instinct with police strikes is that I would probably still try to get along to picket lines, try to get invited to speak at meetings etc. - it's up to other people to convince me why I shouldn't.
I think that's what makes me a revolutionary: You have to see every event as having the potential for awakening the class, and every victory as potentially opening up more fronts.
It's why we marched against the war with Tories, Greens and Lib Dems, while hating the rest of their politics. We took the risk that they would take the "glory" (as indeed the Lib Dems still try to do), but the most important thing was to organise and build.
There were those (*glares at Tatchell*) who said that gay people should not be organising with Muslims in the anti-war movement. But we said the only way to influence any group of people was by engaging with them, and a surefire way of never influencing people was to refuse to work with them.
It's sort of elementary, and I think it should be elementary - like I say, it does then become a tactical question of whether to support individual strikes and fights (for example, if we're in a period of a rising anti-capitalist movement, could our support for a police strike have a material impact on how they treat us on demonstrations, and does it even matter?)
I agree with the line taken by Tony. I would also remind people of the strfikes that took place by police in Boston and Britain in 1919 and here in Melbourne in 1923. My memory is that these were supported by the left. In Melbourne the strike was famously an excuse for looting by workers in the CBD. The enrolment of a middle class militia as scabs was an important moment in the organisation of quasi-fascist "secret armies" in Australia in the '20s and '30s.
I'm also pretty certain that some of the victimised leaders of the British strike ened up in the CP. A strike that turns a policeman into a revolutionary has to be a good thing!
Of course, I'm also aware of the limitations of police unionism. In Tasmania in the early '90s the police union voted to express their support for striking workers at a pulp mill. They even donated money to the strike fund. The next day the cops charged through the picket line as per usual.
The other, perhaps obvious, point is how many trade unionists are watching this dispute and taking note? Postiers, nurses, teachers, sweeps, sparkies, car workers, the peeps down at Heathrow... If wildcat action becomes THE thing we've moved a big step forward.
re: BBC coverage, the point here is that a working class family travelling many miles to see their relative is not news for 364 days of the year, it only becomes news when 'strikes incovenience the public'. The dull violence of the everyday meted out on people whose buses don't turn up, whose hospitals are too far away since closure, whose old people's sheltered housing is flogged off, whose neighbourhoods are carved up by 'developers', whose schools are taken over by millionaires, whose employers squeeze more and more hours out of them, who are made to feel ugly, bad, cruel, inadequate because they don't look like Kiera Knightley etc etc isn't 'news'.
The beeb did show the shove it up your arse comment on the 10pm news. The reporter described this as a 'robust' response, or something like that :)
Finally problem solved for Florence - thanks to Tony and others who have explained the role of revolutionary socialists when an enemy (state protectors) are fighting against our enemy (state). I recall a few years ago at a demonstration organised by Unite against the Nazis when a comrade shouted at me for talking to the police who were supposedly keeping peace between us and the Nazis. My cde said "We in the SWP do not talk to policeman."
I have been at the bitter end of the police brutality and I also personally know policeman (not friends-but friends/husband of friends). So, it would be hypocritical of me not to talk to a policeman just because I hate what they do. Personally, I would find it very difficult though to support policeman if they went on strike for pay or other similar issues. As a revolutionary, I might just do it to show them how stupid they are by protecting the very wealthy when they themselves are paid peanuts and work under diabolic conditions. Something I always tell them when I talk to them during demonstrations. I even found out during the climate march that they wash their own uniforms!
where can we read more of tony?
Cops, just because they have a union, are not workers worthy of support!
One must look at the work they do -- the result or the objective -- of that work. Cops, along with the troops, constitute the army of the rich man that oppresses you. They are oppression workers! When you support them, in any fashion, you support the oppression.
Tony says;
“There were those (*glares at Tatchell*) who said that gay people should not be organising with Muslims in the anti-war movement. But we said the only way to influence any group of people was by engaging with them, and a surefire way of never influencing people was to refuse to work with them.”
Gays love each other and bother no one else.
Cops, like disgusting robots, sell their morality to the man and terrorize and brutalize you and your friends and neighbors on command. Would you support a pedophile’s union, or wife beater’s union, or a politician’s union if they had one?
“Engaging with them” is not the only way to influence any group of people. Disengaging is a far more effective means. It is called shunning and it works.
Anticapitalista has it right - its the states problem - let them fucking deal with it, while at the same time taking the opportunity to amplify the shunning and demand NO PAY FOR OPPRESSIVE COPS! And in the same breath or placard! MORE PAY FOR HEALTH CARE WORKERS.
Blindly supporting workers just because they are workers without considering the morality of the work done in a result or objective sense is fucking stupid.
Cops suck!
Election Boycott 08!
Hand counted paper ballots system wide!
"Blindly supporting workers just because they are workers"
That's where you've misunderstood.
There's no "blind" support here. These are tactical questions, but the starting point of too many people has been "I don't support reactionary workers". Mine is, "is there a gain for the class in supporting these workers".
Chances are, a police strike might well be a reactionary one. For example, there were threats of industrial action after the police murdered Jean Charles de Menezes if any of the officers were prosecuted.
We wouldn't have supported the police in those actions. The cause is reactionary, the action is reactionary.
But there are plenty of times when there might be common cause, might be gains to make through supporting action, might be areas to prise open etc.
Blindly saying "we do not support reactionary workers" is the worst thing to say. Start from the position of "support unless there's good reason not to", and you'll be a more dynamic activist and you'll win much more influence.
There are small examples of this all the time.
A train driver who isn't particularly political, wanted to fly an England flag in his train cab during a football tournament.
He was banned from doing so by management.
Our position on the use of flags as crude, often racist, symbols of nationalism is fairly solid. But what's our position on a reactionary set of managers banning a worker from flying his flag, when he isn't at all nationalist except in his football? And what would we be trying to achieve by avoiding the subject, by supporting the worker or by not supporting the worker?
There was a good debate about it within the union, because it's not clear-cut - there are all sorts of tactical questions about all sorts of issues all the time. Sure, support or otherwise for agents of the state when they go on strike, that's an extreme issue - but if we start by asking what's best for the class, what's best for raising consciousness, for opening up opportunities for the rest of the working class, we're less likely to make mistakes and we're more likely to win influence and allies.
I think tony got it precisely right: the default position for the revolutionary is support for workers; there has to be good reason not to.
Socialist Worker has joined the fray with this article on the dispute, which goes through the strenghts of the unofficial action and the contradictions of the POA Prison officers’ unofficial strike rattles government
Tony said: “Sure, support or otherwise for agents of the state when they go on strike, that's an extreme issue - but if we start by asking what's best for the class, what's best for raising consciousness, for opening up opportunities for the rest of the working class, we're less likely to make mistakes and we're more likely to win influence and allies.”
Tony, agree to disagree here, sorry for the stupid remark, but I am a bit passionate about this issue.
I think this is a moral question of extreme importance. The moral value of the result of one’s work or labor must be a consideration. I think it would be best for the class to raise consciousness of the VALUE of the result of what one does for ‘work’ in one’s life for monetary gain - a key necessity for positive societal change. If thousands of protesters finally, and in mass, broke with these immoral sell out cops this would happen.
The rich man is currently putting in place a great variety of schemes for mass domestic political oppression. Well paid and well fed cops are not needed at this time. I think this is a pivotal historical moment where folks must decide to either support what is right or what is wrong and put any thoughts of old school expediency aside.
This is a time to raise the public’s awareness that when they support cops they also support taser torturing automatons who would give them a lumber lobotomy in a heart beat if they were simply ordered to do so by the man. These misguided sell outs are not your friends and neighbors!
This is a time to make folks realize that when you support cops you are feeding the beast that will club you down if you do not submit your very spirit and the output of your spirit to the rich oppressor.
This is a time to separate the wheat from the chaff and learn who your “allies” really are.
Grim and Dim:
"Excellent reply by Tony to Rosa. Of course a strike by "state bully boys" is a contradictory process. Now we see the fruit of Rosa's rejection of dialectics, while Tony's argument precisely uses a dialectical approach."
Well, if you can't win with reasoned argument, you might as well appeal to mysticism, eh?
This is a tactic Dialectical Mystics have been using since long before Stalin tried to defend the thesis that less democracy was more democracy, on the basis that this idea was eminently contradictory, and thus an excellent example of dialectics in action. [More crass examples at my site.]
And what *exactly* is the "contradiction" here?
[That should shut you up, since, if you accept dialectical logic, that is prima facie proof you know no logic.]
But, Tony did not use any dialectics, and he has won me over (by and large).
What does that say for G&D's sub-Aristotelian, diabolical logic?
Now wonder history has refuted it.
Gin and Tonic:
"By the way, does Rosa not think there are any "state bully girls"? Did she never watch Prisoner Cell Block H?"
I left that out for pedants like you to notice.
Mike:
"There's a 'whole' and 'part' problem with Rosa's intervention too ie she has allotted a role and function to prison guards and then collapsed into it, the whole personality/ideology/outlook of the individuals concerned into that function. I suggest that this is a mix of determinism and/or vulgar marxism, which ends up leaving us with that well-known text, 'Nothing Can Be Done'. The ghost of Althusser hovers over this. His 'ideological state apparatus' theory was ok-ish in giving a broad brush stroke idea of how state, ideology and capital interact but completely crap at offering any indication as to what anyone might do with this seemingly perfectly sealed system."
Much as I respect you Mike, wtf has this got to do with anything I said?
How can you infer so much from so little?
What have any of my ideas got to do with that confused bumbler, Althusser?
Especially now that Tony has won me over?
Len:
"Did she never watch Prisoner Cell Block H?
I sincerely hope not."
You know me far too well...
Apparently all that means no support for striking screws until they change their wicked ways? Who else aren't we going to support?
i on the ball patriot - this is a very doggy subject and i really do not want to take sides. I realised that a policeman was not a workperson's friend a long time ago and will never be. However recently I have realised that policemen are like trained machines when they refused us to go for a wee during a demonstration . Their argument was - 'its orders.' I threatened to wee infront of them and they told me they would arrest me. Where is the logic? How can I ever support someone like this who just does what he/she is told? What if I support them during their strike and then they follow orders to arrest those supporting them? Its a dilemma I wish never to witness.
Re: the issue of whether to support Police strikes
I'm with Tony on this one. Broadly, we should support Police strikes, except in those instances when it's VERY clear we should not (e.g. the Menezes example Tony gives above). The point is that you have to look at the context.
IOBP, i have to say i think you're making a BIG mistake on this issue. Don't forget, virtually NOBODY (except perhaps the very very psychotic) joins the Police because they want to defend the capitalist state against the workers. People join the Police for the same reasons that working people sign up to do ANY job: they need money on which to live. To the extent that ideology comes into it at all, it's virtually always either the confused ideology of the liberal ("the Police's main role is to protect the public from criminals"), or the confused ideology of the Daily Mail reader ("the Police's main role is to protect the public from chav scum").
The point is that those who join the Police have virtually zero likelihood of having an accurate understanding of class politics. They (almost by definition) fundamentally misunderstand the structure of society, and so they pretty much all genuinely believe that what they are doing is right. They're not (for the most part) monsters; they're just ignorant. Now there's two ways of dealing with this sort of person: You can either say "We in the Whatever Party don't talk to the likes of you", in which case he will just think you are a Guardian-reading twat and that will be the end of it. OR, you can try and educate him in the real structure of capitalist society, in which case you just might get somewhere.
Believe me, i have family and friends in the Police, and at the end of the day most of them are just fellas doing a job. They hate their Blairite management-speak-spouting careerist bosses like the plague, too. Who knows, we may not be far off another 1919 here in Britain. So we should always be ready to discuss the real nature of capitalist society with them, and be hopeful of positive openings here for the Left.
Another point is, where do you draw the line? If you're not going to talk in principle to policemen, why not the rank and file of the army too? How ridiculous would that be, considering the number of progressive coups/revolutions have occurred thanks to the cooperation, if not the leadership, of members of the armed forces, in many cases idealistic young officers? Russia 1917, Portugal 1974, Libya 1969, Egypt 195(was it?)2 spring readily to mind.
Moreover, why not extend it to civilians working for the Police (all of them UNISON members), if that's your logic. Should we not talk to them either? Or how about people working for McDonalds or Starbucks or Coca Cola? Should we not cooperate with them either? Very quickly you see where this lunatic logic will take you.
I really do feel very strongly about this. Remember the heroes of 1919!
PCS solidarity.
Any others?
http://www.pcs.org.uk/Templates/...p?
NodeID=913508
In the US, it is doubtful that we would be having this conversation. In most instances, police and correctional officers are a privileged class of worker that pursue their interests independent of the broader labor movement. Job actions of any kind are rare, because law enforcement officers are skilled at claiming that polticians who don't pay them what they want are imperiling public safety.
What that said, Tony's position has merit in the right circumstances. Job actions over working conditions by cops are a classic symptom of neoliberalism running off the rails, reflecting a doctrinaire adherence to the market over the practical requirement of making sure that that the security apparatus is well fed and happy, and, hence, willing to do, without question, whatever is ordered.
For a classic instance of this phenomenon, check out Ben Dangl's recent book about social movements in Bolivia, The Price of Fire, wherein police involved in the suppression of road blockades and riots promptly went over to the other side once they were subjected to wage and benefit cuts necessitated by IMF austerity plans.
Indeed, it is doubtful that Morales and the MAS would have ever taken power if not for the fact that, back in 2004? 2005?, the police clearly refused to act against a mass movement insistent upon overthrowing the government, which it did. And there were certainly powerful people that wanted them to do so, not least of which, the US Ambassador in La Paz.
oops, for anyone who is interested, here is a link for The Price of Fire
The posts by tony and i on the ball are a very precise demonstration of Marxism vs. moralism in practice. It's worthy of a Marxist anthology. Notice how tony's arguments always come back to the practical impact our actions have on the class struggle, while iotbp talks right past him, appealing to abstract moral purity regardless of the consequences.
(p.s., good thing the sparts haven't discovered this thread yet)
ACtually and metaphorically, we say 'Don't shoot'. Most of the time they take no notice but then just sometimes in history they have done...
I'm agreeing with Richard here. In the US cops have their own culture....no matter how much "regular guys" might go into the force just looking for work, or even how racially and sexually integrated the cops become (or even how many gay cop organizations there are), inevitably cops come to glorify a right-wing, racist point of view. They come to identify with the worst of the system, or is that, to identify with what the social role of the police actually is. I can see that given the fuzzy class lines and fuzzier class consciousness it's not impossible to imagine a cop union job action leading to something progressive, but it's even easier to imagine a cop union's members winning their demands and then going out and arresting political activists or shooting down innocent people.
I think the article in Socialist Worker that someone linked to above is exactly how revolutionaries should deal with these situations. If you read the article, it spends half its time slating the government, mentions in two lines why workers should support the screws breaking anti-union laws and the pay-freeze [here it is in its full "Every trade unionist should oppose the use of anti-union laws and welcome any assault on Brown’s pay freeze."] It then goes on about the role of prison officers (and law-enforcement agencies) in society.
BTW This strike shouldn't really be compared with the police strike in 1919, unless I missed a workers revolution somewhere while I was on holiday.
I think it's important to realize that the police, being a major bulwark of the imperialist state, are more in the position of the petite bourgeoisie (PB) than of the working class. The PB are notorious for being largely right-leaning and tend to side with workers only when doing so helps their own narrow class interests. In short, the police are likely to be fickle and cannot be relied upon for class solidarity even though they work for wages and are ostensibly part of the working class. Given that the left has scarce resources, it seems to me that they shouldn't be wasted on those who might repress them as soon as the order is issued.
Florence durrant said: “i on the ball patriot - this is a very doggy subject and i really do not want to take sides.”
Not taking sides affirms the status quo. The status quo does not presently allow you to really own your own spirit. I agree, its a very tough decision indeed. I personally find it very empowering to NOT support and shun the scum bags that oppress me.
deformed worker said; “Believe me, i have family and friends in the Police, and at the end of the day most of them are just fellas doing a job.”
Do they do it for the pay or are they just ignorant? Those were your two stated reasons for people becoming cops. Why have you not educated them to “the real structure of capitalist society”? What ever the hell that means.
deformed worker also said; “Where do you draw the line?”
That’s a really astute question coming from someone who accuses me of using lunatic logic. The answer is to develop a moral code that honors the spirits of all human beings equally and not just the few elite rich among us and their sell out lackeys. That moral code will determine the lines you must draw. It might also cause you to consider that maybe cops should be drafted into service from all areas of the community instead of motivating the ignorant and pay check driven into service like your cop friends and cop family. And yes that includes the automatons in the military too that simply kill on command without any consideration of right or wrong.
and deformed worker also said;“I really do feel very strongly about this. Remember the heroes of 1919!”
No. I do not remember the heroes of 1919. I really like to hear about heroes. Please enlighten me.
I would like to change what I said above at 19:21 from
(SW)"mentions in two lines why workers should support the screws breaking anti-union laws and the pay-freeze"
to
(SW)"mentions in two lines why workers should oppose the government's anti-union laws and pay-freeze"
Note it doesn't say we should "support" the screws, just oppose the government.
34 years after Pinochets Coup Chiles
workers occupy the presidential palace
Brown, Straw and Bush can stick this alongside their Neo Liberal injuctions.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/chile/
...2158717,00.html
Chileans take to streets in anger at regime
· Hundreds arrested in clashes with police
· Economic inequality at heart of protest in capital
Jonathan Franklin in Santiago and agencies
Thursday August 30, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/chile/
...2158717,00.html
Heres the highlights version
Television images showed senator Alejandro Navarro, of President Michelle Bachelet's Socialist party, bleeding from the back of his head after apparently being clubbed by a police officer. The deputy interior minister, Felipe Harboe, said the incident would be investigated. Mr Navarro, who was treated in hospital, supported the protest.
"This protest will start to change things. There will be one after another," said Arturo Martinez, of United Workers Central, the trade union that organised the protest. The union is tapping into widespread anger at economic inequality in Chilean society. As riot police and ruling party politicians tried to play down the protests, the capital was filled by protesters demanding higher pensions, better public transport, subsidised housing and a halt to rising food and electricity prices.
President Bachelet initially defended her record as a progressive politician, then conceded and promised "subsidies to all" families in need and a "short-term solution" for economic inequality. "Nobody can say that my government's programmes are not fair and equitable. I will not accept questioning of my work on social justice," she said. "The solutions to these inequalities and the goal of a more equitable Chile are obtained with dialogue, maturity, work and agreements. Through this process there will be discord, but also common understanding."
While government officials tried to ignore the protests, union leaders such as Mr Martinez threatened to lay siege to Santiago by shutting down major avenues and roads leading into the city.
Throughout the day, protesters repeatedly attempted to approach the presidential palace, which late on Tuesday was briefly occupied by low-income housing residents who stormed the building. At least 30 members managed to scale the iron window grates, dangling from the palace screaming anti-government slogans.
Yesterday's protest comes after weeks of labour action, including strikes by poultry workers in southern Chile and copper miners in the north. Union leaders called the demonstrations to protest against the government's "neo-liberal" economic policies and to further the national debate about the country's minimum wage.
Salaries for workers have been at the forefront of public debate after recent statements by Bishop Alejandro Goic calling for "an ethical [minimum] wage" for Chilean workers.
anticapitalista:
"BTW This strike shouldn't really be compared with the police strike in 1919, unless I missed a workers revolution somewhere while I was on holiday."
If you're referring to my comments, take a look again at what i said above. Nowhere did i make a comparison with this screws' strike and the 1919 police strike. What i said was that a willingness to engage with rank and file police officers and to educate them as to the institutional role of the police in a hierarchical society could well open up possibilities for "another 1919" at some future time.
IOBP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Bri...n_1918_and_1919
deformed worker - talking about the police (ok not about prison officers) says:
"Who knows, we may not be far off another 1919 here in Britain."
"I really do feel very strongly about this. Remember the heroes of 1919!"
Well I wouldn't call the police strikers of 1919 heroes. From your own link:
"Outcome
The eventual outcome of the strikes of 1918 and 1919 benefited police workers. They received a pay increase that doubled their wages and the government was forced to take notice of their issues, establishing the Police Federation in the process. The two strikes also increased the government's awareness of the importance of the police in terms of the government's own stability. After 1919, the police were never again taken quite as for granted, as they had been in the years before."
Now the fact that it was a product of mass radicalisation due to a) WW1 and b) Russian Revolution and weakened the government, great. But the result of the police strikes was not radicalisation of police officers leading them to support workers strikes, but an improvement of their own standing in society relative to workers.
I would disagree with the description of the police as workers in uniform. A more accurate description of the police is that they are scabs in uniform. The might be from the working class, but when workers go on strike the police are on the boss’s side, no matter that the boss might have acted illegally eg Gate Gourmet. It is the police that bus the scabs through the picket line, they are part of the attempt to break the strike.
As for 'some of my friends are police and their just decent blokes' argument, it’s not the individual police that make the police force so reactionary; it’s their objective position in society that makes them so. Police are racist and sexist because they protect a system that is racist and sexist. The various Immigration Acts means that a policeman will look at a black person and will think ‘is s/he an illegal immigrant?’ Its part of the police job description to be racist. BTW Strathclyde Police, when asking for your name and address, now also ask you where you were born. Presumably this is so they can then check your immigration status. The individual either accepts this behavior and becomes just another copper or rejects it and leaves.
The police’s main purpose in society is not to protect human life but to protect private property. If were otherwise then they would have responsibility for Health and Safety at work. Two people a week die on construction sites in the UK. The police are almost never involved in those deaths. They are only called in when the woefully understaffed and under funded, Health and Safety Executive request them to investigate and this rarely happens. Yet if building workers were to strike against unsafe working practices, the police would turn up like flies round shite to break the action.
In the case of the prison officers, this is a group of workers that are striking against a public sector pay cut imposed by Gordon Brown. This is of no little interest to millions of civil servants, postal workers, health workers and local government workers who are also facing the same pay cut. The POA is also defying the union laws that are designed to hamstring effective strike action. These laws were passed by the Tories and maintained by Blair - another broken promise by the Blair government. Many rank and file workers have been cheering the open defiance of the union laws by the POA. We should be cheering along with them.
anticapitalista,
By "heroes", i was of course referring to those who went out on strike and subsequently paid the price by being laid off by the Government, and having their pensions revoked. For example, it was reported that of the entire 70-strong Bootle Borough Police Force, 69 went out on strike.
Duncan B,
"when workers go on strike the police are on the boss’s side"
That might well be generally true today. My point is that only by engaging with the police rank and file will we ever be able to change their class consciousness. Many lower middle class white collar workers also side ideologically with the rich (this was in fact the basis for Thatcher's repeated electoral success), completely contrary to their actual class interests. That doesn't mean we should just refuse to talk to them. We MUST persuade them. It can't be all that difficult: we have truth on our side for God's sake!!
Duncan B,
"As for 'some of my friends are police and their just decent blokes' argument, it’s not the individual police that make the police force so reactionary; it’s their objective position in society that makes them so. Police are racist and sexist because they protect a system that is racist and sexist. The various Immigration Acts means that a policeman will look at a black person and will think ‘is s/he an illegal immigrant?’ Its part of the police job description to be racist."
Yes, absolutely. In other words, it's exactly the same situation as a worker for McDonalds, for example. Individually, they are decent people, but the institution they work for is evil. The difference with the police is that they are far less likely than McDonalds workers to realise and to appreciate that their employer is evil, and so are far more likely to identify with their employer. But that's exactly WHY we have to act to change this consciousness amongst police rank and file. We have to try to make them see that they ARE workers in uniform.
deformed worker
I don't think you can lump the police and 'middle class' [my quotation marks] white collar workers in the same category. They are completely different. White-collar unionism - for a very long time now in the UK and here in Greece - has a history of class struggle, solidarity with other workers and solidarity with the oppressed. Police unions do not. (and as far as I am aware neither do prison workers unions).
I admire your hope in engaging with the 'rank and file' of the Police force, but I think it is a wasted effort in the present circumstances. Maybe when 1919 comes around again, you will be right. Until then I still think that a slogan shouted here by students occupying their universities against neo-liberal attacks stands.
"We want money for education and money for health, not for war and the Police"
Have the SWPer's been out to the picket lines to try and win the prison guards to Islam?
Hey, this has turned into an excellent and highly informative discussion regarding the cops and how revolutionaries should relate to them. And I am proud to claim the full credit for kicking it off (01:20).
;-)
Tony, deformed worker, Robert and Duncan make some great points.
That's a really important point that in a situation where other groups of workers( nurses, teachers, posties etc) are going through bargaining periods and considering strike action a successful action by the cops may be inspiring to those other workers.
And I take the point that our default position should be to support every action unless given good reason not to.
However I have to disagree that cops are workers just like any other, just more reactionary. Its not so much their reactionary views that are the problem, its their role that is the issue. Sure, go up to any blue-collar picket-line and you'll hear your fair share of racist, sexist and homophobic comments, but these workers aren't involved in strike-breaking, harassing immigrants and smashing up demos, whereas this is what the cops do.
So, i think its a bit rich to say that if you don't support police industrial action then you might as well not support McD's or Starbucks workers...
As for talking to cops. i just don't do it, ever, if I can help it. I think it can be really dangerous on demos to talk to the cops, they often try and get info out of you and lull you into a false sense of security that they are human beings, just before they turn around and belt you.
Have the SWPer's been out to the picket lines to try and win the prison guards to Islam?
Shut your face, you infidel scab.
Hey, it's Red Cloud - I thought we lost you (sniff). How's the sect doing?
anticapitalista:
"I don't think you can lump the police and 'middle class' [my quotation marks] white collar workers in the same category. They are completely different. White-collar unionism - for a very long time now in the UK and here in Greece - has a history of class struggle, solidarity with other workers and solidarity with the oppressed. Police unions do not. (and as far as I am aware neither do prison workers unions)."
Hmph. I KNOW!! That's what i'm saying we need to change! I appreciate just as well as you do that there's little or no history of solidarity in struggle shown by police workers towards civilian workers, but only by engaging with police workers will we ever be able to change this state of affairs.
Entirely agree with your use of inverted commas around "middle class" in relation to white collar workers, btw.
"We want money for education and money for health, not for war and the Police"
Completely agree. But it's worth pointing out that government money given to police authorities rarely (if ever) goes towards pay rises for the police rank and file these days. By contrast, senior police officers are just as keen as your average civilian execs to award themselves hugely disproportionate pay rises, and there IS massive resentment towards this amongst regular coppers.
Of course, as with the Army, there's always the inherent tendency for this sort of resentment to be channeled along Far Right rather than Far Left avenues. Thus, for example, bobbies will tend to view the self-serving Blairite management-speak performance-target culture of senior police officers as examples of "loony Left" (i'm serious!), "namby-pamby liberalism", etc. But this is exactly the tendency we need to counter, and will only ever counter by engaging with police workers. This sort of Far Right interpretation of society is of course bullshit, and will only go so far to provide an adequate explanation of the world in the mind of your average polie officer. A Far Left analysis does (i've seen it!) carry a lot more weight with the more discerning of them, and this is what we push for.
Ideally we should be working towards a situation (very far off at this stage, admittedly) where the average police officer sees himself as somebody who should be pursuing a role of public protection (we will of course still need A police force after the Revolution), but who is actually being exploited by the rich into existing as a sort of personal protection service.
"As for talking to cops. i just don't do it, ever, if I can help it. I think it can be really dangerous on demos to talk to the cops, they often try and get info out of you and lull you into a false sense of security that they are human beings, just before they turn around and belt you."
I see what you mean. But that's their working environment, if you know what i mean. They know their bosses and their fellow workers are watching, and there is an expectation that THEY shouldn't fraternise, should act tough, etc. A more fruitful line for the Left to pursue might well be talking to them off-duty (family, friends, friends-of-friends, etc), or for example in informal work situations if you happen to be a civilian working for the police etc.
Cloddissimus:
"Have the SWPer's been out to the picket lines to try and win the prison guards to Islam?"
They said a comrade from 'Worker's Hamster' had been round to get them to accept David Icke's theory, which they found eminently more reasonable than dialectics.
Shocking eh?
The army is different from the police. Workers join the army, by and large, 'to defend the country from tyranny'. And yes they can have and have, pretty reactionary ideas, but this is different from the police. The police's job is to keep the working class in line. In other words the army is directed at the external enemy, al Quada etc whereas the police are directed at the internal enemy, the working class. As individuals they were part of the class but as police they are now apart from it.
This explains why the police defend the BNP. Their attitude to the nazis is that their ‘heart is in the right place’, its just that they go that bit too far. When David Copeland went around blowing up and killing black and gay Londoners, the police defended themselves as saying he wasn’t on their radar because he didn’t pose a threat to the state. The police attitude to the left, however, is that we're all beyond the pale because we want to destroy society, by getting rid of the monarchy, the family, private property etc.
In any revolution the police are the last to fall. In 1980 in Poland the one force that stood by the state was the riot police. The army is much more open to be won over. Any use of the army in a domestic situation is fraught with dangers for the ruling class – ‘we didn’t join to break strikes’. The soldiers may be facing their family on the picket line. The police are hardened by encountering working class hostility in all sorts of situations on a daily basis - soldiers do not.
Fantastic to watch the news last night and be told that the government is keeping its fingers crossed about the possibility of class struggle over pay. You could watch the bureacrats deciding to use the governments discomfort over the Prison Officers to drop hints about possible industrial action. One can imagine the impact if the Prison Officers do breach the governments policies on public sector pay. If they get it why should'nt we? If they got good results from breaking the law why should'nt we?
Anybody who can't see this, and gets sidetracked into long discussions about the reactionary role of Prison Officers has simply lost the plot. In any workplace the key discussion won't be the precise relationship between Prison Officers and the State but the precise relationship between their pay and our pay.
I despair of sectarians sometimes.
The POA have acted in solidarity with other unions in recent years. They have a very close association with the Fire Brigades Union. There has been an internal battle in the POA over the last 10 years.
Cutting through the nuances - the core leadership around Colin Moses and Brian Caton have attempted to steer the union in a broadly social democratic direction. They have come up against the very worst aspects - the POA at Wormwood Scrubs and Feltham some years ago spring to mind.
None of this means that the sociological position of screws has changed or their role as a part of the repressive state aparatus. Nor does it mean that their day to day work no longer leads to them being more susceptible than average to the most bigoted ideologies.
What is does mean is that under the impact of the neo-liberal offensive - directly on the prison service and indirectly through the victims of contemporary capitalism who are hurled behind bars in increasing numbers - there is greater scope for the POA identifying the right targets and encouraging its members to do so.
For example, the policy of the leaders of the union was and may still be against buiding more prisons and for greater psychiatric, medical and social work resources in those that we already have. It was also publicly to say that this government and successive governments were using prisons as a dumping ground for the problems created by a society that was being ripped apart by 30 years of attacks on the welfare state.
I am not, of course, claiming that all prison officers share that approach. But some do.
It is crucial to be acquainted with salient facts in estimating a concrete situation.
From what I know of Greece Anticapitalista is right about the response there. But the actual recent history of the POA is very different from the Greek prison officers.
And above all there is the actual situation in Britain. We have had many years of kowtowing to the anti-union laws. There have been important illegal strikes by the postal workers, which three and four years ago forced their way into national news. But that's about it.
Two days ago millions of people saw on the news a local union official say at a mass meeting that his union's response to a High Court injunction was, "Tell 'em to shove it up their arse, we are staying out."
It is that which needs to be generalised and supported.
It is vitally important that the issue over which they walked out was pay - which they share with the rest of the public sector - not, say, defending a screw who had been disciplined for beating up a prisoner.
An indication of how the establishment understands what was central and what was secondary in this situation is the editorial line of every newspaper. They all said that whatever sympathy the prison officers might deserve, wildcat strike action must be condemned (the liberal press) or punished and prosectued (the right wing).
The second paragraph of the Sun's editorial wept crocdile tears for the prisoner who was found dead in his cell two hours into the walkout (incidentally, the prison service have still not claimed that the death was a a consequence of the walkout).
Now, when the Sun wraps itself in prisoners' rights in order to deal with the great enemy of wildcat strike action and the danger of this example spreading those of us who want to see working class resistance should take note.
Incidentally, two high profile victims of miscarriages of justice I spoke to said that while they don't have "much time for prison officers", they have less time for this government and its policies and it was a good thing that the POA walked out.
Actually, the police line on Copeland was even more partisan and sickening. They announced very early on that he was 'acting alone'. This very neatly isolated him from politics and implied to the listening public that he was some kind of nutter, so we don't need to take the clear political intent of his acts as being political.
Talking to a policeman during demonstrations has its pros and cons. But from my point of view, I see more pros than cons. For a start, there is no information they will get from me cos I tell them why I am demonstrating. I tend to wear self-explanatory T-shirts. A low ranking policeman (don't know what their stripes mean) referred me to an inspector when me and my comrades wanted to leave the climate demo and go home. The inspector took a look at my T shirt and said 'You Globalize Resistance are going no where.' My bargain with him totally failed. When my comrades thought the police were going to round us up and kick the hell out of us, one cde went and negotiated with an office lower than the inspector. I've never seen such quick exit from a demo, when he had allowed us to leave with a comment "If all of you are as smart as you are - you can go."
I also agree with those who argue that we need to discuss the class issues with policemen when-ever an opportunity arises. However, going to support them when they are demonstrating against the government, moreso for more money or better working conditions is another story. Why should I fatten the pockets of my enemies at my own expense? For it is the taxpayer's money that pays their wages.
The future of strike-breaking:
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http://www.modernindustrialservices.com/
(No, it's not satire.)
If all of you are as smart as you are - you can go."
Sorry is that supposed to be a nice story? I prefer the police on strike then at work.
A juxtaposition of comments ...
From the Guardian via ANiN: “Television images showed senator Alejandro Navarro, of President Michelle Bachelet's Socialist party, bleeding from the back of his head after apparently being clubbed by a police officer. The deputy interior minister, Felipe Harboe, said the incident would be investigated. Mr Navarro, who was treated in hospital, supported the protest.”
From deformed worker: “I see what you mean. But that's their working environment, if you know what i mean. They know their bosses and their fellow workers are watching, and there is an expectation that THEY shouldn't fraternise, should act tough, etc. A more fruitful line for the Left to pursue might well be talking to them off-duty (family, friends, friends-of-friends, etc), or for example in informal work situations if you happen to be a civilian working for the police etc.”
The world of La La presents deformed worker’s one act fantasy play entitled, “Love the Cop that Oppresses and Clubs You”.
The scene opens with the door bell ringing at senator Navarro’s home.
Senator Navarro, with his head wrapped in bandages that are stained with fresh blood that is still exuding from his swelling brain, an injury that will probably lower his IQ for a while, if not permanently, opens the door. There stands officer Clubby Bashskull the poor misunderstood working man police officer that clubbed him at the demonstration.
Officer Clubby Bashskull, now off duty, is dressed in civvies' with a box of donuts under his arm. He is still chewing the same piece of gum that he had in his mouth when he brutally clubbed senator Navaro on the head at the demonstration earlier in the day. Officer Bashskull also has a taser hanging around his neck as if it were a camera and pepper spray on his key chain. His eyes are darting around like those of a fox. Finally he smiles and speaks, “Hi Senator. I’m the working man misunderstood cop that brutally and mindlessly clubbed you at that fucking demonstration today. Remember me?”
Senator Navarro, with a dazed and perplexed look of deep pain, suddenly experiences a flashback. His swelled brain, unable to process this sudden flood of deeply uncomfortable information, sends a stream of chaotic nerve impulses throughout his over stressed body and he falls to the floor, stone dead .
Officer Clubby Bashskull opens the box of donuts and pulls out a big fat Jelly donut and bites into it. Jelly squishes to the sides of his mouth and he burps. Wiping the jelly from his mouth with the back of his hand and sleeve he says, “I really like talking to the people I have oppressed when I am on my off duty time. Its all love.”
FrankL
The prime minister doesn't see it like that, which is why the government staged the award in order to keep it below its pay limit. If that limit is breached by any group if threatens to open the floodgates. In addition, any concession to a union that has taken illegal action will be strongly attacked from the right and will send out the "wrong" message to workers and their unions.
Let's make this concrete shall we. What happens if the screws win a pay rise by defying the full range of anti-union laws that have shackled the British labour movement since Thatcher? Should Socialist Worker have a headline saying "State Lackeys Win Payrise: Booh, Hiss!"?
Here in Melbourne the local police union has talked about affiliating to the Trades Hall Council (left-dominated). They are also currently defending themselves against charges of bullying within the union laid by management and are engaged in defending corrupt cops against charges and demanding the usual range of Laura Norder powers etc, ...and...are waging a wages campaign and have talked about strike action.
I would think that the point is that, to the extent that they want to behave like workers and affiliate with the rest of the working class, we encourage it. We have no illusions about their role and ultimate allegiance. But there are contradictions which can be exploited. I found an oral history recording made in the late 1980s by an octogenarian sister from a family of policemen in Sydney while doing research about the 1917 NSW general strike. The old woman remembered her policeman brother opening the door to a country cousin and refusing him entry because he'd come to scab on the strike. The interviewer asked the woman if all the cops felt like that, and she answered: "Yes. They all hated the scabs."
I also found evidence that, when the wharfies (dockers/longshoreman) used terror to chase the scabs off the waterfront in 1919 that many cops turned a blind eye deliberately.
So, yes, the cops are what the cops are. Don't trust them. But, if they want to behave like workers, then encourage it.
Also, there is a subtle, but important difference with prison officers. Unlike cops, they are not routinely used to inflict violence on ordinary workers. They inflict violence on a category of persons called "prisoners" who are distinguishable from the inhabitants of the communities in which they live - at least in their eyes.
They are always going to be one of the more backwards and reactionary sections of the class in a whole series of ways. But, also, they have one of the most unpleasant jobs and this can make them extremely militant over wages and conditions.
Two memories are relevant here. One is a vignette in Trotsky's history of the the Russian Revolution about how at one point where, as a disciplined mass, the nco class of the Russian army converted to Bolshevism:
"Take control of your own lives you miserable bastards!!! No...Wait for it!!!"
The other is the stop work meetings of the public service union that I was a member of in Australia in the early 1980s. The I.S. had a number of members and our motions for action were always supported by the security guards employed by the Federal Government. They would sit in a row in the mass meetings with their uniforms on and with their caps in their laps and would vote with military uniformity for every motion us Trots proposed.
By the 1990s union amalgamation brought the prison officers within the same union. From what I understand of their traditions it meant that the union had a higher density of membership and a larger constituency for action over wages.
johng - 'If all are as smart as you - you can go.'How can that be a nice story you prat? Has a policeman ever said anything nice about someone wearing a T-shirt that says 'Unfuck the world.' He was just being sarcastic and patronising because we were begging him to let us go and I suppose saying that made him feel superior. As far as I know there is no nice or sincere policeman - they despise and hate us for demonstrating because it gives them work to do. However, when you think you are going to be clubbed to death by those policemen (only those who were at the climate demo know how brutal they were) you get your arse out of their way pretty quick. Thats why his sarcasm did not offend us coz he let us go.
"Take control of your own lives you miserable bastards!!! No...Wait for it!!!"
Makes I laff!
sorry florence misunderstanding. i couldn't understand the point of the story. you suggested there were more pros talking with cops then cons and then told the story.
Well, well - how times change; over a year ago I argued what was basically the line Tony (a guest poster no less) adopts here, and deformed worker, etc. Then I got the old: "police are pigs - you never talk to them" line - cf. johng here. When I persisted that, as with the military, they were human beings and capable of change and even revolutionary action (even if generally unlikely), I was told by lenin himself to "get off it Ted". I welcome the belated enlightenment more generally accepted here this time - but with some still obedient to their "traing" as someone here put it.
deformed worker: "Another point is, where do you draw the line? If you're not going to talk in principle to policemen, why not the rank and file of the army too? How ridiculous would that be, considering the number of progressive coups/revolutions have occurred thanks to the cooperation, if not the leadership, of members of the armed forces, in many cases idealistic young officers? Russia 1917, Portugal 1974, Libya 1969, Egypt 195(was it?)2 spring readily to mind."
Quite right.
Ted, I'm not a guest poster. I marked it as "guest post" because, as I stated in this comments box, I wrote it with someone else. I'm a regular blogger, commenter and moderator here, and have been for some time. Lazy, for sure. But the "guest" part is the unnamed person who prodded me into writing.
You're also doing that highly selective thing in claiming that you got a certain response last time you commented (although there's no record of it in the archive). Some people take that line, others don't. Very disingenuous to claim there's been some kind of change of view here.
Essentially, the debate here in this comments box (actually, an excellent example of socialists trying to thrash out issues that are real in the real world in real time) is the same debate that would happen all over again were the issue of police action to come to the fore.
This discussion has been one of the most useful I've had for ages, and has clarified a lot of things for me. You're just wrong to try to score some kind of point from it though, and it's a shame that so many people feel the best way of engaging with the left is to first of all claim that they are so much better than us.
Tony,
I completely agree with you (and others) about how useful this discussion has been.
How revolutionaries active in the class struggle have to deal with concrete situations and not just follow some "Marxist/Leninist" blueprint is really the crux of this discussion.
Here's another example from Greece.
The slogan I mentioned earlier that says:
"Send the MAT (riot police) to put out the fires and not attack demonstarators"
can easily be changed in Greek (by using the passive form of the verb 'put out' in Greek, rather than its active form) to mean:
"Send the MAT (riot police) to be wiped out by the fires and not (send them) to attack demonstrators"
This slogan was also popular particularly with occupying university students that had been on the receiving end of the Police violence for the last year and a half.
If it is any help, Tony, I began this discussion with a knee-jerk ultra-left one-liner, but your reply and those of others have helped change my mind.
So, I for one have found it just as enlightening as you!
I think it's quite natural to take some pleasure in seeing one's point of view justified by some obviously intelligent, thoughtful comments.
I'm sorry you can't find the relevant exchange in the archive; I distinctly recall it and that I don't think that there was ANY support for the: It's Ok to talk to the police line - I was putting forward.
Your assumption about my politics is wrong; I regard myself as part of the left (let's leave aside arguments about who is TRULY left for the moment). I am not claiming that I am better the left in general, just that my views about this issue are better than the "police are pigs - never talk to them" line that I got then.
There was NOT a serious debate then with a range of points of view as this time. So, as I said, I welcome not just a "balanced" debate, but one in which the balance of opinion is dramatically different - however much you would like to believe it was as civilised on that previous occasion.
Well Ted the police ARE pigs. There is no disagreement about that. If you read the posts carefully, the discussion is not whether they are pigs or not, but about how to relate to them and stop them being pigs.
BTW Ted can you give one example of how the police (not army) have played a progressive role in society?
Just like to add my own voice to those saying how enlightening and informative this discussion as been. It's extremely encouraging to see impassioned and articulate views coming from both sides of the debate. It's also instructive to see it as a good example of how thesis clashes with antithesis to produce a dialectical synthesis (sorry Rosa!): we all come out of the other end of the debate a little bit wiser and with better-articulated views than before.
Just to respond to Duncan B's comments above along the lines of the police being beyond the pale in terms of whether we should engage with them, whereas soldiers aren't:
I'm afraid i don't agree with this at all. Think about it. Soldiers generally have to do FAR more unspeakable things in the course of their employment than the police do. Soldiers have to shoot foreign people, for example. Shooting foreigners is much worse than breaking strikes in the UK! I'm not saying we shouldn't engage with soldiers, by the way. I'm just saying that if you agree that we should be ready to engage with soldiers (as i do), then a fortiori, you should also agree that we should be ready to engage with policemen.
If we accept the police are scabs then the question is how do we deal with scabs?
Obviously we would be glad that they come over to our side, bearing in mind there are differing levels of scabs. There are those who are effectively black mailed by the bosses into not striking. These people are open to argument, well at least at first. However, there are others who gladly break the picket lines and side with the boss. I would say that the police are in the latter group, and are beyond redemption. They should be shunned and treated with the contempt they deserve.
Another reason for not talking to the police is that they are never off duty. In other words even the nice community cop is always gleaning intelligence to create a picture of the community they patrol. So, when the riot police turn up they know the score about the housing scheme they are invading, about the community activists they are facing etc The same applies when on a demo, any information that a constable obtained bout the demo will be fed back to the organisation. That is his/her job, to find out about what’s going on the ‘other side’.
You got to remember, at the end of the day, the police are not individuals, they are part of an organisation that has a well defined role in society, that of keeping the working class in line. When you talk to a policeman/woman, off or on duty, you are actually dealing with the police force.
So no. Don’t talk to the filth.
Leaving aside for the moment any example set or not by the Soviet Union, would there be police--or prison guards--as we understand them in a cooperative proletarian state? Have the police ever switched sides in a revolutionary situation (in a way that does not reveal the revolutionary situation to be just a another transfer of power from statist repressive force to statist repressive force)? Or maybe does the transferance of police power denote failure to actually overthrow the social basis of the state? What is the relationship between the current law enforcement institutions and future post-revolution ones? Are the Sparts--since they have been brought up--wrong that the police--and not the army--are irrevocably the armed instrument of capitalist state power and repression?
I still come up with a great deal of concern about investing any support in a police "labor" action. It seems dangerous to me.
I did. The police played a positive role in the collapse of the neoliberal regime in Bolivia.
I removed the "guest post" bit cos it was confusing too many people.
johng - Apology accepted - friends hey! I always believe that misundertandings are easily avoided if one clarifies a point made by someone-else if they are not sure of the meaning! That is what I try and do and subsequently i rarely fire empty bullets!
Duncan B,
"However, there are others who gladly break the picket lines and side with the boss. I would say that the police are in the latter group, and are beyond redemption."
Yes but the crucial point is that the police by and large don't SEE themselves in this role. Since they generally have a petty-bourgeois worldview, they identify with the "honest hardworking employer" class rather than the "rabble-rousing trouble-making lazy employee" class. Thus they don't see the act of scabbing as an act of betrayal at all. On the contrary, they see the act of STRIKING as the act of betrayal - of the "hardworking" employers, of the stability of the national economy, of the interests of "public order", etc, etc.
We know, of course, that this worldview is bullshit, but should we really be all that surprised that people hold it? It's spouting out at them from their telescreens and newspapers every minute of every day. It's bourgeois ideology of course, and it's not just the police that are taken in by it. Chat to any suburban housewife and she will spout some form of it at you.
Does this all mean that policemen or any other of these aspirational Middle Englanders are "beyond redemption", as you say? Of course not!! Since these people are in reality just a slightly better of section of the working class, they too are feeling the effects of the neoliberal attacks on jobs just as much as blue collar workers. Hence a Far Left analysis is bound to finally strike a chord with this lower middle class as they face repossession, unemployment, spiralling uni tuition fees for their kids, etc, etc, etc. Sooner or later, with our help, they - including those working for the police - will come round to the frankly bleedin' obvious fact that they have FAR more in common with the "lower class" than they ever do with the rich.
This discussion for me has brought home the point that it is not a class struggle so much as it is a morality struggle. The problem with rigidly following, “some "Marxist/Leninist" blueprint”, as anticapitalista says, IS really the crux of this discussion.
Supporting ‘workers’ that oppress you and maintain the power of the state in the expedient hope that the workers class will thereby be strengthened is folly.
Where do you draw the line?
The concrete reality is that the workers class in every occupation has been co-opted by the rich imperialist elite. Where do you draw the line? That IS the relevant question. Which jobs are most moral and which least moral? Do the most immoral, such as cops and military, deserve public shunning and humiliation? I say yes! Why? Because those occupations are most important to the rich imperialist elite in maintaining their oppressive power and they are the most repulsive in terms of their immorality. Obediently and mindlessly bashing another human beings skull with a hard wood stick is unforgivably immoral, regardless of how idealistic and starry eyed about a scam ‘Rule of Law’ the skull bashing perpetrator is.
What of the worker in a factory who makes bombs as opposed to a worker who builds housing? Which occupation is most moral and most beneficial to all?
Examining these lines, and drawing these lines, will quickly make one realize that socialist fairness will never be achieved by simply, and sometimes expediently or blindly, supporting the ‘worker’. Drawing the lines will also make one realize that what is most needed, what is most important, is control over the process of determining what will be produced. The rich imperialist elite, through the corporate apparatus, presently calls the shots. Shunning and refusing to work in the most immoral occupations that they set out will not only emphasize the class divide -- rich and poor, have and have not -- it will also serve to emphasize the immorality and poor use value of resources that go into the least moral products. Do we really need thousands and thousands of A bombs and H bombs scattered about?
So ... Socialism at its core is about fairness and equality, and not just all about the worker’s struggle. Like software, the Marxist/Leninist" blueprint is in need of an upgrade. That upgrade should emphasize morality and the direction of humanity as a whole and de-emphasize the stereotypical hat in hand, “Oh please hire me boss!”, worker. Fuck immoral jobs! Up with moral opportunity! Up with the human spirit!
Now for the real blasphemy, a name change suggestion ...
Out with the old school workers crap -- ‘Socialist Workers Party’ -- and in with the ‘Socialist Morality Movement’.
Cops suck! They are immoral scum!
If you make bombs for a living you might want to consider an occupation change.
And yes, we are all one, more so today then ever before ...
and then leave the force and become 'proper' workers.
How can you be a revolutionary or even left-wing reformist and in the police force?
This from the hot-bed of capitalism
http://www.thestandard.com.hk/ne...9365&
con_type=1
It's a good idea for the left to keep the prison guards pretty much on side since after the revolution, there'll be a lot of c*nts needing to be securely kept under lock, stock and key.
Just like Rosa and Tony I'm a 100% enlightened by this debate. I had a cousin (he was like a brother to me) who was a locally feared policeman in the Smith regime.He had an imposing persona and that made people fear him. Yet to me he was my gentle giant and i loved him to bits in uniform and in civics. When the freedom fighters escalated the war against Smith there was a known family secret of the number of ZIPRA freedom fighters he saved using his inside police knowledge. One lesson which was our secret that he taught me when i finished my 'O' levels was 'Do not fight for a government that oppresses your people.'
One of my neighbours in the UK was my friend whilst he was a lorry driver. I helped him with his Psychology lessons he needed to join the police. Politically and intellectually he was one of the thickest people i ever befriended. Before he joined the police, there was no 'black and white' in our vocabulary. Six months of policing in London his language changed to 'my day would have been great if it was not for those black/paki idiots.' Intellectually, he did not seem to acknowledge that as a black person I would be offended by those statements.
All i am trying to say here is, love or hate policemen, we have to live with them. They are brutal when dealing with those they regard as the enemy. But we know that those they regard as their enemy are not their enemy per se, but the enemy of the state. This neighbour I am talking about is just at the bottom end of the working class, barely making ends meet.
It is for this reason that somehow i do not go along the i on the ball patriot/extreme/anarchist left who do not want revolutionaries talking to policemen. Education is what most of these low ranking police officers lack. Given the fact that they suffer economically as ordinary working class people, i will offer myself to educate them without compromising my revolutionary principles. On the same note, I'll keep my eyes wide open at demonstrations to get the hell out of their way when they become robots that they are when they follow commands. Victory will ultimately be ours if we are not sectarian.
Anticap
I know where you are coming from. But putting it so definitively invites people to mention Emil Eichhorn, for example.
In fact (and sheepishly), over here in France me and my wife have got to know an English rozzer who comes over to stay up the road every time he's got some hols. And he gets lots of holidays! People moan about teachers getting lots but this guy spends more time in the Charente than Segolene Royal. But I digress. Politically he's liberal enough. Hie wife is a sceptical influence on him, he's in two minds about the Iraq war (ok a no brainer for most of us but...) and he's got two lovely kids. He isn't a racist but still would cosh my head in if ordered to on some demo or other even though we've broken bread together and shared a lot of meals and beers. Morale - I still don't know about this whole question for sure, but the political arguments we had with them changed his mind on a few things. Who knows - maybe they're not all bastards. I'll have to get these tatoos washed off my knuckles perhaps.
I must confess to having been quite polite to the policeman who rescued me when my car broke down in the fast lane of the M1.
I also chatted in a desultory fashion to the two police (and two bailiffs) who kept me trapped outside my front door (which I refused to open) for three hours when they wanted to seize my property for non-payment of the poll tax. It would have been pretty boring if I'd refused to open my mouth.
I have one question for those who denounce the police as a reactionary mass and advocate no contact. How do they envisage a revolutionary situation? If all cops are irredeemably reactionary, do they think we will take them on in an armed confrontation and defeat them? That seems to me intrinsically implausible. The generation who did National Service are now pensioners with failing eyesight. Very few younger people (in Britain certainly) can fire a gun.(I wonder how many of those posting here have weapons skills). The state machine is inevitably better armed then we are, so our only hope is that in a profound social crisis the police will not be immune from the pressures affecting everyone else and the state apparatus will begin to fragment.
This doesn't necessarily mean a straight progressive/reactionary split. I recall being told that in Italy in 1969 police were not allowed to use indiscriminate violence against demonstrating students, so they went on strike in protest and marched off chanting "Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh". Very contradictory, but it weakened the authorities.
And if, in a revolutionary crisis, sections of the police offer to come over to us, what do we do? Shoot them?? That will ensure that all the rest fight to the last drop of blood - and take a lot of us with them. Certainly regard them with suspicion, but at the same time we should obviously encourage any division or dissent in the ranks of the police.
One or two of you are concentrating on individuals here. While this is not unimportant, it's not the crucial issue here.
The class stuggle can force these groups en masse to change, as we are perhaps seeing with the prison officers.
And even if this is only temporary, it could drive a coach and horses through Thatcher's anti-union laws, and/or show other workers how to fght back.
Gin and Tonic, nice to see you are in a non-dialectical mood right now.
Indeed, you sound eminently reasonable becasuse of that.
Except perhaps for this:
"This doesn't necessarily mean a straight progressive/reactionary split. I recall being told that in Italy in 1969 police were not allowed to use indiscriminate violence against demonstrating students, so they went on strike in protest and marched off chanting "Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh". Very contradictory, but it weakened the authorities."
As I asked you before: what *precisely* is the 'contradiction' here?
Objective-subjective, folks. And both conditions prevail inside everyone of us. Often in contradiction with each other. It's why life's fun and horrible.
off topic - but has anyone else any thoughts on the Spiked site? It gets on my nerves but I can't put a finger on why...
Steve, I suppose you know it's run by ex-RCP-ers, and Furedi-groupies?
That's enough to screw with any site.
IOBP:
"Do the most immoral, such as cops and military, deserve public shunning and humiliation? I say yes!"
Ok, so you would have shunned out-of-hand those working for the Imperial Russian Army prior to 1917?
Mike:
"Objective-subjective, folks. And both conditions prevail inside everyone of us. Often in contradiction with each other. It's why life's fun and horrible."
Nice example of a priori super-psychology there, comrade.
But, where is the data to substantiate such an impressively bold universal thesis?
But even if it were correct, why is that a contradiction?
"Who knows - maybe they're not all bastards."
No, they're not. SOME of them are of course, make no mistake. But, by and large, they're just ill-informed people forced to sell their labour to rich twats (not that they see their own situation in these terms, of course). In that respect, they're no different from most civilian workers. That's why we need to be ready to engage with ALL workers - including policemen.
"off topic - but has anyone else any thoughts on the Spiked site? It gets on my nerves but I can't put a finger on why..."
It's the pseudo-oppositionalism of "Spiked!" that annoys me. They hate the Government and they criticise the British State, and so at first you think they are talking sense. Then they start saying that the big problem with the State is that it interferes too much with "progress" and "technological innovation" (by which they mean spoiling the environment, reckless profiteering, etc). Then you start to figure out where they must be getting all their money from: i.e. the oil lobby, the car industry, etc.
Essentially they are Right Libertarians. Who was it who said that a [Right] Libertarian is just a [US] Republican who takes drugs?
Just to offer another angle on the copper debate, from a position of being in agreement with Tony's basic approach.
I work as a firefighter here in Australia, and spend far more time than i'd like working alongside coppers (particularly at traffic accidents). Ontop of that there are significant numbers of ex-cops inside the fire brigades.
Now i accept, as i'm sure most of you do, that the main function for the police is to act as a body of armed men etc etc to prop up class rule as we know it. But over the years of rubbing shoulders with police in fairly horrible work environments (dead or dying people) it became very clear to me that the subjective understanding cops have of their role is a world away from why the state bothers to fund and train them. I am yet to meet a rank and file cop or ex cop who thinks their role is to protect the ruling class.
No surprises here. You'd have to be a fairly stupid sociopath to want to spend your working day keeping the working class in line for a basic public sector wage. What makes more sense is to see yourself as a protector. A tough love kind of social worker. There was an ex-copper Labor politician here called Bill Hayden you said something along these lines - that becoming a copper was what working class boys did instead of becoming a social worker.
This understanding of their role is not simply a fantasy that makes their working day easier - it also makes sense for most of the average coppers daily duties. The majority of their time is not spent busting picket lines. It's dealing with sad and ordinary people in fairly normal day to day life.
This not only lets cops get through their working day with some sense of achievment, it also is an important part of the ideological glue that keeps things together - seeing the cops as being there to somehow help people smooths over so much of the class division that is day to day life. It's not about rich and poor, it's about good people and bad people.
I think it is important for revolutionaries to understand this, because it makes it a little easier to understand some of the things cops do. But it is absolutely vital to understand that the subjective identity police adopt is as weak as piss when it comes up against their actual job. They do as they're told or they're no longer police. As has already been posted here, the last police strike in Australia was '23 in Melbourne. While the strikers demands were more or less won, the ring leaders were all gaoled or sacked.
What this means is to always expect the worst from police, but understand that they have a conflicted role which can sometimes be exploited. Consequently, there are times that they can act in a way aids and abets our side in the struggle, inspite of their objective role.
Jim
Jim,
Absolutely.
Surely one has to judge each case, if the RUC had gone on strike in the 1980s and said their job was being hampered by govt policy or even that they wanted more danger money and bigger guns should they have been supported?
If the Prison Officers in the H Blocks had struck against the appalling conditions they worked in during the dirty protest should we have supported them?
More off topic, but not if your a dialectical materialist in which case it may or may not be.
Mike:
"Objective-subjective, folks. And both conditions prevail inside everyone of us. Often in contradiction with each other. It's why life's fun and horrible."
Nice example of a priori super-psychology there, comrade.
But, where is the data to substantiate such an impressively bold universal thesis?
But even if it were correct, why is that a contradiction?
Rosa Lichtenstein | Homepage | 2 Sep, 01:04 |
Rosa Can you explain this to the philosophically and educationally challenged like miself?
"Nice example of a priori super-psychology there, comrade"
What does all this mean?
Should Michael be hauled before the peoples committee for re-educating the intelligentsia for saying it?
Dialectics is very odd. I remember Duncan Hallas doing a meeting and straying onto the topic of the dialectic and saying who understands dialects? Ha ha ha, Whatever they are it means that.....and sliding off into something more concrete.
Are you arguing against the ideas of dialectics Rosa ?
If so can we have a column that explains it, simply? Lenin?
How about Bhaskars view of dialectics which seems to be valued in some quarters?
ANiN:
"What does all this mean?"
It refers to any attempt to derive universal empirical theses (in this case apertaining to psychology) solely from a few words, or from a very superficial 'thought-experiment'.
"Should Michael be hauled before the peoples committee for re-educating the intelligentsia for saying it?"
No, a public challenge here will suffice. We'll get to the other if necessary, though.
"Are you arguing against the ideas of dialectics Rosa ?"
I am notorious for doing so -- check out my site.
"If so can we have a column that explains it, simply?"
What? The dialectic, or my devastating criticisms of it?
Both you can find summarised here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ros...ummies%
2001.htm
And my main objections (in slightly more detail) here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ros...Oppose%
20DM.htm
The same, but in mind-bogglingly extensive detail, here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/
"How about Bhaskars view of dialectics which seems to be valued in some quarters?"
Wall-to-wall non-sense, interspersed with hopless confusion --, that is, where any sense can be made of it.
I should get off the fence on that one, I think...
By the way, the moderators have run-together my last but one comment, which began with:
"Mike:
"Objective-subjective, folks. And both conditions prevail inside everyone of us. Often in contradiction with each other. It's why life's fun and horrible."
"Nice example of a priori super-psychology there, comrade..."
With one I did not post; i.e., the one beginning:
"Surely one has to judge each case...".
Don't know who wrote that, but it certainly wasn't me!
Unless, of course, it was all part of ANiN's post???
Mike you are right - thank you! This means when a person is in a subjective mind, policeman or not - its best not to engage with that person in any debate he/she may not agree with. When they are in an object mind, i engage in a political constructive debate with anyone given the fact that my work exposes me to people from all profession and walks of life. We can all demonise a certain group of people - police being the nastiest in terms of revolutionary socialists. But does that make someone who spies and betrays innocent people for selfish reasons right? Most falsely imprisoned political prisoners all over the world are not betrayed by policeman! We have all got our objective and subjective sides to us. The question is, which one is dominent? Policemen like us in their individual communities are just ordinary folks who do not benefit from the state apart from those in higher ranks. I thus believe, dialectics or not, statistics or not a forward thinking revolutionary has to engage with all working class people when they is a potential for an object debate!
Hi Rosa. I think ANiN was quoting you, but it looks like both comments were posted together. Your post, at 01.04, is up there.
I think the only comments I ever edit are ones containing the word "islamofascist"...
Yes, as you can see, I cottoned onto that fact earlier.
Thanks anyway, Tony.
So the police are now demanding the right to strike. This is a concrete situation. I say, if they go on a wildcat strike, in this situation (where it is part of a more general resistance against Brown's public sector pay freeze), a revolutionary socialist should support them.
I strongly disagree with arguments based on "morality", iotbp. Ironically, as described above, the moral, vs. the immoral is precisely the basic contradiction (hah!) that informs the subjective world view of the policeman.
The basic contradiction for the revolutionary socialist is labor vs. capital, not some notion of good vs. evil.
Christian, but why is any of this a 'contradiction'?
I have been asking this of dialecticians for over 25 years, and have read practically everything (in English) that has ever been written of this 'theory', and have still to be given a satisfactory answer (or even one remotely so).
Can't argue with the other things you say, however.
Anticap
I know where you are coming from. But putting it so definitively invites people to mention Emil Eichhorn, for example.
Kevin
But Emil Eichhorn was (s)elected during the revolutionary wave in Germany in opposition to the SPD reformists. He wasn't really head of the police, but head of the workers militia.
In pre-revolutionary times ie now, any cop that does somehow realise the role of the police in society has very little choice but to leave. I'm sure this is happening. In fact a cousin of mine left the force in the 80's as he couldn't put up with the racism any longer.
Again the fact that the police federation is demanding the right to strike is positive for us revolutionaries because it weakens the government and we should argue that all workers should have the right to organise into unions, all have the right to srtike and that all workers sgould fight to smash the pay freeze. This does not mean we have to say we "support" the police strikes (if it happens)
Rosa can you explain what is meant by a contradiction?
JohnG:
"Rosa can you explain what is meant by a contradiction?"
In its simplest form: the conjunction of a proposition with its negation.
A more complex example would be this:
~[(P→Q)v(P→R)↔(P→(QvR))];
or perhaps:
~[~(Ex)(Fx&~Gx)↔(x)(Fx→Gx)]
[In the above, "E" is the existential quantifier; "↔" is a biconditional sign; "(x)" is the universal quantifier; "&" stands for "and"; "v" is the inclusive "or"; "~" stands for negation; "→" is the conditional sign; "P", "Q", and "R" are propositional variables; "F" and "G" are one-place, first-level predicate letters; and "x" is a second-level predicate-binding variable.]
Of course, you would know all this if you bothered to educate yourself.
The above by the way is a snippett from Essay Five, at my site:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ros...l/page%
2005.htm
Christian:
"The basic contradiction for the revolutionary socialist is labor vs. capital, not some notion of good vs. evil."
Yes, I have seen the movie; but why is this a contradiction?
"The conjunction of a proposition with its negation"
This sounds a bit circular to me. In ordinary language isn't this a bit like saying "a contradiction is a statement which is contradictory"?
I can contradict someones statements. Can I also have contrary interests to yours? could it reasonably be said that someones behaviour was contradictory? Or that someone's interests were contradictory (in relationship perhaps to some goal they had)? Or that my interests contradicted yours? Certainly some data might appear contradictory in relationship to some enquiry we have about it.
Does this not suggest that the notion of a contradiction is not exhausted by what might go on inside a proposition? In ordinary usage?
Perhaps Marxists have used the term contradiction to describe the relationship between labour and capital because that relationship simply in terms of an opposition does not adequately capture the relationship.
So if Capitalism as a system both requires labour and at the same time is threatened by it, and this combination of dependency and threat is not contingent but built into the relationship itself, does not the idea of this relationship being a contradictory one just seem a fairly straightfoward way of talking about it?
Perhaps someone is in the midst of an unhappy love affair and says "I love him but I also hate him". Its not just the statement but the feeling which is a contradiction surely? If Freud is held to describe the human individual not as a unified subject but a bundle of contradictory drives and desires, might one not imagine contradictory drives (if not desires) in a particular social system?
Can I not have contradictory emotions about a subject, situation or person (I know I do about all sorts of things!).
I'm just very puzzled about what it means to restrict the meaning of the term contradiction to a rule of formal logic. Its always been the least compelling of your arguments it seems to me. I don't understand the linguistic scandal that is supposed to be involved in talking about the human subject as a 'bundle of contradictory drives and desires' or talking about the capitalist system as encompassing contradictory tendencies (how the TRPF is held to operate inside a concrete capitalist social formation for example).
I don't see how there can be anything ipso facto absurd or meaningless about such statements to anyone familiar with ordinary language.
"He's a bundle of contradictions that lad".
Or to relate it to this discussion. Some people might be thought to have a contradictory class location. Are they workers or are they screws? Well the answer is both isn't it. And the two roles, both integral to the job pull them in different directions.
Rosa, if you insist on narrowing the meaning of the word "contradiction" to the one you described from formal logic, and call what everyone else calls "contradiction", "opposing forces" or something, be my guest. I honestly don't care what you call it, but I'll keep using language the way most participants in the conversation understand it. And, if I may say so, the way Hegel (eg, the contradiction of "object" and "subject") and later Marx and so on employed it.
Playing "gotcha" here by claiming "but that's not a (logical) contradiction" isn't very enlightening, which was the reason for my somewhat childish "hah!". I apologize for that, the last thing I want to saddle this thread with is a fruitless debate on dialectic materialism.
JohnG: I refused months ago to deabte with you since you showed many times over you had serious problems understanding the word "relevance" (you even tried to discuss the logical objets in Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus' in a thread about voting irregularities in Tower Hamlets, and accused me of trying to stop you making a fool of yourself precisely in that way!), and you have a fondness for pontificatung about subjects you clearly know nothing about, such as logic, and much of Philosophy.
You require me to prove stuff all the time, but are singulalry inacapable of explaining, let alone defending, a single one of the whacko ideas you lifted from Hegel.
My opinion of you has not changed in the intervening months: you are still a monumental waste of time.
You will, however, be able to read my response to you at my site tomorrow, under the heading 'Brick Head Rides Again'.
The only way to deal with you is to treat you as unfairly as you argue.
Others, of course, I will debate with.
"Rosa, if you insist on narrowing the meaning of the word "contradiction" to the one you described from formal logic, and call what everyone else calls "contradiction", "opposing forces" or something, be my guest."
Then answer her question at least: what did YOU mean by 'contradiction'? Bearing in mind we are not mind readers.
... and I realize I sound like somewhat of a dick in that last comment. Please disregard it and read johng's instead.
Christian:
"Rosa, if you insist on narrowing the meaning of the word "contradiction" to the one you described from formal logic, and call what everyone else calls "contradiction", "opposing forces" or something, be my guest. I honestly don't care what you call it, but I'll keep using language the way most participants in the conversation understand it. And, if I may say so, the way Hegel (eg, the contradiction of "object" and "subject") and later Marx and so on employed it."
I do not wish to narrow anything, but, as I have said, over the last 25 years, I have been requesting of dialecticians a clear explanation of what they mean by this word (a term Hegel himself lifted from formal logic, but got the details wrong, and then compouded that error by confusing the resulting mess with the alleged negation of the Law of Identity).
You can read a summary of my argument here:
http://www.revleft.com/
index.php...showtopic=69128
To date, no one has been able to explain this obscure term-of-art, and neither have I seen a clear account in the hundreds of books and articles I have read on this (written by dialecticians).
Now, you can keep on repeating the use of this word, but you must not pretend that any of you mean any thing by it -- any more than Christians mean anything when they bang on about the Trinity (a notion, incidentally, that has the same origin in mystical Platoism as the 'dialectically-united' opposites you lot bang on about too).
In addition, I only raised this issue here because 'Grimm and Dim' alleged that it was my failure to grasp this execrable theory that led to the things I said about this strike.
It was then legitimate of me to ask him what he meant by the word 'contradiction' as he used it in the said criticism.
Of course, Tony, employing not one ounce of dialectics talked me around.
Which just goes to show that we do not need this 'theory' to argue our case.
And contradictions cannot be the same as opposing forces, since, if two forces oppsoe one another, the effects of of one or both are prevented from occuring.
There can thus be no 'dialectical' contradiction between things that do not exist.
And that is so *even* if you accept Hegel's shaky logic.
More details here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ros...age%
2008_02.htm
Red Eck, you will find it a waste of time asking MrG what one of these obscure entities is, just as you will soon see he has a very tenuous grasp of logic (if any at all).
I grew tired of asking him to explain a single dialectical notion two years ago. Hence, I just bait him now.
You will notice, though, that I even now answered him.
Don't hold your breath waiting for a clear response to your request, however (or one that goes beyond the usual banalities).
After 25 years if this stuff from comrades, one tends to get a little tetchy.
"It is clear from all this that the dialectic process involved in sense-certainty is nothing else than the mere history of its process – of its experience; and sense-certainty itself is nothing else than simply this history. The naïve consciousness, too, for that reason, is of itself always coming to this result, which is the real truth in this case, and is always having experience of it: but is always forgetting it again and beginning the process all over. It is therefore astonishing when, in defiance of this experience, it is announced as “universal experience” – nay, even as a philosophical doctrine, the outcome, in fact, of scepticism – that the reality or being of external things in the sense of “Thises”, particular sense objects, has absolute validity and truth for consciousness. One who makes such an assertion really does not know what he is saying, does not know that he is stating the opposite of what he wants to say."
In fact the summmary of part of my case against Hegel can be found here:
http://www.revleft.com/index.php...st&
p=1292364187
This is the best discussion I've ever read on this topic, or pretty much any Marxism topic for that matter. I hope what I'm about to ask doesn't make me sound like I've learned absolutely nothing from it (and please bear in mind I've only just recently become interested in Marxism) and that this doesn't sound really liberal, or plain reactionary, or both (but I realize it might). Though I've hardly ever felt so terrified and angry as when I've been threatened with violence and verbally abused by the police at demonstrations, on several unlucky occasions I've also had stuff (phone, bicycle, wallet) stolen from me - sometimes violently - and that felt pretty horrible, too (although a different kind of horrible...not anything like oppressed). I'd phoned the police on other occasions, but didn't on these because I felt weird about it - a vague feeling, from having watched them work, that it wouldn't help anyone if they got involved. But, obviously, part of that reluctance was down to my own selfishness - as in, I didn't think the police would help ME, either (ie to get my stuff back. why should they bother investigating such petty crimes?). Nevertheless, I would've liked to have had my stuff back, even if I didn't want to call the police.
So here's my question...
Is there any relationship between (A) how the revolutionary (not to say that my revolutionary credentials are anything besides missing, but I'm interested in changing that) should tactically use, or not use, the cops who are on strike and (B) how the revolutionary should use, or not use, the cops when he or she becomes a 'victim of (property) crime'? Someone above mentioned that most of what the police do isn't beating up revolutionaries, but rather dealing with the victims of capital. I completely agree with this, and that the reason the police typically, maybe even always, do a pretty bad job of this is that the role itself is flawed. But then, I think, someone else here (and it might be a bit of stretch for me to follow the typical-police-duties example with the following one) mentioned that we'll need some sort of police to keep violent reactionaries under lock and key. IOTBP says, if I've got it right, that, morally, the police are absolutely awful and that revolutionaries should shun them even when they're on strike. I want to agree with this, because I hate what they do in society, but I still want to change their minds and make them, ideally, want to leave police force, so i also want to agree with Tony. But I also feel uncertain about my own moral position because there's a side of me that wants to phone them up when my stuff gets stolen. Is the last feeling unrelated to the others? Does anyone else feel this way?
The difficulty with Rosa is that she simply becomes abusive when anyone challenges her ideas, and responds to not a single argument put to her. I would say that I have enough abuse and witchhunting from other people and one hardly expects it from people who imagine they're on the left.
I've given a number of examples of how the word 'contradiction' is used in ordinary language, and demonstrated that, in our language, we use the term about other things then contrary propositions within statements (even at the most simple level when someone asks 'are you contradicting me?' which is not a reference to a statement containing a contrary proposition).
But the metaphysician Rosa continues to use words in her own special way without explaining the relevence. And then, having based her argument on utterly obscure technical issues from formal logic, turns round and accuses other people of being 'philosophical'. Its like a very good Wittgensteinian joke.
The term 'contradiction' is obviously rather important in the context of this argument (a dialectical contradiction might be considered a necessary contradiction) because whenever anyone offers an example of a dialectical contradiction, Rosa responds by suggesting that its not a 'contradiction' (presumably its just a difference and not neccessary at all) the main argument being that contradiction simply means a statement containing a contrary proposition.
Therefore the capitalist mode of production can't be understood with dialectics, because dialectics rests on a faulty understanding of what a contradiction is.
And this somehow relates to mystical ideas developed by ruling classes through the ages. To which are counterposed Rosa's ideas developed by other ruling classes through the ages. Its really not very compelling.
One might add a little quote from Bernard Russell. Anything that can be put in a nutshell should probably stay there.
...In everyday language Rosa's argument rests on claiming that it is a mistake to talk about 'contradictions' in reality, as opposed to 'contradictions' in statements about it.
Hegel's great crime was notoriously to treat of contradictions as things that could exist outside of statements. Partly he was able to do so as he saw the unfolding of history as an idea and not a material process.
The real debate is whether its possible to seperate Hegel's general philosophical schemae from his notion of a contradiction in reality. There is a large literature on this which Rosa sadly ignores.
Instead Rosa proceeds like a medieval theologian ruling out 'action at a distance' as impossible on the basis of a philosophical theses (in this case the philosophical theses is that reality cannot have contradictions, only statements about it can). Attempts by medieval philosophers to rule out the possibility of the gravity were shown up as irrelevent by the progress of science. Rosa's arguments are hardly more compelling.
At no point does she do more then show that the use of the term 'contradiction' within the Hegelian and Marxist traditions is incompatible with Formal logic.
To which the answer can only be: so what? Surely the main question is whether this method illuminates reality. The answer is yes it does. What relevence Formal logicians debating what can and can't be said in a sentance have for people concerned with what can and can't happen in capitalism, is something which Rosa has never addressed.
Why should we be interested? Rosa here will claim that its important because of the failures of Marxism and make a series of assertions about these failures being connected to a belief in dialectics. These assertions are not very convincing or well argued, and sadly demonstrate that knowledge of formal logic does not neccessarily lead you to coherent arguments.
using mozzilla on a sky account based west london am unable to reach site from former bookmark or search result have come via cache, just thought i'd tell you, if hits are down or if you are unaware etc, will check back for advice if none no worries, this thread is shown as relating to latest post on cache, posted on 29th.
all the best
How long's that been going on for? What's happening when you try to visit via your bookmark?
(There haven't been any posts since the prison officers one)
”I've given a number of examples of how the word 'contradiction' is used in ordinary language, and demonstrated that, in our language, we use the term about other things then contrary propositions within statements (even at the most simple level when someone asks 'are you contradicting me?' which is not a reference to a statement containing a contrary proposition). “
Please could you now proceed to give an example of such a contradiction for this thread.
”But the metaphysician Rosa continues to use words in her own special way without explaining the relevence. And then, having based her argument on utterly obscure technical issues from formal logic, turns round and accuses other people of being 'philosophical'. Its like a very good Wittgensteinian joke.”
What is the basis of this allegation? When has she ever changed the meaning of a word to suit her ‘own special’ way?
”The term 'contradiction' is obviously rather important in the context of this argument (a dialectical contradiction might be considered a necessary contradiction) because whenever anyone offers an example of a dialectical contradiction, Rosa responds by suggesting that its not a 'contradiction' (presumably its just a difference and not neccessary at all) the main argument being that contradiction simply means a statement containing a contrary proposition.
Therefore the capitalist mode of production can't be understood with dialectics, because dialectics rests on a faulty understanding of what a contradiction is.”
Yes, I took her point to be that using words with ambiguous meaning fail to convey any meaning at all.
”And this somehow relates to mystical ideas developed by ruling classes through the ages. To which are counterposed Rosa's ideas developed by other ruling classes through the ages. Its really not very compelling.
One might add a little quote from Bernard Russell. Anything that can be put in a nutshell should probably stay there.”
Again, what is the basis of this allegation? You accuse her of propagating metaphysics without proof.
“...In everyday language Rosa's argument rests on claiming that it is a mistake to talk about 'contradictions' in reality, as opposed to 'contradictions' in statements about it.
Hegel's great crime was notoriously to treat of contradictions as things that could exist outside of statements. Partly he was able to do so as he saw the unfolding of history as an idea and not a material process.”
Yes, and dialectitians still do! What did Grim and Dim write earlier? Something about prison guards striking a ‘contradiction’? So then, are they striking or are they not? Or what did he mean by ‘contradiction’?
”The real debate is whether its possible to seperate Hegel's general philosophical schemae from his notion of a contradiction in reality. There is a large literature on this which Rosa sadly ignores.
Instead Rosa proceeds like a medieval theologian ruling out 'action at a distance' as impossible on the basis of a philosophical theses (in this case the philosophical theses is that reality cannot have contradictions, only statements about it can). Attempts by medieval philosophers to rule out the possibility of the gravity were shown up as irrelevent by the progress of science. Rosa's arguments are hardly more compelling.
At no point does she do more then show that the use of the term 'contradiction' within the Hegelian and Marxist traditions is incompatible with Formal logic.”
In other words, she shows that there is no logic with the use of the term ‘contradiction’ as used by dialectitians.
”To which the answer can only be: so what? Surely the main question is whether this method illuminates reality. The answer is yes it does. What relevence Formal logicians debating what can and can't be said in a sentance have for people concerned with what can and can't happen in capitalism, is something which Rosa has never addressed.”
Does it illuminate reality? You’ve yet to show how
”Why should we be interested? Rosa here will claim that its important because of the failures of Marxism and make a series of assertions about these failures being connected to a belief in dialectics. These assertions are not very convincing or well argued, and sadly demonstrate that knowledge of formal logic does not neccessarily lead you to coherent arguments.”
It is important, for if you want Marxism to be taken seriously then you cannot refer to mumbo-jumbo. Otherwise, anyone can easily write off Marxism as idealistic nonsense.
A good example of a contradiction might or might not be (I think that's called a tautology) the following, from some US Fed. drone,
"It is not the responsibility of the Federal Reserve - nor would it be appropriate - to protect lenders and investors from the consequences of their financial decisions," Bernanke said.
"But developments in financial markets can have broad economic effects felt by many outside the markets, and the Federal Reserve must take those effects into account when determining policy."
Was it Searle who said "there's a bit where you say it and a bit where you take it back." like trying to have your cake and eat it. The statement is somehow 'a reflection of reality' (o dear 101 philosophical faux pas I know) a reality where the conflict/contradiction between the two extra-linguistic economic forces in Bernanke's statement is played out. Yet it can also be 'reduced' to a propositional contradiction.
As for the rozzer issue - I proudly and firmly contradict myself. On demos in the past I've engaged in political discussion and on others shouted that they should go and get a proper job before ending up fighting them, deplored scenes of coppers with heads streaming blood from around the world yet laughed at Class War's "Injured Copper" feature and even during a suicidally rainy unemployed afternoon in Huddersfield, contemplated joining their ranks. I put it down to watching too much Frost and soon snapped out of it. Be good if they went on strike though. Who would they get to police their picket lines? Miners?
One very interesting problem in Rosa's account of human history is on the role of religion. Apparently one Babeuf turned up at Marxism and presented a related argument. He suggested that the argument of the anti-dialectic crowd was'nt simply philistine because whilst technical vocabularies were neccessary for questions of technique, and later theoretical languages about technique, and whilst this differed from ordinary language,
a) everything said in the technical or theoretical language could be translated back into everyday language (its a kind of shorthand?)
and b) it differed from philosophy which was 'religious', and religions were about small elites befuddling the masses and persuading them that they needed an 'elite' to do their thinking for them (hence this philosophical/religous language can't be translated back into ordinary language).
There are many difficulties here, but for a Marxist the most striking thing is the extraordinary ignorence of the historical role of religion in the development of techniques, theories of these techniques, and indeed scientific discoveries of many kinds, this being true since the beginning of human history.
Perhaps the funniest thing about all this is the huge strides that were made in the science of logic by medievel theologians whose work Rosa is otherwise familiar with. Without this work its unlikely that Rosa could construct the arguments she makes today.
All of this is closely related to problems often referred to as demarcation criteria (how do we distinguish between philosophy and science, a line which actually shifts through the course of history) and the closely related problem of the progress of scientific knowledge.
Science was bound up with religion for most of human history and it is only in the period leading up to and following the enlightenment that human knowledge progressed by strictly seperating these domains.
That this was progress can't be denied. But how do we explain developments (most of them in recorded history) which proceeded because of, rather then in spite of theological and religious beliefs?
I would suggest a bit of the old dialectical thought might come in handy here. Anyone confused by any of the above might try playing a quick game of Civilizations.
Its incredible to me that someone who proudly calls themselves a historical materialist can know so very little about actual human history. And that someone who denounces philosophy can substitute purely philosophical arguments for such knowledge. Stand up the real anti-philosphers. (Hegel, for all his idealist faults, was the first philosopher to suggest that progress of human ideas had to be understood historically. In that sense he was far in advance of Rosa and Bebeuf whose thought remains mired in the 17th century).
Hi tony it just says file not found, had same problem jsf and some other sites it first happened a couple of days ago but jsf now loads, glad to hear this is the current post. Afraid i am so tech-challenged that little further info is likely to be available from me. i wondered if there might be some site blocking going on, but sinse jsf has recouvered,i dont know why you and i am afraid to say xymphora, sorry, are still not available to me.
great post and very very good subsequent discussion, it has clarified a few points in my mind, if thats not invovling me in several contradictions.
Anon - that's how I feel about this discussion. There's really a lot to think about here.
OK, regarding the problems you're having with the site, it's 50-50 but it could be an issue with your computer or a problem with the internet. It might even be just limited to your own area.
ISPs like Sky use caches - when you visit a site, Sky will often not actually send you the actual site, it'll send you its cached version. I know that in my workplace, caching works badly and sometimes I have to refresh the page loads of times just to get the site to load properly.
I dunno what's happening with your connection - but do us a favour: If it keeps happening over the next few days, post again and we'll look into it more.
"using words with ambiguous meaning fail[s] to convey any meaning at all"
Which means (or does it?) we all have to shut up - and that includes Rosa and red eck. Because all words have "ambiguous meaning" - you don't have to be post-modern to realize that. Maybe you'd like to engage in the challenge and define for us what "ambiguous meaning" means, precisely.
Any reason for the lack of posts? Ther's a huge RMT strike about to kick off and I thought you guys would have something to say about that.
Red Eck.
You ask:
Please could you now proceed to give an example of such a contradiction for this thread.
"Human agents are bundles of contradictory drives and desires rather then unified subjects"
"Capitalists must compete under capitalism to make profits. In order to compete they must direct their investment towards plant, technology and machinary. This produces a tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Hence the role of competition in the health of profits is contradictory under capitalism".
"What is the basis of this allegation? When has she ever changed the meaning of a word to suit her ‘own special’ way?"
Every time she turns away from ordinary usage of the term 'contradictory' or 'contradiction' and insists that contradictions can only exist within statements and not, for example, between peoples interests, within data, within societies, or within the human psyche.
"Yes, I took her point to be that using words with ambiguous meaning fail to convey any meaning at all"
In what sense is the ordinary use of the term 'contradiction' 'ambiguous'?
"Again, what is the basis of this allegation? You accuse her of propagating metaphysics without proof"
Metaphysics is concerned with ontological statements. Rosa's beliefs that there cannot be contradictions in reality but only in statements is a metaphysical belief. As is incidently, logic (quite literally as it can't be proved with reference to physical phenomenan: the propositions of logic are the purest kind of metaphysical statements imaginable. Attempts to ground logic in anything but itself have always failed). It is indeed a 'contradiction' that Rosa's arguments against philosophy can only proceed by utilizing the purest kind of philosophy, a philosophy incidently, whose progress was greatly shaped by medieval theologians debating what an omnipotent God would look like. This does not at all mean that logic is nonsense or wrong. But it does mean that Rosa's argument is nonsensical and wrong.
"Yes, and dialectitians still do! What did Grim and Dim write earlier? Something about prison guards striking a ‘contradiction’? So then, are they striking or are they not? Or what did he mean by ‘contradiction’?"
I would imagine that he meant that prison warders occupy a contradictory class location because like the rest of us they are wage workers, but unlike the rest of us they are agents of the capitalist state. Again this is an utterly commonsensical and non-mystical use of the term 'contradiction'.
My own example:
Does competition lead to higher profits or does it not?
To say yes would be true, and to say no would be true. Competition is neccessary to achieve higher profits under capitalism. It also leads to a tendency for the rate of profit to fall. This is a contradiction of capitalism. Do not adjust your television set. Thats reality.
"In other words, she shows that there is no logic with the use of the term ‘contradiction’ as used by dialectitians"
Not at all. She demonstrates no such thing. All she demonstrates is that formal logic deals with propositions and not with reality. We knew that already.
"Does it illuminate reality? You’ve yet to show how"
I believe Marxism illuminates reality.
"It is important, for if you want Marxism to be taken seriously then you cannot refer to mumbo-jumbo. Otherwise, anyone can easily write off Marxism as idealistic nonsense"
Impress who? The ideologues of the bourgoisie who continue to repeat biblical injunctions about how one thing is always one thing and not the other?
No thanks. Rosa speaks utter mumbo jumbo about, for example, the history of religion and its role in human society. Its simply a repetition of Enlightenment thought which reduced the role of religion to that of social control, and therefore did much the same with the history of political ideologies. The whole of Marxism is an attempt to move beyond this perspective. Rosa wants to take us back to the 18th century. Her arguments are the product of being overly impressed with the tradition of analytical philosophy when she went to university. She obviously got embarressed because the Marxism she had learnt was not incompatible with what the profs had to say. Instead of thinking more about Marxism she just tells us what her profs said.
And all this is dressed up as a form of populism championing ordinary folk. Its bourgoise ideology - simon pure, which believes that philosophy ends with last bourgoise ideologues and is still fighting priest craft in an age where it is no longer priests we have to worry about.
Its also, quite aside from the philosophical questions, based on a set of arguments philistine not just about ideas but about history itself.
Very misleading and very dangerous for those who imagine themselves radicals. Its the philosophical equivilant of Martin Amis speaking on the War on Terror.
Comrades can now read my response to Mr G here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/
ros...rides_again.htm
Christian,
What do you mean by mean?
:)
This debate always reminds me of the charecter Mr Logic in that unfunny comic Viz. The implicit joke about mr logic was that by constantly using formal logic in interpretating statements made by people in everyday situations he wasn't being very logical. Generally the strip ended with him being punched on the nose.
There is a similarly irritating feel about Rosa's ridiculous little rants. Someone who has so completely missed the point that you don't know where to start.
Red Eck.
You ask:
Please could you now proceed to give an example of such a contradiction for this thread.
"Human agents are bundles of contradictory drives and desires rather then unified subjects"
"Capitalists must compete under capitalism to make profits. In order to compete they must direct their investment towards plant, technology and machinary. This produces a tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Hence the role of competition in the health of profits is contradictory under capitalism".
"What is the basis of this allegation? When has she ever changed the meaning of a word to suit her ‘own special’ way?"
Every time she turns away from ordinary usage of the term 'contradictory' or 'contradiction' and insists that contradictions can only exist within statements and not, for example, between peoples interests, within data, within societies, or within the human psyche.
"Yes, I took her point to be that using words with ambiguous meaning fail to convey any meaning at all"
In what sense is the ordinary use of the term 'contradiction' 'ambiguous'?
"Again, what is the basis of this allegation? You accuse her of propagating metaphysics without proof"
Metaphysics is concerned with ontological statements. Rosa's beliefs that there cannot be contradictions in reality but only in statements is a metaphysical belief. As is incidently, logic (quite literally as it can't be proved with reference to physical phenomenan: the propositions of logic are the purest kind of metaphysical statements imaginable. Attempts to ground logic in anything but itself have always failed). It is indeed a 'contradiction' that Rosa's arguments against philosophy can only proceed by utilizing the purest kind of philosophy, a philosophy incidently, whose progress was greatly shaped by medieval theologians debating what an omnipotent God would look like. This does not at all mean that logic is nonsense or wrong. But it does mean that Rosa's argument is nonsensical and wrong.
"Yes, and dialectitians still do! What did Grim and Dim write earlier? Something about prison guards striking a ‘contradiction’? So then, are they striking or are they not? Or what did he mean by ‘contradiction’?"
I would imagine that he meant that prison warders occupy a contradictory class location because like the rest of us they are wage workers, but unlike the rest of us they are agents of the capitalist state. Again this is an utterly commonsensical and non-mystical use of the term 'contradiction'.
My own example:
Does competition lead to higher profits or does it not?
To say yes would be true, and to say no would be true. Competition is neccessary to achieve higher profits under capitalism. It also leads to a tendency for the rate of profit to fall. This is a contradiction of capitalism. Do not adjust your television set. Thats reality.
"In other words, she shows that there is no logic with the use of the term ‘contradiction’ as used by dialectitians"
Not at all. She demonstrates no such thing. All she demonstrates is that formal logic deals with propositions and not with reality. We knew that already.
"Does it illuminate reality? You’ve yet to show how"
I believe Marxism illuminates reality.
"It is important, for if you want Marxism to be taken seriously then you cannot refer to mumbo-jumbo. Otherwise, anyone can easily write off Marxism as idealistic nonsense"
Impress who? The ideologues of the bourgoisie who continue to repeat biblical injunctions about how one thing is always one thing and not the other?
No thanks. Rosa speaks utter mumbo jumbo about, for example, the history of religion and its role in human society. Its simply a repetition of Enlightenment thought which reduced the role of religion to that of social control, and therefore did much the same with the history of political ideologies. The whole of Marxism is an attempt to move beyond this perspective. Rosa wants to take us back to the 18th century. Her arguments are the product of being overly impressed with the tradition of analytical philosophy when she went to university. She obviously got embarressed because the Marxism she had learnt was not incompatible with what the profs had to say. Instead of thinking more about Marxism she just tells us what her profs said.
And all this is dressed up as a form of populism championing ordinary folk. Its bourgoise ideology - simon pure, which believes that philosophy ends with last bourgoise ideologues and is still fighting priest craft in an age where it is no longer priests we have to worry about.
Its also, quite aside from the philosophical questions, based on a set of arguments philistine not just about ideas but about history itself.
Very misleading and very dangerous for those who imagine themselves radicals. Its the philosophical equivilant of Martin Amis speaking on the War on Terror.
Red Eck, thanks for fighting my corner, but I am sorry to have to tell you that with respect to Mr G, you are wasting your time.
He makes stuff up about my views all the time, and wanders off at several randomly-selected tangets, as the mood takes him.
As for abuse, if you check back in the record, initially I began by treating him with all due respect, but he soon descended into abuse, and now merely moans when I pay him back far worse than I get.
Here is why; in reference to a page at my site (link below), this is what I say on the opening page of that site:
"This page contains links to forums on the web where I have 'debated' this creed with other comrades.
For anyone interested, check out the desperate 'debating' tactics used by Dialectical Mystics in their attempt to respond to my ideas.
You will no doubt note that the vast majority all say the same sorts of things, and most of them pepper their remarks with scatological and abusive language. They all like to make things up, too, about me and my beliefs.
25 years (!!) of this stuff from Dialectical Mystics has meant I now take an aggressive stance with them every time -- I soon learnt back in the 1980's that being pleasant with them (my initial tactic) did not alter their abusive tone, their propensity to fabricate, nor reduce the amount of scatological language they used.
So, these days, I generally go for the jugular from the get-go.
Apparently, they expect me to take their abuse lying down, and regularly complain about my "bullying" tactics.
So, these mystics can dish it out, but they cannot take it.
Given the damage their theory has done to Marxism, and the abuse they all dole out, they are lucky this is all I can do to them."
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ros...a.l/
RevLeft.htm
The damage this 'theory' has done to our movement is detailed here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ros...age%
2009_02.htm
Incidentally, as if to prove my point (that he has a novel grasp of the word 'relevant'), Mr G now bangs on about Marxism 2007.
Babeuf is capable of defending himself, but he is away right now.
Nevertheless, comrades can read exactly what Babeuf said here (where they will also see that Mr G's comments are no less inaccurate than much else he posts):
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/
ros...arxism_2007.htm
An interesting example of theology and logic comes from the Islamic world. During the 17th and 18th century in South Asia there were debates about whether God who had ordained that the Prophet was the final Prophet could, in principle, change his mind, and send another prophet anyway.
The debate was polarised between those who wished to stress that God could do whatever he wanted and those who wanted to preserve the texts as the final authority. Then there was one famous poet who argued that whilst God couldn't send another prophet in this universe, it was open to him to create another universe and in that universe the Prophet Muhammed might not be 'the seal of the prophets'.
All of these arguments not only reflected a large social ferment about religion within society but also look rather similar to some of the arguments which were to lead to the development of more sophisticated kinds of logic in Europe during the medieval period (modal arguments about possible worlds etc).
Because aside from the ideological components these arguments were all about neccessity and what is meant by neccessity. Neil Davidson has written somewhere about the idiocy of the Protestant tradition (sorry Len) and the reformation in its dismissal of all medieval scholasticism, an attitude taken up unreflectively by some of the Enlightenment philosophe's.
Its a mark of this attitude that some comrades (including Len hmmmmmmm, THATS why, Lenin's refusal of politics is obviously a paisleyite move) cannot understand that when Hegel is talking about apparently theological catagories (subject, being, becoming etc) he is also talking about the very catagories that made non-theological forms of thought possible.
The various proofs of arcane theological propositions might have been faulty. But this is not at all to say that some of the apparatus deployed in these arguments did not progress in the course of them. This should not be too mysterious to those who on the one hand militantly espouse athiesm and on the other hand pronounce on the doctrine of 'free will' with religous fervour (one might add the notion of Rights actually).
For many the historicity of our concepts is deeply disturbing. It shouldn't be for Marxists.
Steve Brown:
"It is not the responsibility of the Federal Reserve - nor would it be appropriate - to protect lenders and investors from the consequences of their financial decisions," Bernanke said.
"But developments in financial markets can have broad economic effects felt by many outside the markets, and the Federal Reserve must take those effects into account when determining policy."
Why is this a contradiction, as opposed to being merely inconsistent, or something else (such as simply confused)?
And even if they were, do they struggle against one another, as 'dialectical contradictions' are supposed to do?
Do they turn into one another (again, as 'dialectically-united opposites' are supposed to do, too)?
And that Searle comment is far too vague to do anything with.
But, even if it weren't, how is taking something away and giving it back a 'dialectical contradiction'?
Do they too struggle? Do they change into one another?
And it is very easy to have your cake and eat it: leave the wrapper on and wait for nature to take its course.
Christian:
"Which means (or does it?) we all have to shut up - and that includes Rosa and red eck. Because all words have "ambiguous meaning" - you don't have to be post-modern to realize that. Maybe you'd like to engage in the challenge and define for us what "ambiguous meaning" means, precisely."
I will, once you define 'define'.
And, since I have have never claimed what you say above, what you say above is no answer to me.
Go on smarty pants: stop prevaricating and tell us what a 'dialectical contradiction' really is.
[Mr G's rather weak examples from yesterday (but they were not even dialectcial) are shown up for ehat they are in that link I posted above.]
Thanks tony wiil do.
Hi tony site loads fine for internet explorer, i am mystified, people like me should not be allowed near computers, many thanks for providing such an interesting and useful forum.
er, could the sight moderater please post my answer to ek. If Rosa is going to be allowed to troll and abuse people in this manner the least that can be done is that my responses are posted. It should be said that Rosa is one of the vilest elitists I've ever seen post on a board. I really hope people are not taken in by her. She's a bit thick really.
Oh sorry I see its there. As usual Rosa's deranged ranting in which she shows herself incapable of defending a single one of her ridiculous arguments confused me somewhat.
I hope that people do check the link to Babeufs statements at Marxism. They will see that he says exactly what I say he says. I've said it once and I'll say it again. Rosa's argumentative tactics are identical to those of right wing Zionist trolls. Endless misdirection, abuse when she can't think of an argument, and a bleating and aggressive sense of victimhood. One of the things I find particularly objectionable is that she is simply defending establishment philosophy: and acting as if she's the victim of some establishment conspiracy. Marxists aren't the establishment Rosa in case you hadn't noticed. You are.
"Why is this a contradiction, as opposed to being merely inconsistent, or something else (such as simply confused)?"
Because the policies of financial institutions of the ruling class are not merely 'confused' or 'inconsistant'. They do the things they do because there is no right thing to do under capitalism. That is because capitalism is a contradictory system. Its neccessary to understand these contradictions if you want to understand why capitalism does the things it doesn't. A refusal to acknowledge this is one reason why orthodox economics cannot understand why crisis happen, in much the same way you can't understand the history of your own thoughts.
As comrades will be able to tell from Mr G's posts (which are, as I predicted, aimless and irrelevant to the debate Grim and Dim initiated), he has a somewhat tenuous grasp of the word "relevant", itself.
Anyone who wants to read my detailed refutation of his earlier comments can access them here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/
ros...rides_again.htm
I will add further replies to his latest public self-humiliation, tomorrow.
One minor point worth making: Mr G calls me "one of the vilest elitists I've ever seen post on a board."
Now this excellent blog is unfortunately visited by Nazis, racists, homophobes, sexist pigs, supporters of both mass murder in Iraq and of all the murderous inequalities the human race has had inflicted upon it.
And yet Mr G equates me with them (and with all the even viler types who post on openly hate-ridden boards).
And why is this?
Because I dare to attack the mystical theory that gives some sort of sense to his life.
What more proof do we need that this 'theory' works for him like an opiate, providing him with consolation for the fact that Dialectical Marxism has enjoyed unprecedented lack of success over the last 100 or so years, and for the additional fact that the UK-SWP is half the size it was before Chris Harman resurrected it in 1988.
[And this despite the unprecedented world-wide radicalisation we have seen since 1999, and the prominent role the SWP has played in the StWC, and Respect.]
If truth is tested in practice, it has refuted dialectics.
Add to that the fact this this 'non-elitist', Mr G, is quite happy to bad mouth me (a member of the working class), even while he prefers the mystical ideas of that arch-elitist Hegel.
Johng,
Your examples of a ‘contradiction’:
"Human agents are bundles of contradictory drives and desires rather then unified subjects"
Says who?
"Capitalists must compete under capitalism to make profits. In order to compete they must direct their investment towards plant, technology and machinary. This produces a tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Hence the role of competition in the health of profits is contradictory under capitalism".
You mean the role of competition creates a paradox? So are you saying that ‘contradiction’ is another word for ‘paradox’?
”Every time she turns away from ordinary usage of the term 'contradictory' or 'contradiction' and insists that contradictions can only exist within statements and not, for example, between peoples interests, within data, within societies, or within the human psyche.”
Are you saying the ordinary use of the word ‘contradiction’ is to mean the same as ‘paradox’?
”In what sense is the ordinary use of the term 'contradiction' 'ambiguous'?”
When perhaps according to you, it could mean either ‘contradiction’ or ‘paradox’.
”Metaphysics is concerned with ontological statements. Rosa's beliefs that there cannot be contradictions in reality but only in statements is a metaphysical belief. As is incidently, logic (quite literally as it can't be proved with reference to physical phenomenan: the propositions of logic are the purest kind of metaphysical statements imaginable. Attempts to ground logic in anything but itself have always failed). It is indeed a 'contradiction' that Rosa's arguments against philosophy can only proceed by utilizing the purest kind of philosophy, a philosophy incidently, whose progress was greatly shaped by medieval theologians debating what an omnipotent God would look like. This does not at all mean that logic is nonsense or wrong. But it does mean that Rosa's argument is nonsensical and wrong.”
Again, by ‘contradiction’ here, do you mean ‘paradox’?
-Yes, and dialectitians still do! What did Grim and Dim write earlier? Something about prison guards striking a ‘contradiction’? So then, are they striking or are they not? Or what did he mean by ‘contradiction’?-
”I would imagine that he meant that prison warders occupy a contradictory class location because like the rest of us they are wage workers, but unlike the rest of us they are agents of the capitalist state. Again this is an utterly commonsensical and non-mystical use of the term 'contradiction'.”
You mean an utterly commonsensical and non-mystical use of the term ‘paradox’?
”My own example:
Does competition lead to higher profits or does it not?
To say yes would be true, and to say no would be true. Competition is neccessary to achieve higher profits under capitalism. It also leads to a tendency for the rate of profit to fall. This is a contradiction of capitalism. Do not adjust your television set. Thats reality.”
Again, you mean a ‘paradox’ of capitalism.
”Not at all. She demonstrates no such thing. All she demonstrates is that formal logic deals with propositions and not with reality. We knew that already.”
And what do propositions deal with?
”I believe Marxism illuminates reality.”
Me too.
”Impress who? The ideologues of the bourgoisie who continue to repeat biblical injunctions about how one thing is always one thing and not the other?”
It is important to gain the confidence of ordinary working class people. They will not touch Marxism with a barge pole if they think Marxists are people who see ‘contradictions’ everywhere. Incidentally, most people associate Marxism with Stalin, Mao and a whole host of other demagogues who have abused the word ‘Marxism’. They often quote the cliché: “works in theory, but not in practice”. My experience is that most people do not see Marxism as progressive. This is a major problem for all of us.
"No thanks. Rosa speaks utter mumbo jumbo about, for example, the history of religion and its role in human society. Its simply a repetition of Enlightenment thought which reduced the role of religion to that of social control, and therefore did much the same with the history of political ideologies. The whole of Marxism is an attempt to move beyond this perspective. Rosa wants to take us back to the 18th century. Her arguments are the product of being overly impressed with the tradition of analytical philosophy when she went to university. She obviously got embarressed because the Marxism she had learnt was not incompatible with what the profs had to say. Instead of thinking more about Marxism she just tells us what her profs said."
How do you know if any of those things happened to Rosa? Why resort to insulting her?
”And all this is dressed up as a form of populism championing ordinary folk. Its bourgoise ideology - simon pure, which believes that philosophy ends with last bourgoise ideologues and is still fighting priest craft in an age where it is no longer priests we have to worry about.
Its also, quite aside from the philosophical questions, based on a set of arguments philistine not just about ideas but about history itself.
Very misleading and very dangerous for those who imagine themselves radicals. Its the philosophical equivilant of Martin Amis speaking on the War on Terror.”
Johng, I believe you cannot fight bourgoise economic idealism with this other idealism you’ve adopted: Dialectics. Check out Rosa’s webpage: http://www.anti-dialectics.org
johng -- I really appreciate your contributions here, and I agree with your characterization of "Rosa Lichtenstein." I'm baffled as to why she(?) chose a pseudonym patterned after Rosa Luxemburg, who definitely didn't make the mistake of confusing dialectical and formal logic.
I'll try to be as succinct as possible in my take on this complex subject. The law of contradiction, which was first formulated by Aristotle, whereby two propositions negating each other cannot be simultaneously true, has nothing to do with the term "contradiction" as used by Marxists, who, by definition, are dialectical materialists.
By "contradiction," Marxists refer to a category expressing the inner source of all motion and development. Contradiction understood only as external cannot be such a source. The recognition of internal contradiction and its unity with external contradiction is what distinguishes dialectics from metaphysics. Like metaphysics, dialectics recognizes contradiction in general, but it goes further by recognizing the category in the very essence of entities, i.e., essential, internal and necessary contradictions.
Dialectical contradictions must be differentiated from so-called logical contradictions, which do no more than manifest confusion and inconsistency of thought. Dialectical contradictions, as a source of motion, are themselves in the process of motion or development, and so pass through stages of development in the essence of entities. These stages include identity, difference and antithesis.
Here's the shortest possible primer on dialectics:
1) All entities are in constant change.
2) The ultimate source of any change is within the entity (or process) itself.
3) This source is the struggle of opposites, the contradictions within each entity.
4) This struggle, at nodal points, brings about qualitative changes, or leaps, so that the entity is transformed into something else.
5) Practical/critical activity resolves the contradictions.
Rosa:
Christian:
"Which means (or does it?) we all have to shut up - and that includes Rosa and red eck. Because all words have "ambiguous meaning" - you don't have to be post-modern to realize that. Maybe you'd like to engage in the challenge and define for us what "ambiguous meaning" means, precisely."
I will, once you define 'define'.
And, since I have have never claimed what you say above, what you say above is no answer to me.
I of course never wrote that you said anything regarding meaning and its ambiguousness - you merely presumed that it was you I was talking to for no apparent reason. However, red eck did write what I quoted, and it is him/her I replied to. As you would have noticed if you actually read the posts here.
Ricardo:
"johng -- I really appreciate your contributions here, and I agree with your characterization of "Rosa Lichtenstein." I'm baffled as to why she(?) chose a pseudonym patterned after Rosa Luxemburg, who definitely didn't make the mistake of confusing dialectical and formal logic."
No confusion by me, just a simple request to have a single one of dialectic's ideas explained clearly, something Mr G has systematically refused to do.
And, I already know these two are not the same: one is logical, the other mystical. So how could I possibly confuse them?
And if you prefer the aimless ruminations this waffle-meister, then you will definitely not enjoy my detailed refutation of them.
So, do not, under any circumstances, click on the link I posted earlier.
And I chose the name you ask questions about precisely to honour the other great Rosa.
To refuse to challenge you mystics would be to spit on her grave.
The other things you say, repeated endlessly like the mantra they have become (and for the gazillionth time, with noi change -- so dialectical materialism seems to be the only thing in nature that does not alter), have all been refuted in extensive detail at my site.
Just one thought to leave you with: where exactly is the 'nodal' point when a metal slowly melts and changes qualitatively from solid to liquid?
Never thought of that one, eh?
Just shows how much this hermetic theory has addled your brain, doesn't it?
You can read a summary of other unanswerable objections to this sub-Aristotelian theory here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ros...Oppose%
20DM.htm
Oh, and by the way, Aristotle did not define contradictions the way you say he did; and formal logic has come a long way in the last 2400 years (particularly the last 150).
And it can handle change.
Christian:
"I of course never wrote that you said anything regarding meaning and its ambiguousness - you merely presumed that it was you I was talking to for no apparent reason. However, red eck did write what I quoted, and it is him/her I replied to. As you would have noticed if you actually read the posts here."
I suppose then that someone forced you to type this:
"Which means (or does it?) we all have to shut up - and that includes Rosa and red eck...".
Apparently, you do not read your own posts.
Rosa L -- Obviously we'll never agree on the value of dialectics, but I would think that there's at least some hope that we can agree on what Aristotle's law of contradiction is. You'll notice that I wasn't quoting, just giving a simple description. Perhaps you'll prefer this one: No proposition can be simultaneously false and true. Does that do it for you, or is everybody always wrong about everything, except you and your sycophants?
Well it's been entertaining - perhaps Rosa and Johng should set up their own joint site and battle it out there and the rest of us could pop in every now and again to check on the latest epithets.
The discussion should have been an unnecessary one. It basically consisted in persuading those with a simplistic, dogmatic view (police are class enemies and pigs and should be never be spoken to) of the rather obvious error of their views - are police just born this way?
The sane and rather obvious view that police are just people working in unfortunate area (as someone pointed out, again obvious, they don't actually spend much of their time attacking pickets) with pretty limited political understanding, and as people can have their views changed - nobody says easily.
It's no surprise that almost all those arguing this sensible view seem to have had personal contact with policemen as family members, friends, neighbours, etc. This sort of experience does tend to make it evident that rigid dogma doesn't fit the facts - people are more complex and almost all capable of change - a fact which should be welcomed by those on the left; if a form of life changes, consciousness may well change too.
For someone so intent on logic, you are not very good at it. If we all have to shut up, that clearly includes you, too.
I'm quoting this from memory, so forgive me, Rosa, if this is not exactly correct:
"The dialectic does not outlaw the syllogism or deductive, formal logic. It simply transcends it."
Jeez! I forgot to add who said that. A certain L. Trotsky. Sorry
Prison guards are merely determinantes of Capital. They owe their existence to Capital. Their abolition can only be the result of their negation through their negation: i.e, Capital.
Just wanted to recommend an excellent film which deals tangentially with dialectics. It's fiction, about a (white) teacher at an inner-city school and his friendship with a precocious 13-year-old (black) girl. The acting is superb, and any humanist (especially Marxist) would love it.
_Half Nelson_
1hr. 47 min.
2006
Cop this!
"VICTORIA'S powerful police union is considering forming a political party to contest the next state election.
The move, backed by other emergency services employees, comes as the Police Association and the Victorian Labor Government are locked in a pay dispute".
http://www.news.com.au/
heraldsun...5005961,00.html
What do comrades think about this one!? Particularly given it also would include the Firies and Ambos...
Crikey part 2.
"Victoria's Emergency Services workers have voted to form a new political party and field candidates in the 2010 State Election.
The announcement comes as the Police Association plans work bans as part of its pay rise bid.
The Association's Paul Mullett says he expects strong support for the "Safer Communities Party," because of the faith Victorians have in their police, firemen and paramedics.
He says there is no longer much difference between the two major political parties."
How 'bout them apples!?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stori...?
section=justin
Red Eck,
The example "Human Agents are a bundle of contradictory drives and desires rather then unified Subjects" was not intended to serve as an argument about the nature of humanity, but rather to demonstrate that there is no grammatical error in using the term 'contradiction' in this way.
Use of the term 'Paradox' to describe what Marx referred to as 'Contradictions' would run into exactly the same problem as use of the term 'Contradiction' does from the standpoint of formal logic: Paradox's in formal logic exist in statements not in reality.
If you think this through in a serious way (unlike Rosa who when confronted with an argument ignores it in favour of continuing to bash a straw man) you'll realise that this whole argument makes any kind of social theory of capitalism impossible, and more then that, just IS a form of idealism. Thats perhaps the biggest irony of this whole 'discussion'.
Your argument about working class people being repelled by Marxism because it see's 'contradictions' everywhere, is based on no evidence at all (this is unsurprising given the idealist tradition you are defending), anymore then Rosa and Babeuf's arguments about religion.
In one aside Rosa attacks articles in Socialist Worker for referring to 'contradictions' implying that this is the result of fealty to 'dialectics'. Its not. Its fealty to ordinary language. Google contradiction and you'll find that people use the term all the time in precisely the way Socialist Worker does.
What ordinary people do not do generally is couch every proposition in terms derived from the linguistic turn of the late 19th century or on the other hand formal logic.
As to your remarks about abuse (one notes that you respond not at all to my point that the general account of the relationship between religion, philosophy and 'technical language' which provides the ideological glue for Rosa's attack on Marxism is simply empirically nonsensical) you are surely having a laugh.
Rosa over the last couple of years has proved too frightened to engage in debate and so either just behaves like she has access to special secret knowledge which mere mortals don't possess, or on the other publishes long diatribes on her looney and obsessive site to which people can't respond, which are personal attacks mixed up with tedious ranting about her own pet obsessions.
Eccentricty is tolerable in small doses but Rosa ought to realise that whilst this kind of behaviour has been associated with intellectual greatness in the past, behaving like an obnoxious spoilt brat does not actually CAUSE genius. The difficulty is that anyone who so transparently wants to be taken for one, probably isn't. Now that is a paradox and not a contradiction.
"What more proof do we need that this 'theory' works for him like an opiate"
Considerably more then you can provide Rosa.
"The sane and rather obvious view that police are just people working in unfortunate area (as someone pointed out, again obvious, they don't actually spend much of their time attacking pickets) with pretty limited political understanding, and as people can have their views changed - nobody says easily".
I'm not sure about this. The trouble is that its too broad. We're none of us 'born' with our ideas, whether thats George Bush's desire to invade countries or Rosa's obsession with formal logic. That doesn't mean there is not a particular way we are. Its important to be able to tell the difference between a capitalist and a worker, even if, pretty much, they're both human beings.
Its not simply that the Police work in a 'problematical area'. Its that as an institution the Police have a particular function in a Capitalist society just like a Capitalist does. And as Marx put it, Being determines Consiousness.
This leaves room for all sorts of contradictions in their consiousness (its simply untrue that Marxism discounts this) but if they act on those contradictions (ie try to resolve them) they will probably end up ceasing to be coppers and capitalists (both of whom can of course continue to function with an unhappy consiousness, but this hardly helps the rest of us).
But its important that Socialists understand that this makes it much more unlikely that the Police will break either as individuals or as a group from dominant ideologies. If there is evidence that changes in society mean that there is a collective break going on then of course one intervenes to deepen it.
But the important thing is not what individuals are like (they are of course perfectly ordinary human beings with the same foibles as the rest of us) but what the institution actually does. It is very important that people understand this distinction and its this distinction that should guide discussion on the subject.
In the US there is a tradition of electing Sheriffs. This has not meant that the Police have been transformed into a progressive institution (why not, would lay the basis for an interesting discussion).
Prison Officers are I think different in all sorts of ways. Both in terms of pay and conditions (the contradictions between their function and their status as wage labour is much sharper) and in terms of their function.
They are basically refuse disposal, working with the people who have already been processed by the Police and the Courts. The Police are much higher up the hierarchy of the State. They, togeather with the judiciary, actually PUT us in jail.
Lenin,
This probably deserves a post. Its on the attitudes of corporate america to proposed Labour laws in China:
http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/
...thBrecher41.pdf
I don't understand dialectical materialism, and I don't want to. But it seems to me that this thread is living disproof of Rosa's notion that dialectical materialism, as opposed to formal logic, is the source of sectarianism on the Left.
Because, blow me down, johng and Frau Prof Dok Lichtenstein have been fighting like two Trots in a sack. Don't you have any non-Marxists to beat up somewhere?
Hey, Mr G, I must thank you once more: because of your aimless 'interventions', my site is receiving a record number of hits!
More please!
MFB: if you do not like this spat, I should care.
And sectarianism is caused by the petty bourgeois origin of most Marxists (whereas I am working class); dialectics is their ideology.
Hence, it just makes matters worse, but does not cause it.
Being determines consciousness, and all that.
Hegel, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin, Gramsci, Trotsky, et al., were not workers. I left Marx out because he gradually abandoned this 'theory' and it is almost totally absent from Kapital.
More details here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ros...age%
2009_01.htm
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ros...age%
2009_02.htm
Ricardo:
"Rosa L -- Obviously we'll never agree on the value of dialectics, but I would think that there's at least some hope that we can agree on what Aristotle's law of contradiction is. You'll notice that I wasn't quoting, just giving a simple description. Perhaps you'll prefer this one: No proposition can be simultaneously false and true. Does that do it for you, or is everybody always wrong about everything, except you and your sycophants?"
You are confusing Aristotle's characterisation of the so-called law of contradiction (a term he does not use) with what is now called the Law of Excluded Middle (or possibly even the Law of Bivalence -- your 'description' is not too clear).
You can examine a more accurate account of what he thought here:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entrie...ristotle-logic/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entrie...entries/square/
It will at least save you having to make stuff up.
And no, everyone is not always wrong -- for sure you proved that to be so by getting this one thing right.
So, there is hope for you yet.
Ricardo, who likes to quote holy dialectical scripture:
"The dialectic does not outlaw the syllogism or deductive, formal logic. It simply transcends it."
Not so, as I show here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ros...l/page%
2004.htm
Your incapacity with Aristotlelian logic (even!) does not inspire confidence that you know what you are talking about.
But, oddly enough, in that respect at least, you are identical with most other dialecticians (oh hear, I have just used the 'law of identity'...).
Christian, getting tetchier by the minute:
"For someone so intent on logic, you are not very good at it. If we all have to shut up, that clearly includes you, too."
I will admit to that, but only if you will admit to not understanding even your own posts.
Deal?
Shawn:
"Prison guards are merely determinantes of Capital. They owe their existence to Capital. Their abolition can only be the result of their negation through their negation: i.e, Capital."
Well, this is another fine example of the mystification of revolutionary socialism.
On the confusions underlying this part of dialectics, I suggest you read this:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ros...l/page%
2007.htm
Comrades will be able to read my reply to Mr G's latest droppings, at my site in the next 24 hours. or so.
Book early!
Thanks to him, most seats have already been taken...
[I'll post the link later.]
And Ricardo, no answer yet on melting metal?
Tut Tut; if you can't handle even *that* minor 'difficulty', how on earth do you think you will be able to cope with changing society with that lame-brained theory of yours?
I am sorry Shawn, I missed this from earlier:
"It is clear from all this that the dialectic process involved in sense-certainty is nothing else than the mere history of its process – of its experience; and sense-certainty itself is nothing else than simply this history. The naïve consciousness, too, for that reason, is of itself always coming to this result, which is the real truth in this case, and is always having experience of it: but is always forgetting it again and beginning the process all over. It is therefore astonishing when, in defiance of this experience, it is announced as “universal experience” – nay, even as a philosophical doctrine, the outcome, in fact, of scepticism – that the reality or being of external things in the sense of “Thises”, particular sense objects, has absolute validity and truth for consciousness. One who makes such an assertion really does not know what he is saying, does not know that he is stating the opposite of what he wants to say."
Thanks for proving, yet again, that this stuff makes about as much sense as the Book of Revelation.
MFB - I empathise, not just because I am Trot, a Marxist etc. If you have followed johng and Rosa's argument, you can either decide that dialectics is crap or you can try and make sense out of it. What I learnt in reading books on this subject is never try to understand what you can never rationalise. For instant for metaphysicians, their world is best explained by (P-Q)vP-R) and so on and so on. That simply does my head in. What I hope is that like me, you have found the general debate on how to respond to the strikes that benefit the enemy of the working class enlightening and how the contradictions and the dialectics facing our struggle help us rationalize such conflicting situations. Hopefully johng and Rosa will continue to battle it out in another site which I might just visit to see who is being subjective or objective! Its been a great laugh thanks to tony!
Yeah. Rosa.
JohnG:
"Yeah. Rosa."
I knew I'd win you over in the end. :)
Well, Rosa, I´ve tried reading your site and found its style just too nerdy to really take it seriously.
florence - thanks for that, basically what i've been itching to say.
talking to a comrade the other day about dialectics, with our combined almost total lack of knowledge about it, one of us said "I don't think anyone really thinks before going on a picket line or demonstration "What Would The Dialectic Do?". I don't think we should really rush to make those bracelets.
This was an informative, comradely debate about the contradiction (ha!) of workers that are employed to defend capital going on strike, until the huff of debate surrounding dialectics, propositions, formal logic yadda yadda made it fucking tiresome to wade through. Mainly, Rosa, this was your doing - we're all very impressed by how incredibly knowledgeable you are about these things, but I'd rather smash my face in with a garden hoe than put up with your confrontational harmuphing and breathtaking imperiousness.
Back to the real debate - as the socialist son of a police officer I feel that we should mainly regard police/prison officer strikes as we should other strikes, but perhaps play it a bit safer than we would with other strikes - there are obviously times where the strike may be unsupportable (if the police were striking to be given guns, for example, or on racist grounds). I think a lot of socialists are put off by the fact that the police behave in a racist, sexist etc. way, but if we're to relate to the working class, we can't let this be a barrier to engagement - a lot of workers in all industries behave in these ways in their free time and at work - the problem is the police are given the right to control people, and this obviously intensifies the visibility of the problem. Also, the police are trained/conditioned to consider themselves as having high social status, which is amplified by dealing with violent criminals and social pariahs in their line of duty. This feeds back into the racism/heavy-handedness.
Rosa is obviously horrified at the suggestion that the notion of sense certainty has a history. I find it amazing that a philosopher from that period could come up with such an idea. Generally speaking you can try and make sense of things or you can imagine that the history of thought is a history of howlers until we came along. The latter perspective (which seems to be what informs the way Rosa reads Hegel, and is of course the idea that Hegel was challenging all along) just strikes me as silly.
"And sectarianism is caused by the petty bourgeois origin of most Marxists (whereas I am working class)"
Priceless.
Rosa, I am one of the people who decided to have a look at your site after reading this thread. It didn't help you in your quest, however - it merely hardened the opinion I already had of you.
Rosa: "Prison guards are merely determinantes of Capital. They owe their existence to Capital. Their abolition can only be the result of their negation through their negation: i.e, Capital.
Well, this is another fine example of the mystification of revolutionary socialism.
On the confusions underlying this part of dialectics, I suggest you read this:"
What is so mystifying about my statement? I will read the links you provided once I get the chance (start of the semester and all).
Tom:
"Well, Rosa, I´ve tried reading your site and found its style just too nerdy to really take it seriously."
Oh dear; I will just have to learn to get over such a devastating blow from such an internatIonally-renouned philosopher and logician such as you.
Steff Action and Florence, you are right; this theory is absolutely useless when it comes the the class stuggle, so it is no surprise to see from the documentary evidence that not even the Bolsheviks in 1917-18 (or the Third International before Lenin died) used this theory.
However, Florence, from what you posted, I think you have confused metaphysics with logic.
Rich:
"Rosa, I am one of the people who decided to have a look at your site after reading this thread. It didn't help you in your quest, however - it merely hardened the opinion I already had of you."
Thanks for confirming the fact that mystics do not like to have their theory exposed for what it is --, and that they cling on to this theory, as Mr G does, because it provides them with consolation for the fact that Dialectical Marxism (but particularly Dialectical Trotskyism) is such a long-term failure.
Forgive me for trying to put a stop to it.
Shawn:
"What is so mystifying about my statement? I will read the links you provided once I get the chance (start of the semester and all)."
Ok, but the mystification appears at two levels (over and above the origin of the theory in Hermetic Philosophy):
1) It confuses linguistic issues (such as negation) with material change.
2) It prevents comrades from giving an account of change, to such an extent that, when pressed, they cannot explain a single dialectical notion. In other words this theory is a mystery to them, too.
[MAD = Materialist Dialectics.]
A brief outline why MAD-fans cannot account for change is given here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/
ros...rides_again.htm
[Half-way down the page.]
If you read it, you will note, I hope, that Mr G, in his ramblings above, has failed to show where this argument goes wrong (as far as I can see, he ignored it), as I will make abundantly plain in my new response to him, to be published at my site tomorrow.
Good luck with the new term!
And Mr G, you will be pleased to know that since you decided to soil yourself in public in your desperate attempt to traduce my ideas, visitors to my site have increased by 500%.
Way to go, G-man!
I honestly don't see why Socialists would tolerate this abusive and unpleasent piece of work on a socialist blog. Its like having a stalker. Really nasty.
Rosa thinks I like to quote the old masters. Might as well feed her generalization based upon one example. This one I looked up in F. Engels's _Anti-Duhring_ (pp. 31-32). Referring to Hegel's work on dialectics, he says, "For the first time, the whole world -- natural, historical, intellectual -- is represented as a process, i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development. And the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development."
And to answer your question about the nodal point at which a metal is qualitatively changed from a solid to a liquid, it's called the melting point.
An important term in dialectics is relevant here -- "(the) measure." Any good dictionary of philosophy can explain it to you. That's if you care to educate yourself.
Rosa:
Are we not using historical concepts when we mention proletariat, capital, police? The conception of what is a prison guard is nothing more than our historical understanding of it. If one is to abolish our current conception of prison guards, should we not be abolishing its historical mediator (capital)? When I say negation of the negation, all I'm really saying is: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."
As a side note:
I find it hard to understand how you can take what one random so-called Marxist* said about reality being dialectical and branding every person who makes use of Hegelian philosophy as holding the same ideals. I doubt you can find a Marxist (from this blog anyway) who holds that reality is dialectical in nature.
*John Rees - I’m only quoting from your website and taking what you write about Mr. Rees as fact, cough sense-certainty cough.
'I think a lot of socialists are put off by the fact that the police behave in a racist, sexist etc. way, but if we're to relate to the working class, we can't let this be a barrier to engagement - a lot of workers in all industries behave in these ways in their free time and at work.'
Steffaction
This is too true, Steff. A couple of years ago I was trying to organise truck drivers and workers on a construction materials supply depot in London into the T&G (now Unite).
It wasn't too hard to unionise the (white) truck drivers, but trying to get them to accept that the other workers on site should also be unionised was met with the response, 'They don't need a union - they're Asian.'
As much as I wanted to tell them that the union didn't need fucking racists like them, walking away from that workplace, or trying to organise all the workers except for the drivers, would obviously have been the wrong thing to do.
As hard as it was, the drivers had to be argued with and talked around to accepting that their attitude was a barrier to improving their own conditions. I think this is similar to the situation we are faced with when dealing with the police or prison guards, but on a much much larger scale.
As difficult and as distasteful as it is, engaging with racist workers - instead of telling them to go fuck themselves - gives us at least a chance of pushing people to the left and can have a positive effect on everyday situations such as improving things in a workplace or getting workers exposed to new ideas in a union. (Although I concede that it is probably a different situation if you are faced with racist workers organised in a fascist political party - obviously we don't accept them into our unions, and in fact we would be organising to isolate them and 'accidently' push them under a train.)
Rosa: Thanks for confirming the fact that mystics do not like to have their theory exposed for what it is
So with no prior knowledge of me you assume I believe in some kind of mysticism? My post was neither in favour nor against theories of dialectic. In no way do I consider myself an expert but, from the reading I have done, I don't believe dialectics have such huge importance in the overall scheme of Marxist thinking as you do.
New-comers to Marxism reading your site would surely be put off more by the obsessive and mean-spirited tone you have than the dialectics you are refuting.
Now, I need to scotch the vicious rumour going about that Mr G is once again indirectly trying to drum up support for my site by posting such risible comments.
That is a lie, and I will hear no more of it.
He fully intends to fib and dissemble; he is not doing this just to help me out.
The fact that I have had a 500% increase in visitors is in no way down to him.
Still -- thanks John!
Stop sniping, people.
Ricardo, with yet more holy writ:
"Rosa thinks I like to quote the old masters. Might as well feed her generalization based upon one example. This one I looked up in F. Engels's _Anti-Duhring_ (pp. 31-32). Referring to Hegel's work on dialectics, he says, "For the first time, the whole world -- natural, historical, intellectual -- is represented as a process, i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development. And the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development.""
Too bad Engels got that one wrong then, isn't it.
Now, you can stop quoting such inanities Ricardo. I have been reading this stuff for longer than most of the comrades here have been alive, and do not want to read any more of it.
Not even you can be so cruel, can you?
"And to answer your question about the nodal point at which a metal is qualitatively changed from a solid to a liquid, it's called the melting point."
Maybe so, but the qualitative transition from solid to liquid is slow, and non-nodal (as are many phase transitions -- links and references at my site, if you want them) -- metals just get softer and softer when heated.
So that qualitative change is non-nodal.
The same applies to glass, toffee, butter, chocolate, plastic...
All eminently non-dialectical.
Shawn:
"Rosa: Are we not using historical concepts when we mention proletariat, capital, police?"
Sure, as I have said a gazillion times, I fully accept historical materialism (minus the Hegelian gobbledygook).
"When I say negation of the negation, all I'm really saying is: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.""
I agree with Marx, that is why we can lose those mystical terms (viz "negation of the negation").
"As a side note: I find it hard to understand how you can take what one random so-called Marxist* said about reality being dialectical and branding every person who makes use of Hegelian philosophy as holding the same ideals. I doubt you can find a Marxist (from this blog anyway) who holds that reality is dialectical in nature."
Ricardo seems to, and I think others do too. Certainly John Rees does, and so do most comrades in the SWP.
Most Trotskyists do too, as do most communists, and Maoists, and so do many 'libertarian communists'.
Google 'dialectical materialism' and you will soon see how many comrades/parties have swallowed this whacko theory.
To be sure, academic Marxists tend to reject this theory, but they have something far worse to put in its place: systematic dialectics --, the next best thing to fluent Martian.
But, I go further, I deny there is a dialectic anywhere, except perhaps in a good argument, as here.
"John Rees - I’m only quoting from your website and taking what you write about Mr. Rees as fact, cough sense-certainty cough."
The phrase "sense certainty" is as obscure a phrase as one could wish to find, and that is not just because it attributes certainties to things like touch and smell, anthropomorphising our senses.
I can make no sense of it, and I have yet to meet/read anyone who can.
Rich:
"So with no prior knowledge of me you assume I believe in some kind of mysticism? My post was neither in favour nor against theories of dialectic. In no way do I consider myself an expert but, from the reading I have done, I don't believe dialectics have such huge importance in the overall scheme of Marxist thinking as you do."
*Apologies* for maligning you then, but, you only have to read some of the desperate posts here, and on other forums, and read the many books and articles that pour out on this topic (for my sins I have had to read the lot), to be convinced otherwise.
Now you may be right in what you say (*I sincerely hope you are*), but I have to go on what I have read, and what my own experience has told me over the last 25 years (that I have been in and around the SWP), and it tells me that you are wrong.
Hence, my project will continue until either this theory is dead, or I am.
Tomb Patrol: will do!! :)
Rich:
"New-comers to Marxism reading your site would surely be put off more by the obsessive and mean-spirited tone you have than the dialectics you are refuting."
Some are, many not.
I have lost count of the e-mails I have received from (comrades) all around the world (some in the UK-SWP) thanking me for my stance, and my aggressive approach toward those who have ruined our movement with this mystical theory.
Anyway, I do not intend to change, even if no one listens, so much do I hate Hegelian Hermeticism.
Like it or lump it then...
I agree about the need to engage with workers even when (especially when) they're racist. But I don't think the question of whether you relate to racist workers is the same as the question of relating to the Police (I'm not saying we never do, just saying its not the same question).
Prison Officers are more like the hard end of social work then the police, I think. For some of the reasons I gave above, both the economic position and their position within the hierarchy of the repressive apparatus of the state.
Historically Prison Officers have not been as isolated inside the Class as Police Officers are. I mean a Prison Officer can't arrest you for instance.
Sense Certainty?
Rosa you unbelievable clot. It was the 18th century term used to provide foundations for the doctrine of empiricism. Hegel was arguing that this was a concept and hence could not serve as a 'foundation' outside of the realm of the thought. Thus those who argue that sense certainty provides a foundation outside consiousness are 'saying the opposite of what they thing they are'. In other words its a critique of empiricism, even if an idealist one. But its perfectly coherent and clear what he means IF you understand the term 'sense certainty', its history, and the body of thought he's referring to.
Rosa is a perfect example of someone mocking things they can't understand simply because they haven't been bothered, and not because there is anything inherently incoherent.
Its actually deeply disturbing to think that someone so unfamiliar with the history of philosophy presumes to educate others in her own ignorence.
Appalling. What is also appalling is that it does a real disservice to those who are interested in ideas and want to learn things. Absolutely the worst example of a pretentious twit I've ever come across. Its a real crime from a socialist point of view. demagoguery of the worst kind.
Johng,
"The example "Human Agents are a bundle of contradictory drives and desires rather then unified Subjects" was not intended to serve as an argument about the nature of humanity, but rather to demonstrate that there is no grammatical error in using the term 'contradiction' in this way."
Perhaps, but I had asked you where it came from. Did you make it up?
"Use of the term 'Paradox' to describe what Marx referred to as 'Contradictions' would run into exactly the same problem as use of the term 'Contradiction' does from the standpoint of formal logic: Paradox's in formal logic exist in statements not in reality."
I asked you: do they mean the same? We'll worry about its implications later.
"If you think this through in a serious way (unlike Rosa who when confronted with an argument ignores it in favour of continuing to bash a straw man) you'll realise that this whole argument makes any kind of social theory of capitalism impossible, and more then that, just IS a form of idealism. Thats perhaps the biggest irony of this whole 'discussion'."
You accuse Rosa of idealism? When has she ever imposed her beliefs on reality?
"Your argument about working class people being repelled by Marxism because it see's 'contradictions' everywhere, is based on no evidence at all (this is unsurprising given the idealist tradition you are defending), anymore then Rosa and Babeuf's arguments about religion."
I said working class people *would* not be impressed by dialectics. Very few people on this Earth have come across dialectics. They are already turned off Marxism by Stalin and Mao.
"In one aside Rosa attacks articles in Socialist Worker for referring to 'contradictions' implying that this is the result of fealty to 'dialectics'. Its not. Its fealty to ordinary language. Google contradiction and you'll find that people use the term all the time in precisely the way Socialist Worker does."
Go on then, show me. Give me some links then?
"What ordinary people do not do generally is couch every proposition in terms derived from the linguistic turn of the late 19th century or on the other hand formal logic."
Who said they did?
"As to your remarks about abuse (one notes that you respond not at all to my point that the general account of the relationship between religion, philosophy and 'technical language' which provides the ideological glue for Rosa's attack on Marxism is simply empirically nonsensical) you are surely having a laugh."
Rosa's has devoted a lot of her time to refuting dialectics with sound and extremely well researched arguments. She is an intellectual and a major asset to all activists. She knows her stuff and certainly does not deserve any abuse. All she wants is for comrades to transcend above pious fundamentalism.
"Rosa over the last couple of years has proved too frightened to engage in debate and so either just behaves like she has access to special secret knowledge which mere mortals don't possess, or on the other publishes long diatribes on her looney and obsessive site to which people can't respond, which are personal attacks mixed up with tedious ranting about her own pet obsessions."
That's a lie. She has countered all that you have flung at her. And all the knowledge she has accessed is right there in her essay references.
"Eccentricty is tolerable in small doses but Rosa ought to realise that whilst this kind of behaviour has been associated with intellectual greatness in the past, behaving like an obnoxious spoilt brat does not actually CAUSE genius. The difficulty is that anyone who so transparently wants to be taken for one, probably isn't. Now that is a paradox and not a contradiction."
I think this says more about you than it does Rosa. Live with it.
Rosa -- You're right. I do think that reality is dialectical in nature.
BTW, I resisted, because of time pressure, consulting your site, but when I read that the attendance there has undergone a huge increase, I succumbed.
Now I can tell you in comradely sincerity: You need therapy.
Johng,
I get it that trade unionists and socialists engaging with racist workers and the police is different - I was backing Tony's original excellent points (way back when), that we should always be trying to move workers/the police towards our ideas, every day, in whatever way we can.
Here in Colombia, bearing out what several people said above, it is easier to talk with soldiers than the police - there is a draft that Colombian men can get out of if they pay, which of course means that it is the sons of poor workers who fill the ranks - but because the military also patrol city streets and are used in a regular 'policing role' in everyday life, there is even less distance between them and the people (notwithstanding atrocities committed against peasant workers by 'elite' military units out of sight in the rainforest).
Problem is, the government has created special police units which are better armed than the military and uses them only in the last resort as a kind of praetorian guard to defend the régime.
Should Colombia fall to the left, I can imagine it would be like Romania in 1989, with soldiers defending the people from the last stand of the policía.
Rocardo:
"You need therapy."
I think I am booked in after all you mystics. Apparently, you lot require it more urgently.
But, still, you cannot reply to my devastating arguments.
Just like the other 'Marxist' Hermeticists who post here (and elsewhere).
I can, however, see that Mr G is beginning to lose it.
Oh dear...
He can read my reply, at my site, tomorrow.
Rosa - deal ;). I did post a really pathetic cheap shot there, didn't I? No more flamewars for me!
A request to Rosa, johng and others involved in the dialectics debate.
Could you just fuck off from this thread and take it elsewhere.
Trying to read a thread about how revolutionaries should intervene in strikes by 'reactionary' workers is hard enough, but it has now been totally lost in this thread and it is an issue to be discussed.
Some info for those interested or not in dialectics.
Here in Greece we (the Greek SWP) are standing in the forthcoming General Election under an umbrella anti-capitalist unity coalition called EN.ANTI.A (meaning "Against" - Anticapitalist Left Unity) and on our election leaflets we clearly state that we want money for health, education, social services and not for the military and the police.
Now is that a con...................
Er, guys, I posted a link to an article about the Police, Fire Brigade and Ambulance unions forming a political party here in Australia...I would have thought that was a development worthy of discussion..?
Anti-C:
"Could you just fuck off from this thread and take it elsewhere."
Er..., no.
Since it was the mystics who brought this up, and think it important, it is equally important to slap them down -- especially if you agree with me that this 'theory' has played a part in making Dialectical Marxism (especially Dialectical Trotskyism) the failure we see today (and the failure it was for most of the 20th century).
And anti-c; where is the 'contradiction' in what you say?
[That is, if you meant this by your use of "con..."]
Rosa says "However, Florence from what you posted, I think you have confused metaphysics with logic." You are right, it is your right to think Rosa what-ever you want to think, but do not think for me. As you have noticed, I have not engaged in any debate on dialectics directly with you. So, can we just leave it there. You with your own thoughts of what is what, and me with my own thoughts of metaphysics and logic. Good-day and goodbye!
Rosa I was baiting you with the con..... and you took it.
Chav,
I read that, but it has got lost in the dialectics 'debate'. From what I read it doesn't sound like something any revolutionary would support as the major
platform is law and order. I think it simply indicates the crisis of capitalism and the failure of (in particular) the reformist left to offer an alternative. The revolutionary left should 'persuade' these workers that they need to break with capitalism, not strengthen it.
thanks for that anticapitalista. I've heard that tens of thousands of people have been marching across Greece against the vicious expropriation of forest lands by the arsonists/developers. It's just unbelievable to see this happening.
Where does the KKE stand in relation to the far-left coalition? Are both looking to tactically ally with or apply pressure on PASOK? I've also heard that the ultra-right LAOS is increasing in popularity with its anti-Albanian hysterics. Really nasty.
Comrades can now read my extended response to Mt G here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/
ros...oils_himsel.htm
FD:
"You are right, it is your right to think Rosa what-ever you want to think, but do not think for me. As you have noticed, I have not engaged in any debate on dialectics directly with you. So, can we just leave it there. You with your own thoughts of what is what, and me with my own thoughts of metaphysics and logic. Good-day and goodbye!"
And you are welcome to think what you like on whatever you like, even if it is all completely wrong.
Anti-C:
"Rosa I was baiting you with the con..... and you took it."
So *you* say --, but, more likely: this retreat of yours is probably down to the fact I put you on the spot, and you cannot actually say why it is a "con...".
hollowentry
Yes people are extremely angry with what has happened this summer over the fires and they are extremely aware that it has been government cuts that have caused the tragedy (and loss of 63 lives). The number of forest firefighters has been reduced by 2500 over the last 5 years, money spent on upgrading fire-fighting equipment has disappeared and many of the figher-fighters are seasonal workers. The government promised to make them permanent in their election promises, but failed to do so along with 250,000 other temp workers.
KKE is standing on its own. It is incredibly sectarian, choosing to demonstrate separately on all the major issues. It is very hostile to the far-left and calls a vote for the far-left as a wasted vote.
For those outside Greece, things might appear strange. I walked to work this morning and passed some election posters side by side. One from the Radical Left Coalition (Syriza), one from AntiCapitalist Left Unity (ENANTIA), one from KKE, one from KKE-ML(Maoists) and another from Revoluionary Left Alliance. At least there were no Tory ones.
LAOS is gaining support and they are LePen type fascists. Their 'supporters' trashed an election stall of ours in Athens and theyare expected to do particularly well in Northern Greece and here in thessaloniki.
Part of the problem is that the Left in general do not confront LAOS as fascists, but as ultra-nationalists ( a bit like how LePen/Griffin are portrayed) and fail to mobilise against them.
We'll see how we do in this election. There is a demonstration on Saturday here in Thessaloniki at the International Fair. This happens every year, but this will be important as it is just a week before the elections.
ROSA -Don't you just get it? - I said let us leave it there, that means I do not wish nor want to engage in a debate with you on any subject of any sort, so kindly keep your righteousness to yourself and i will keeps my wrongs to myself. My wrongs and my rights are not to be judged by you! Thank you!
Rosa - So *you* say --, but, more likely: this retreat of yours is probably down to the fact I put you on the spot, and you cannot actually say why it is a "con...".
Well IMO there is no controversy about saying "Money for health and not the police" at all.
Ricardo, ‘when I read that the attendance there (at Rosa's site) has undergone a huge increase,’
Yes but as the …‘short (but very basic) introduction to the aims of this site’…. is 20,000 words long, how many actually returned or stayed more than a few seconds?
FD:
"ROSA -Don't you just get it? - I said let us leave it there, that means I do not wish nor want to engage in a debate with you on any subject of any sort, so kindly keep your righteousness to yourself and i will keeps my wrongs to myself. My wrongs and my rights are not to be judged by you! Thank you!"
Fine, I am quite happy for you to stay confused. I will not try to help you out at all. That's a promise!
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/
ros...oils_himsel.htm
I let Hegel go on until I hear things like "It's God's will". That is where Feuerbach slaps me upside the head. Marx strolls in and says "God's will" is merely a historical concept that I have.
Time lag ... lost in the deception ...
When the ‘rule of law’, as the result of government deception and corruption, incrementally transitions from a state of minor or mildly unjust control over the lives of its citizens, to a state of rigid fascistic control over its citizens, there is a time lag in the change of the viewpoints of the citizens affected. The majority of citizens will still hold the fantasy that they are living under the old rules, even as the newer more corrupt and oppressive rules are set in place and used to silence their more vocal fellow citizens.
I think that many on this thread have failed to fully understand the real depth of change in the scam ‘rule of law’, and the change in the troops and cops of all stripes, including prison guards, that enforce that scam ‘rule of law’. Many believe that cops are still the kind Bobby on the corner gently helping an old lady across the street when in reality today’s cop is judge, jury, and executioner, who will shoot you dead in the face on the subway. Today’s cop is someone who will mindlessly entrap you, seize your property without due process and then jail you. Today’s cop is protectionist muscle for the alcohol and tobacco cartel that ‘legally’ addicts and kills you and your loved ones and puts users of any competitive products behind bars. Etc. Etc.
Supporting troops and cops under the older, kinder, gentler, scam ‘rule of law’ may have had its place in terms of union solidarity, but under the present conditions of this new totally non responsive to the citizen scam ‘rule of law’, supporting law enforcement in any fashion is unconscionable! New methods of resistance are required to meet these harsher, more unjust times.
The psychological pressure of shunning of these newer more oppressive ‘law enforcement’ personnel is required and justified.
There is an old adage; “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you!”.
In past times that may have been good advice for the less spirited among us who were content with their daily ration of crumbs. But we now live in different times. The hand that feeds you is now a more corrupt and deceptive hand, and it is slowly (almost imperceptibly for many still living in the good Bobby, help the old lady cross the street, illusion), diminishing the supply of crumbs to selected groups of individuals.
It is time to bite this newer more corrupt hand that feeds you.
That is best accomplished by not feeding the hand that bites you!
Shun the troops and cops who enforce this immoral, preemptive brand of the scam ‘rule of law’, regardless of any ‘working man’ -- gag me with a fucking spoon! -- union affiliation.
The contradiction is that there is a duality in everything. A yin and a yang in everything. A good and a bad in everything. The deceptive among us are masters at exploiting that duality, that contradiction. They exploit the past illusionary viewpoint of good cops and patriotic troops in the older order by spreading that illusion of goodness liberally upon these newer less moral cops and troops in this newer present order.
Life is about seeing the contradictions and resolving the conflicts they present. Balance for the individual is the never ending desired state. It can not be achieved without constantly seeing the ever present duality in everything. Said another way; one must see the illusions in order to step out of them.
No balls! No brains! No freedom!
thanks anticapitalista. give 'em hell.
FD, I am sorry, I had no intention of annoying you --, and sure we can leave it at that.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/
ros...oils_himsel.htm
On the ball:
"The contradiction is that there is a duality in everything. A yin and a yang in everything. A good and a bad in everything. The deceptive among us are masters at exploiting that duality, that contradiction..."
This reads like so many mystical tracts I have had the misfortune to consult in my researches (and is no less inaccurate for all that), such as this:
"The great Fourth Hermetic Principle-the Principle of Polarity-embodies the truth that all manifested things have "two sides"; "two aspects"; "two poles"; a "pair of opposites," with manifold degrees between the two extremes. The old paradoxes, which have ever perplexed the mind of men, are explained by an understanding of this Principle. Man has always recognized something akin to this Principle, and has endeavored to express it by such sayings, maxims and aphorisms as the following: "Everything is and isn't, at the same time"; "all truths are but half-truths"; "every truth is half-false"; "there are two sides to everything"; "there is a reverse side to every shield," etc., etc. The Hermetic Teachings are to the effect that the difference between things seemingly diametrically opposed to each is merely a matter of degree. It teaches that "the pairs of opposites may be reconciled," and that "thesis and antithesis are identical in nature, but different in degree''; and that the ''universal reconciliation of opposites" is effected by a recognition of this Principle of Polarity. The teachers claim that illustrations of this Principle may be had on every hand, and from an examination into the real nature of anything..."
From here:
http://www.gnostic.org/kybalionh.../
kybalion10.htm
But duality is not the same as contradiction (or your left hand would 'contradict' your right, and males would contradict females (what hermaphrodites would do is best left in silence), and you have ignored things that come in threes, or fours, or...
Plenty of examples of those at my site.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ros...l/page%
2007.htm
And not all things change -- for example photons (or if they do, it is not a result of their 'internal contradictions' -- *whatever one of those is!*).
on the ball patriot,
I agree that under the new dispensation supporting the forces of law and order would be wrong. I just don't understand how supporting people who are involved in law enforcement going on strike, would be supporting the forces of law and order. The forces of law and order are dead set against the forces of law and order going on strike.
In general they're against anyone at all going on strike.
Duncan B:
"Yes but as the …‘short (but very basic) introduction to the aims of this site’…. is 20,000 words long, how many actually returned or stayed more than a few seconds?"
I am sure not many stayed for long, but I get enough e-mails thanking me for my work (and for my attention to detail) to suggest there are plenty of comrades out there who take Marxism seriously enough not to do that.
Now, the very very basic introduction is less than 5000 words (and designed for comrades like you with the attention span of a nervous cat):
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ros...ummies%
2001.htm
Anti-C:
"Well IMO there is no controversy about saying "Money for health and not the police" at all."
Nice get-out, and we all believe you, honest...
Rosa,
Do you really think I meant to write that there was a contradiction in our ENANTIA leaflet arguing for money for health and not the cops?
No "contradiction" at all and no controversy either.
Guess my jokes are pretty bad.
Rosa said: “And not all things change -- for example photons (or if they do, it is not a result of their 'internal contradictions' -- *whatever one of those is!*).”
Rosa, ALL things change, especially comments that are taken out of context and then inappropriately compared to the so many mystical tracts that poor you have had the misfortune to labor through.
And I never said that “duality is not the same as contradiction”. Go back and read my comments and when you are through there labor through this not so mystical tract about cops and government tactics to suppress free speech and protests. Here is an excerpt, it is a slow loading pdf but a worthwhile read for all who have posted on this thread;
“Welcome to Miami motherf----r, this is what you get when you f--- with us,” is
what one of them said to me as the van pulled off. I was handcuffed behind my back
and laid out on my stomach; my feet dangled out the back of the van—there wasn’t
enough room with all the cops. The police officers gave each other high-fives and
proceeded to drive around looking for another Legal Observer, all the while arguing
whether they could fit her in the back of the van with me.
Minutes earlier, three of the cops had jumped out of the white nondescript van and
attacked me. They were all wearing ski masks and dressed as anarchist black bloc
protesters. I threw up my hands and offered no resistance. They punched me and I
fell to the ground and attempted to protect myself. They kept punching me, kicking
me, and then they dragged me into the back of the van. They told my two friends to
get the f--- out of there or they would get it too. They eventually took me to a small
windowless room in the police station where they proceeded to interrogate me about
my political affiliations, schooling, and friends. They never took off their ski masks.
The moment that white van pulled up next to me, my stomach dropped. I knew
exactly what was coming. When they had me in the back of the van, I laughed a
little bit. Were they serious? Complete panic and fear then set in because they
were, indeed, serious. They threatened to kill me. Looking back, it was all very
surreal and so very absurd.
Today, when I relate the story to other people and listen to their reaction. They
usually respond with “I had no idea,” or “How could this happen in the United
States?” The truth is that it did happen because this government is scared. That is
what this whole experience has made me realize. Our organizing in the streets and
in the courts is a threat to this government, otherwise they would not pay us so much
attention. Ultimately, that realization has strengthened my resolve to keep fighting.
Miles Swanson, Legal Observer at the FTAA
meeting in Miami, 2003”
https://
www.nationallawyersguild....rotest_2007.pdf
Johng said: “I agree that under the new dispensation supporting the forces of law and order would be wrong. I just don't understand how supporting people who are involved in law enforcement going on strike, would be supporting the forces of law and order. The forces of law and order are dead set against the forces of law and order going on strike.
In general they're against anyone at all going on strike.”
Jhong you toy with me. Cops are not workers. They are oppression and subjugation specialists. Would you support child molesters if they had a union?
Anti-C:
"Do you really think I meant to write that there was a contradiction in our ENANTIA leaflet arguing for money for health and not the cops?
No "contradiction" at all and no controversy either."
Well, I have really backed you into an uncomfortable corner, haven't I?
Now, can we get you to go further: No contradictions anywhere at all in the entire universe...?
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/
ros...oils_himsel.htm
I was open minded about Rosa and his/her contributions as this debate progressed, but recent comments have left me with the impression of someone with a very mean spirited nasty attitude with zero ability to relate to anyone.
Rosa has suggested that he/she is not in the SWP, so thank fuck for that!
"It is time to bite this newer more corrupt hand that feeds you.
That is best accomplished by not feeding the hand that bites you!
Shun the troops and cops who enforce this immoral, preemptive brand of the scam ‘rule of law’, regardless of any ‘working man’ -- gag me with a fucking spoon! -- union affiliation."
i on the ball patriot does not tell us how he would deal with the police in a revolutionary situatiion. Does he really think he can outshoot them? They are better equipped and better organised than we are. If they are also monolithic, then there is no hope - we shall stay enslaved for ever and might as well get used to it. i on the ball patriot is very strong on slogans and very thin on strategy.
Rosa - Well, I have really backed you into an uncomfortable corner, haven't I?
Not at all. Please define uncomfortable.
Actually don't bother. Just re-read the posts again and you will see that there is no hint of your dreaded dialectics in any of my posts in this thread.
Get a sense of humour Rosa.
Paul:
"I was open minded about Rosa and his/her contributions as this debate progressed, but recent comments have left me with the impression of someone with a very mean spirited nasty attitude with zero ability to relate to anyone."
You shouldn't be so hard on Mr G.
"Rosa has suggested that he/she is not in the SWP, so thank fuck for that!"
I can see why you mystics might want to keep me out.
Ah, Gin and Tonic: figured out why the things you mentioned near the start are 'contradictions' yet?
Anti-C:
"Please define uncomfortable."
I will, once you define 'define'.
"Just re-read the posts again and you will see that there is no hint of your dreaded dialectics in any of my posts in this thread."
Except, of course the notorious "con..." phase you went through.
"Get a sense of humour Rosa."
Well, if all that is on offer is one like yours, I will probably be more humourous not bothering.
One on the ball patriot:
"Rosa, ALL things change, especially comments that are taken out of context and then inappropriately compared to the so many mystical tracts that poor you have had the misfortune to labor through."
Considering Hegel got his ideas from the Hermetic crowd I quoted, and since the things they say still resemble the things you say, the only conclusion is that you are a mystic.
More detail here:
http://www.marxists.org/referenc...ks/en/
magee.htm
And, even though you put "ALL" in capitals, it is no less true that not all things change. One example being, of course, the claim that all things change, which has remained the same for 2500 years.
Of course, if that saying changes into its opposite (as all the dialectical classics tell us everything must) then it can only change into "Some things do not change".
So, either way, I am right.
And, if you look this up you will see that photons do not change/decay (or if they do, they do not change as a result of their internal contradictions --, for they are elementary particles and thus have no 'parts' --, as I noted, but only as a result of external influences), so your physics needs upgrading I think. Left alone, Photons are eternal beings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Pho...ical_properties
"And I never said that “duality is not the same as contradiction”."
In that case, wtf does this mean:
"The contradiction is that there is a duality in everything."
Why is that a 'contradiction'?
You lot keep dancing around this question, but seem constitutionally incapable of answering it.
since this thread has become some kind of horrible group therapy session, here i wade =
i on the ball patriot - your style is that of a moralist - you take the simplest of ideas and expound upon them interminably. whenever anyone picks you up on the banality of your thought, you repeat the same ideas. i wouldn't like to be in the thought cage of current american discourse, but you unrepentantly snarl from its confines. your style fucks me off, and you have no understanding of what or why socialists fight. socialists fight because the world can be based on democratic lines. your wildsprung farspread rage has nothing to with socialism, more huffing and puffing. you harp on about corruption - deal with the corruption of your own space by your ruling class. adopt a doctrine or read more theory. and then start to fight.
individual situations amount to politics and one can not deduce politics from the observation of individual actions. the plural of anecdote is not evidence. i'm being flip but by jove you piss me off.
Grim and Dim said: “i on the ball patriot does not tell us how he would deal with the police in a revolutionary situatiion. Does he really think he can outshoot them? They are better equipped and better organised than we are. If they are also monolithic, then there is no hope - we shall stay enslaved for ever and might as well get used to it. i on the ball patriot is very strong on slogans and very thin on strategy.”
Shunning the cops, the pols and the crooked electoral system right now IS the revolution. It IS a strategy. It is a complete and total vote of non confidence in the government. Shunning by the few initially will grow as it draws more and more attention to the illusions and more and more people learn of the deceptions. It is a platform for the majority of the dissatisfied to physically and very publicly dissolve the false mandate that the crooked pols claim as the source of their power.
Florence Durrant just told Rosa to take a hike, she took away Rosa’s power by shunning her, and she did it the right way by telling her publicly. Rosa has been condescendingly arrogant and drawn barbs from others whom she has offended with her attitude and for derailing the thread. If she continues in this supercilious vein more and more will shun her and she will ultimately be babbling to herself. She will have lost her power over those who shun her.
That is what must be done by millions of citizens to the crooked cops, pols and electoral system. That IS the revolution, it will work. Shunning, and publicly stating why is a powerful force for change. More powerful than dialoguing with dense and mindless cops who are your enemy. More powerful than voting in an illusion that only serves to validate that illusion and allow you to publicly display your stupidity and give up your power. More powerful than supporting a cops union that masks their true mission of oppression in a slogan of “protect and serve”.
When you work within the system you dissipate your energies in the system. It is designed that way. You must put your energy outside the system. Shunning is a way of putting your energy outside of the normal energy dissipating paths.
Shunning is a revolution of spirit. It can spread like a wild fire to lay waste to the corrupt few among us. As you said, Grim and Dim, you can not “outshoot them”. But you certainly can shun them!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunning
"It is a complete and total vote of non confidence in the government"
Refusing to relate to Prison Officers on Strike? In the concrete situation thats a vote of confidence in the government. Its also true that participation in elections has been historically lower in the US then in almost any developed country, for a very long period of time. In itself this achieves nothing, for whilst it may indicate the extent of alienation from the political system, alienation is in itself not necessarily a protest or neccessarily a consious rejection.
Unfortunately politics is not like a discussion on the internet (where your tactics seem excellent ones incidently, and I certainly should have adopted this method earlier).
One-weird-patriot:
"Florence Durrant just told Rosa to take a hike, she took away Rosa’s power by shunning her, and she did it the right way by telling her publicly. Rosa has been condescendingly arrogant and drawn barbs from others whom she has offended with her attitude and for derailing the thread. If she continues in this supercilious vein more and more will shun her and she will ultimately be babbling to herself. She will have lost her power over those who shun her."
Not so; I am quite happy to leave poor Florence in her ignorant state.
Now, if that is 'taking my power away', then bring it on.
And 'shunning' me will not stop me.
But it will prove you cannot defend your ideas.
Anyway, what are you, a member of the Exclusive Brethren?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Exc...lusive_Brethren
And what you interpret as 'arrogance' is really the result of my receiving 25 years of abuse from dialecticians (like Mr G -- I just go on the attack from the start; I was quite pleasant to begin with back in the 1980's, but the abuse I got for just *questioning* the Holy Dialectic changed me into what you now see), as well as an expression of my anger at how these mystics have ruined Marxism over the last 140 years.
So, when you bang on about 'shunning' (something that will go down here like a lead balloon, and not just with me), what you really mean is that you intend to stick your head back in the sand.
And, from what I can see from your posts, that is probably where it belongs.
Mr G:
"where your tactics seem excellent ones incidently, and I certainly should have adopted this method earlier"
I accept your surrender.
Now, does anyone else want to try to render this Hermetic theory comprehensible?
After all we have only been waiting for someone to do this since Hegel put pen to misuse...
ROSA - This is my final request to you Rosa. Please do not ever insult me - for a start you do not even know me or my learning needs for that matter. If I am ignorant as you say - this has nothing to do with you what-so-ever! I have not questioned your intelligence, your knowledge etc, so please do not question mine. Respect does not cost a penny and yet its worth more than gold to some of us! I respect myself - hence I do not disrepect others - whether intelligent, knowledgeable or not.
On the ball patriot: one thing I don't understand is this idea of working 'outside the system'. What is 'the system' to you. Serious question.
"Shunning the cops, the pols and the crooked electoral system right now IS the revolution. It IS a strategy. "
98% of the time I do "shun" the cops. I never see them. They do not intrude on my life. UNLESS I want to go on a demonstration, organise a protest, occupy premises etc. Then I see plenty of them. And I'm not sure how I could shun them. How do you "shun" someone when they're beating you up? So to shun them should I give up taking part in all forms of protest activity? Doesn't sound much of a strategy to me.
And of course the cops and the electoral system don't exist for their own sake. They are the products, the defence and the legitimation of an economic system. How can I shun that? Maybe "Patriot" has a private income. Most of us go to work. Can we shun our emoployers - whether they be the capitalist state or greedy private owners? What's the alternative? Go on the dole - but we're shunning the state. Steal or beg - our friends the cops will soon be along. Maybe "patriot" thinks the entire working class should go on hunger strike.
FD:
"ROSA - This is my final request to you Rosa. Please do not ever insult me - for a start you do not even know me or my learning needs for that matter. If I am ignorant as you say - this has nothing to do with you what-so-ever! I have not questioned your intelligence, your knowledge etc, so please do not question mine. Respect does not cost a penny and yet its worth more than gold to some of us! I respect myself - hence I do not disrepect others - whether intelligent, knowledgeable or not.
florence durrant"
OK
steffaction said: “i on the ball patriot - your style is that of a moralist - you take the simplest of ideas and expound upon them interminably. whenever anyone picks you up on the banality of your thought, you repeat the same ideas. i wouldn't like to be in the thought cage of current american discourse, but you unrepentantly snarl from its confines. your style fucks me off, and you have no understanding of what or why socialists fight. socialists fight because the world can be based on democratic lines. your wildsprung farspread rage has nothing to with socialism, more huffing and puffing. you harp on about corruption - deal with the corruption of your own space by your ruling class. adopt a doctrine or read more theory. and then start to fight.”
You are right, I am a moralist in the sense that I view my politics in terms of simple right and wrong. Is that not what socialists are doing when they fight “because the world can be based on democratic lines.” Socialists have made a moral judgment that democracy would better serve humanity than a dictator, fascism, etc. I too believe that. I am sorry that my style fucks you off. Ideas are simply wedges, it is persistence that drives them home. Persistence can be repetitive and very grating when one catches on to the basic message. My basic message is that things are not what they seem because they have been purposefully corrupted and co-opted by an elite few for devious self serving means, and, that we all need to look a lot deeper and do a better job of revealing the dual nature - the good and the bad - in all of these co-opted entities. I also believe that the corruption in my “own space”, the corruption in ‘my’ ruling class, is also the corruption in your space. Similarly, the corruption of your ruling class is also my corruption. If one individual lives in a police state, we all live in a police world. Said another way, we are all one.
On the touchy feely, horrible group therapy session, here i also wade =
I suspect that a part of your disenchantment towards me, in addition to the moralizing repetitiveness that I admitted to above, might also have to do with the fact that your Dad is a cop. You love him I am sure and here is some asshole (me) on the net telling you to shun him because police practices have become so onerous. I understand the dilemma. I have an older brother who recently retired after twenty years as a state cop. We have had many ‘law and order’ moments. All I can say is I am glad that he is retired. A key part of shunning is to send a very strong message to those being shunned that you feel their behavior, or the behavior of the organization that they belong to is wrong. It is the dialogue that is important -- letting cops know that the folks are on to them and that they do not protect and serve the people so much as they protect and serve the few elite rich. If positive change is to come at all it will not be totally painless. The rich will not give up their new wealth, garnered from their current ever more oppressive practices, easily. Steffaction, sometimes the struggle really sucks.
Johng said: “Refusing to relate to Prison Officers on Strike? In the concrete situation thats a vote of confidence in the government.”
No it is not. It is a vote that Prison Officers are engaged in the direct oppression and curtailment of the liberty of citizens (‘work’ hah! hah!) for the government, and as such can not be supported. That direct involvement is so close to the oppressive state that they are the oppressive state. It is a moral judgment that the work that the state has them doing is unacceptable.
Johng also said: “Its also true that participation in elections has been historically lower in the US then in almost any developed country, for a very long period of time. In itself this achieves nothing, for whilst it may indicate the extent of alienation from the political system, alienation is in itself not necessarily a protest or necessarily a consious rejection.”
True, that alienation is in itself not necessarily a protest or necessarily a conscious rejection. I am not suggesting a simple, tail between the legs, alienation. I am suggesting a very conscious, highly visible, very public shunning, that will make that alienation very concrete to the powers that be.
The ‘system’ (here I mean generally accepted methods and institutions) has failed to respond to the will of the people. In fact it is subverting the will of the people. One must therefore not dissipate energies in the system -- those generally accepted, established venues.
I am not saying just don’t vote. I am saying express your alienation by informing those you are shunning in a very public communication exactly why you are shunning them and what it will take to get you back in the game. Send copies to any interested parties that you might feel will give it some voice. If the word shunning is troublesome think boycott, it is the same concept with less of a moral tone. I like shunning because all of the right wing Christians will attach, and consider, the moral judgment implied in it.
I was highly vocal when I shunned the electoral process here in Florida last year. I stated my demand - no more touch screen voting, hand counted paper ballots only, system wide - by letter to my local supervisor of elections and copied other political activists and news outlets . Governor Crist recently announced that Florida is moving out of touch screen voting. Will I now vote? No! I will continue to shun the voting process until we have paper ballots, non machine counted, system wide. I believe that the established gangsters are fearful of a massive voter boycott. They know that they would lose control without that validation process. Shunning is a way to express the will of the people and will ultimately make the electoral system honest.
Election Boycott 08!
Paper Ballots System Wide!
Having just returned from holidays, I find johng has been trying to criticise the arguments I put forward at the Marxism 2007 talk on Dialectics. At this late stage, I don't think anyone can object that I'm sidetracking the discussion on the prison officers' strike, which has petered out by now. Rosa has already been dealing with the matter, so I'll concentrate on what I think is the one remaining area of contention.
After trying to summarise what I said at the Dialectics meeting (which can be read here), johng makes the following objections:
There are many difficulties here, but for a Marxist the most striking thing is the extraordinary ignorence of the historical role of religion in the development of techniques, theories of these techniques, and indeed scientific discoveries of many kinds, this being true since the beginning of human history. ... Science was bound up with religion for most of human history and it is only in the period leading up to and following the enlightenment that human knowledge progressed by strictly seperating these domains. ... That this was progress can't be denied. But how do we explain developments (most of them in recorded history) which proceeded because of, rather then in spite of theological and religious beliefs? ... I would suggest a bit of the old dialectical thought might come in handy here. Anyone confused by any of the above might try playing a quick game of Civilizations. ... Its incredible to me that someone who proudly calls themselves a historical materialist can know so very little about actual human history.
Since I've argued (like Rosa) that "the old dialectical thought" can only serve to mystify, I can't agree.
Neither can I agree that any of the above touches on my argument at all, but since it may have a superficial plausibility, I'll explain why. johng's argument only appears to work because it elides a crucial distinction between religious institutions on the one hand, and the language of religious ritual and holy literature on the other. So, to take one of many examples, the Benedictine order, after the Cluniac reforms of the 10th century, became the most important transmitter of new technological skills and ideas in civil engineering and agriculture across Europe. Thus a religious institution played a materially progressive role. But anyone who has ever examined medieval treatises on farming or architecture will find that the language used for conveying the practical ideas is - unsurprisingly - practical, and not religious. You can give your thanks to God at the start of the treatise and at the end, but if your chosen task is to enable others to construct more efficient ploughs or water-mills, or to show them how they can take advantage of the greater load-bearing potential of pointed arches, then the religious talk eventually has to stop and the practical talk has to begin. And that is exactly what these writers did.
As a believer in Dialectics, johng has characteristically failed to think his argument through, and rushed for the universal glue of Dialectics to fix it up, thereby compounding ordinary confusion with mystical confusion.
But there need be no mystery here. The same abbots and bishops who were happy to sponsor entirely earthbound practical and technical work also sponsored the propogation of religious ideas. Again, the Dialectican would want to rush away from rational argument here, preferring mystificatory talk about "contradictions". But both the technical treatises and the religious mumbo jumbo served to entrench the power of the abbots and bishops as members of the ruling class. Better ploughs, water-mills or bridges served to increase the surplus they needed to live their unproductive ruling-class lives and to sustain the Church as a ruling-class institution. Religious ideology served to make the rest of the population accept the Church's demands (including demands on their labour), again sustaining the Church as a ruling-class instution. Certainly, grand cathedrals and abbey churches had an ideological role to play, but bishops and abbots didn't want the structure collapsing on them, so they relied on those who had the necessary technical expertise - they didn't simply rely on God or angels to stop a 1000-ton stone ceiling from falling on their heads. (To pre-empt johng's next likely objection, of course religion then and now did not only serve as an ideological buttress for the ruling class, but that is not of relevance to the present argument.)
In previous discussions on Dialectics at the Tomb, certain individuals have been keen to pose as heroic activists disdainful of the supposedly time-wasting anti-Dialectical arguments that Rosa and I put forward (many of these same individuals, as it happens, are merely Dialecticians switching tactics after seeing their arguments shot down). Readers who have come this far may wonder what it all matters. I could say that examining the behaviour of a past ruling class is legitimate work for Marxist historians, and that it can give us greater critical distance the better to interpret the behaviour of our own ruling class better. I could also say that we are, as Marxists, supposed to be interested in the development of the forces of production, although this is rarely in evidence (hence the woefully ignorant repetition of "the handmill gives you society with the feudal lord" without the realisation that Marx's slip needs correcting).
But beyond this, let us ask ourselves how Dialectics is used. Here we saw a perfectly intelligent revolutionary socialist activist (johng - but I don't want to single him out here) throwing together a fundamentally flawed argument in the knowledge that Dialectics could be invoked and all would be well. In this particular instance, it has little relevance for the next demo you help to organise, or for the Socialist Worker articles that will have to be written if, say, the housing bubble suddenly bursts. But would you want to rely on people who are in the habit of constructing shoddy arguments and then invoking Dialectics to finish the job and to silence objections? That's fortunately not the situation we're in today in the party to which many Tomb readers and contributors belong, but if Dialectics is not given a rough ride whenever it appears, its use can easily spread. Other Trotskyist parties have degenerated and split - for various reasons - into warring factions, where leaders hurl Dialectical spells at each other like the wizards of children's cartoons. At the beginnings of our party's history, Tony Cliff was faced with charges that his state capitalist theory was "mechanical" and "undialectical"; he won support by arguing his case carefully, persuading others rather than demanding that they follow him because his Dialectical spells were more powerful than those of the other wizards.
Let's keep it that way.
Hi on the ball patriot. One problem in this argument is that we're both shouting 'look deeper', but seem to mean different things by this term. You speak of elite manipulations. We speak about the nature of capitalism. You seem to believe that capitalism as it exists is the result of elite manipulations, whilst we believe that elite manipulations are the product of capitalism.
Look DEEPER we shout at each other. This is clearly a very basic disagreement, but one difficulty is that it cannot be resolved morally. Hence Steffecon's and indeed the Marxist traditions opposition to moralism, which shouldn't be confused with the morality we all have (even if our morals might differ). Its an argument about how capitalism works and how this is connected to the workings of its institutions, not an argument about how bad capitalism is, or how bad its institutions are (we're agreed on that).
In terms of the arguments about cops, prison officers etc, etc. I think this argument is relevent here to. When you talk about a qualitative shift in the nature of these institutions I think your referring to the interaction of neo-liberalism and liberal governance in advanced capitalist societies. This co-exists with an increasing absence of even the rhetoric of reformism, not just in the realm of economics but how state agencies treat us. Increasingly there is hardly any difference between the official left and right in this respect.
I agree with all this (but would note the danger of underestimating previous kinds of brutalism: perhaps one distinction would be that the sharp edge of these brutalisms used to be visible in 'unreformed' bits of the system in advanced capitalist societies, from northern ireland to alabama. Today, whilst such areas exist even within advanced capitalist societies, the kinds of regression your speaking of have their headquarters at the centre not the periphary.
However if we look at the connections between McJobs and the disposable people in prison, you have to ask yourself quite seriously if, for example in the US, a section of this brutal machine went on strike, it would not signal something faulty in the machine itself. For the idea that anyone has any rights at all as against the market and the state (remember we're talking quite literally about 'servents of the state' here) cuts so against the grain of the present set-up that such a move would signal a deeper incoherence in the workings of that state then simply a few people grumbling about money.
This isn't happening in your part of the world but I think it is happening in this part of the world. On the news over here we are told that the government is 'keeping its fingers crossed' about the PO dispute, trying to 'hold the line', not because they're worried just about Prison Officers, but because they're worried about other groups of workers who have responded to the dispute by raising questions about their own conditions.
The simple question would be this. If you are in a public sector union and someone gives you a leaflet saying you should vote to strike over your own conditions because of the success (lets hope) of PO action, do you think the leaflet should not have been written? Do you think the workers should not feel more confident if the PO win a victory against the government?
If you think that the leaflet should be put out and it would be rational for workers to feel more confident about going on strike, then you have to conclude that PO workers should be encouraged to do so. If they should be encouraged to do so then you have to show solidarity with them. Its also true that a smaller but nevertheless significant part of this story would be the consiousness of PO workers themselves. Somewhat isolated (though not nearly as isolated as coppers) from the rest of the class, to turn on the state and rely on the support of other workers has to be a good thing.
There is a history of this kind of question being debated. Social Workers for instance. Their growing involvement in trades unionism was not without controversy but in the end it was good, both for the movement as a whole, and for more progressive ideas amongst that group of workers, that they did.
The analogy is imperfect but there is no reason in principle why they same thing shouldn't apply. Unless you have illusions in the people who used to tyranise over the lives of the most vulnerable, marginalised and oppressed sections of the working class that is...
So, once again. LOOK DEEPER!
Babeuf is simply wrong to imagine that it is possible to neatly seperate the development of religous thought and technical arguments in this way. But I have no intention of trying the patience of people further on this topic.
I want to return to On the Ball Patriots much more relevent and interesting arguments:
Hi on the ball patriot. One problem in this argument is that we're both shouting 'look deeper', but seem to mean different things by this term. You speak of elite manipulations. We speak about the nature of capitalism. You seem to believe that capitalism as it exists is the result of elite manipulations, whilst we believe that elite manipulations are the product of capitalism.
Look DEEPER we shout at each other. This is clearly a very basic disagreement, but one difficulty is that it cannot be resolved morally. Hence Steffecon's and indeed the Marxist traditions opposition to moralism, which shouldn't be confused with the morality we all have (even if our morals might differ). Its an argument about how capitalism works and how this is connected to the workings of its institutions, not an argument about how bad capitalism is, or how bad its institutions are (we're agreed on that).
In terms of the arguments about cops, prison officers etc, etc. I think this argument is relevent here to. When you talk about a qualitative shift in the nature of these institutions I think your referring to the interaction of neo-liberalism and liberal governance in advanced capitalist societies. This co-exists with an increasing absence of even the rhetoric of reformism, not just in the realm of economics but how state agencies treat us. Increasingly there is hardly any difference between the official left and right in this respect.
I agree with all this (but would note the danger of underestimating previous kinds of brutalism: perhaps one distinction would be that the sharp edge of these brutalisms used to be visible in 'unreformed' bits of the system in advanced capitalist societies, from northern ireland to alabama. Today, whilst such areas exist even within advanced capitalist societies, the kinds of regression your speaking of have their headquarters at the centre not the periphary.
However if we look at the connections between McJobs and the disposable people in prison, you have to ask yourself quite seriously if, for example in the US, a section of this brutal machine went on strike, it would not signal something faulty in the machine itself. For the idea that anyone has any rights at all as against the market and the state (remember we're talking quite literally about 'servents of the state' here) cuts so against the grain of the present set-up that such a move would signal a deeper incoherence in the workings of that state then simply a few people grumbling about money.
This isn't happening in your part of the world but I think it is happening in this part of the world. On the news over here we are told that the government is 'keeping its fingers crossed' about the PO dispute, trying to 'hold the line', not because they're worried just about Prison Officers, but because they're worried about other groups of workers who have responded to the dispute by raising questions about their own conditions.
The simple question would be this. If you are in a public sector union and someone gives you a leaflet saying you should vote to strike over your own conditions because of the success (lets hope) of PO action, do you think the leaflet should not have been written? Do you think the workers should not feel more confident if the PO win a victory against the government?
If you think that the leaflet should be put out and it would be rational for workers to feel more confident about going on strike, then you have to conclude that PO workers should be encouraged to do so. If they should be encouraged to do so then you have to show solidarity with them. Its also true that a smaller but nevertheless significant part of this story would be the consiousness of PO workers themselves. Somewhat isolated (though not nearly as isolated as coppers) from the rest of the class, to turn on the state and rely on the support of other workers has to be a good thing.
There is a history of this kind of question being debated. Social Workers for instance. Their growing involvement in trades unionism was not without controversy but in the end it was good, both for the movement as a whole, and for more progressive ideas amongst that group of workers, that they did.
The analogy is imperfect but there is no reason in principle why they same thing shouldn't apply. Unless you have illusions in the people who used to tyranise over the lives of the most vulnerable, marginalised and oppressed sections of the working class that is...
Again. LOOK DEEPER!!
Comrades will note from Mr G's reply, I hope, how Babeuf's prediction that, when their bogus arguments are exposed, our mystical friends beat a hasty retreat.
Tomb patrol, tomb patrol...
sorry I posted the above twice. Just delete the last one. Babeuf has simply done the usual trick of regurgitating an argument that is wrong, then claiming that its right by hammering on a table, and then using the fact that I don't agree with him to argue that my disagreement JUST GOES TO SHOW....etc, etc. Don't know what it is with the logicians but they seem incapable of imagining that they're not the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Just delete my post above and lets stick to the PO dispute.
Hello patriot.
Here in backward Britain I've voted on manually counted pieces of paper for the last 45 years. It hasn't stopped us getting leaders like murderess Thatcher, liar Blair and the unspeakable sewer rat Brown.
Now I don't believe that an electoral boycott would pose a serious threat to our rulers.
But let's suppose it did. What would happen - on the basis of your own premises?
Obviously a boycott by a few people is pointless - you'd have to involve large numbers. That means organisation - meetings, leaflets, fund-raising, perhaps pickets of polling stations etc etc.
If this looked like being at all effective it would be promptly demonised "Communist", "Unchristian", "Terrorist" etc etc.
So the cops would come in, beat you up, haul you off to jail. You can't boycott prison officers if you're in jail.
And don't tell us you'd do it all through the internet. The police are quite good at tracking paedophiles who use the internet. If election-boycotters were a threat, they'd quickly seize your computer and examine your files.
Of course you're right to be a "moralist" in the sense that the world we live in is profoundly immoral. But the aim is not for you to feel morally superior - you may well be morally superior to me: I don't care, and neither does the system.Surely you have a moral obligation to actually do something to try and change things. For that you need a strategy.
Some of us here have got a strategy. To sum it up very briefly - encourage the maximum unity of working people, and try to provoke the maximum disunity among their enemies. It may be very difficult and take a long time. But it is a strategy. What have you got??
Mr G:
"Babeuf has simply done the usual trick of regurgitating an argument that is wrong, then claiming that its right by hammering on a table, and then using the fact that I don't agree with him to argue that my disagreement JUST GOES TO SHOW....etc, etc. Don't know what it is with the logicians but they seem incapable of imagining that they're not the greatest thing since sliced bread."
Yet again, comrades will note that Babeuf's measured tone can in no way be described as 'hammering the table', and as far as us 'logicians' are concerned, far from having as high an opinion of ourselves as Mr G has of mystics like Hegel, we at least took the trouble to learn the subject before passing comment on it.
Again, unlike Mr G.
Ok, I have now updated my latest take-down of Mr G, since I promised to search back in Lenin's archives to find where I had originally adopted different tactics toward Mr G.
This has been done to show that he threw the comradely and respectful manner I originally showed him back in my face, underlining why I am now so aggressive with him.
Anyone who checks these out will see that the debating tactics he uses these days are the ones he has always used.
This link should work:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/
ros...el.htm#Appendix
If not, go here and scroll down to the Appendix at the end:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/
ros...oils_himsel.htm
[More will be added later.]
ok let me just state again. Babeuf is quite wrong to imagine that religous, technical and philosophical developments can be so neatly seperated. They can't be. But there is no point in debating with people who so strongly believe that they MUST be right that they're not interested in reasoned or rational debate (let alone empirical evidence). It also needs to be said that the printing of deranged nonsense about me on a blog where there is no right to reply is the act of a stalker: not a comrade. And anyone who collaberates in any way with someone who behaves like this, I will not engage with.
Tomb Patrol, I really object to being stalked on the net by Rosa. I come here for a chat with comrades. I do not come here to be abused on the net in a forum where I have no right to reply. I think she should either stop this unfraternal behaviour or be banned. Its disgusting.
I am terminating this thread. No further comments will be accepted here, and in particular this discussion will not recommence on a separate thread. Is everyone clear? (Don't answer that, I won't let the comment through).
Johng said : “Hi on the ball patriot. One problem in this argument is that we're both shouting 'look deeper', but seem to mean different things by this term. You speak of elite manipulations. We speak about the nature of capitalism. You seem to believe that capitalism as it exists is the result of elite manipulations, whilst we believe that elite manipulations are the product of capitalism.”
I believe that capitalism does not exist. It does not exist because of the result of elite manipulations. Prices, production, and the distribution of goods are not determined mainly by competition in a free market, they are determined by the elite manipulations.
Capitalism is simply the name of the ruse that gets proffered and argued and serves to take the eye off of the manipulations. Deception, in the form of manipulation and corruption has been around a lot longer than capitalism. The elite manipulations, the ability to deceive, are genetically programmed into the human race. I believe that looking deeper into the deceptions, and the process of deception -- as opposed to the non existent masks such as capitalism -- will better serve us all and give us greater insights that will form the basis of a less conflicted , less deceptive and fairer world.
As for looking deeper;
ALL words wear a similar mask that hides a deeper meaning. The deeper meaning most always masks some sort of deception or unpleasantness. Take for example the word politics. Politics, most might believe, is the name given to the complexity of social interactions between human beings as they go about getting their needs met. And that is true. People that hold that viewpoint would have a good basic understanding of the meaning of the word. But most would not hold the viewpoint that politics is also a cozy, comforting little euphemism for the process of cannibalization and subjugation for sustenance that goes on betwixt and between humans and humans and other species. It is a very scary dog eat dog world that we live in. All organisms must cannibalize (verb transitive here) other organisms in order to stay alive. No one gets out alive! Politics, getting one’ needs met for sustenance, is in reality a very serious, life and death process. When we speak of politics in the first instance, we mask that unpleasantness. We are sedated to the reality when we hold prominent in our minds that first meaning. We are more skeptical and alert when we hold prominent the second, closer to reality meaning of the process of cannibalization.
Similarly, we must hold prominent in our minds the ruse capitalism meaning that says capitalism is a mask that hides the vicious corruption and is not simply just another economic system.
Johng, regardless of what ever meaning is ascribed to ruse capitalism, I believe that we are both agreed that the core problem is the inequitable distribution of resources to the few and scant access to those resources by the many. The few are living in obscene comfort at the expense of the masses who we are living in comparative and real squalor and they do not have a prayer of developing their greatest potential as human beings -- and scam ‘rule of law’ is at the heart of it. The imbalance needs to be eliminated and a more beneficial to all system of access to the world’s resources is needed.
I think the way to that better world is extreme skepticism of the systems as they are, examining the process of deception, and revealing those deceptions.
As for the cop issue, you make good points, I understand them but I must disagree with them. The point about the qualitative shift is probably most important in my thinking, and yes it is at the center and I would say even non existent in the periphary. But it is a fast moving demon and strong measures are needed.
Along with outing the oppression ‘workers’ (cops) I would like to see more union consolidation and more of reaching out to all citizens. I have long advocated ear marking a portion of union dues, maybe 10%, for just that kind of effort. Hey, it just occurred to me, maybe the unions could collect dues from ordinary, non union citizens, and use the funds to advocate for them with government. Now that would be a powerhouse organization that would rock the 'system’ I am sure!
"I am terminating this thread. No further comments will be accepted here, and in particular this discussion will not recommence on a separate thread. Is everyone clear? (Don't answer that, I won't let the comment through)."
The funny thing is, I posted exactly the same thing earlier, telling people to just stop cos the most interesting political discussion I've ever seen on the blog has been completely ruined by theoretical dick-waving.
And Haloscan ate my post!
So anyway, this is me saying "I totally agree".
"I believe that capitalism does not exist. It does not exist because of the result of elite manipulations. Prices, production, and the distribution of goods are not determined mainly by competition in a free market, they are determined by the elite manipulations".
In one sense "on the ball" thats a perfectly acceptable position from a Marxist point of view. Marx did not believe that Capitalism existed in the form written about by Adam Smith (although he did learn from Smith, and other bourgoise economists). However for Marx the writings of someone like Adam Smith reflected two things.
First of all it was propaganda for capitalism. One does not usually expect propaganda to provide a fair and balenced picture of the nature of capitalism. Secondly, such accounts, rather then just deluding others, were themselves deluded. Because capitalism CANNOT exist in that form. The imagined world of free independent producers producing for a free market and satisfying each others needs on that basis, in a radical democratic Republic, in which there was as little inequality as possible between persons (the radical origins of all those laws against monopoly and in defence of free trade etc) was the utopia of radical lower and upper middle class intellectuals of the 18th century.
It was a genuine radicalism in its time. But the system created by these individuals turned out differently then they expected. And this wasn't because a few people became corrupt (from Rousseau onwards these ideologues were obsessed with 'corruption' and the attendent dangers of inequality, largely because the very system they fought for was generating it at every turn: its very similar to the obsession with Virtue one gets amongst Islamists today).
It was because this idealistic account of what would happen when you destroyed the power of kings and priests and replaced it with a system based on free trade and democracy was flawed and wrong. They didn't understand the new kinds of inequality and the new kinds of corruption generated by capitalism. This is why, many Marxists, reading your account will think that you are simply reproducing the illusions of the 18th century.
I've always been fascinated by the way in which the US's national ideology is bound up with these illusions. But its also always seemed to me a prime example of how once revolutionary ideologies can come to serve reactionary ends, whether by directly supporting those ends, or, as I would argue is the case in what you argue, confusing those who desperately want to oppose the system.
Marx described the traditions of bourgoise radicalism in France in terms of 'history weighing like a nightmare on the brain'. And these historical turns were for Marx the real 'ruse of history', emptying old ideologies of their old content and confronting us with a bewildering range of new questions.
Marx's analyses of capitalism was an attempt to answer these new questions.
GUYS!! This thread is CLOSED.
Capiche?
How come that slur was allowed through???
Thanks, but if you were going to let one of my comments through, I'd have preferred it to have been this:
"Jim, comrades here tell us that dialectics enters into everything they do and think, except when I challenge them, they go rather quiet, and complain that I mention it.
Add to that the fact that I did not raise this issue, Grim and Dim did.
But I will always fight my corner, often very aggressively, since I am more angry that I can say over the mess this theory has made of Marxism (and of the brains of excellent comrades in the SWP)."
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