John, this seems to be a hard-wired article of faith with you, one we have heard MANY times:
"The chief obstacle to building the massive egalitarian revolutionary movement is this: people think that hardly anybody else agrees with them in having their egalitarian revolutionary aspiration (i.e., to “remove the rich from power, etc.”). They therefore feel hopeless about the possibility of such a revolution" But the rest of us dimply are not convinced that this is THE main obstacle, although it is a valid point and needs to be part of the strategy. Hearing you state it for the upteenth time does not move the needle.
I am identifying the CHIEF CURRENT obstacle. One needs to do that in order to know what strategy to pursue. Right?
Furthermore, the reason activists fail to see what is the chief obstacle is their wrong view of ordinary people, a view that is elitist and reflecting the centuries-long elitism of virtually all intellectuals including Karl Marx.
John, perhaps we can discuss this on December 2nd. But you make the tasks we have to perform, equivalent to having some kind of mass group therapy session.
Group therapy is wonderful. Everyone in the group finds out they have similar problems! It's a great thing...
But it's not "What is to be Done".
The masses of people are not all spontaneously get together and discover that they all feel they are equal.
Look at that text, by Lenin (not Chernyshevsky) to find out what is to be done.
I suggest you read what happened at Dartmouth in 1969 but not in 1968 to see the effect of people learning they are not alone. I was one of the organizers of the 1969 building take over that abolished ROTC from Dartmouth in an anti-Vietnam War effort. Please read about it at https://www.pdrboston.org/what-causes-a-political-sea-change . After you read about this event, please tell me if you think that when people learned in 1969 that they were not alone that that was just "therapy" but not the KEY thing that made people abolish ROTC in 1969 instead of 1968. OK?
What you cite is valid, but not the SOLE issue here. Removing the rich from power is hugely complex and not merely an acknowledgement of a certain truth. I too had similar experience as you during the Vietnam era and we won over the majority at University of Hawai'i, I think at least not to OPPOSE us.
I don't want to get into your anarcho mishegas, John. The fact remains that you were an ORGANIZER among a number of OTHER ORGANIZERS. So it just wasn't the case that people just spontaneously listened to you and discovered they like equality.
And 1969 came at the end of almost a DECADE of an ORGANIZATION known as the Students for a Democratic Society. Which fell apart later because they lacked THEORY and because they were anarchistic, and thus fell prey to a bunch of Stalinist Maoist groups that destroyed their internal democracy.
But you are not assuredly, from multiple articles I (and Jon) have read, an advocate of a centralized pole of authority, alongside decentralism.
In other words, you have consistently advocated for the idea of "voluntary communalism"--that all authority, all sovereignty, should be vested in local communities. These communities, governed by participatory assemblies of the local residents themselves, should always and evermore have the (dubious) "right" to decide, on their own, whether they wish to follow the directives of more centralized, delegated bodies elected by the citizens.
I am certainly not opposed to local communal assemblies, governing their own affairs particular affairs: within reason, during the Revolutionary process, and afterward.
But I have at length gone into problems with your advocacy of making these local communities completely SOVEREIGN, to the point where they may completely ignore centralized body directives.
The result, historically, has inevitably been that the revolution has been indeed "drowned in blood" by the bourgeoisie, AND that the economic devolves into chaos, as in Barcelona in 1936, where each factory committee vied with each other to appropriate more resources and more market share for themselves.
John, your contributions to the medical freedom movement, as a university trained public health expert and former official, are impressive. And I am not one to "pull rank", and I will not here. I am NOT going to tell you that you need to defer to my views, because of my "superior" training, as a Ph.D. in political theory. That would be pedantic, arrogant bullshit, on my part.
What I will say, however, is that your lack of training in my field, mandates (to use that unfortunate word!) that you educate yourself better on these issues, and think more deeply about the problems that your position raises.
I have no doubt that if you put an effort into such a project, you will see the error of your way here.
Such a project might also lead you to question your great animus against the work of Marx and of Marxists like myself: branding us, falsely, as elitists, merely because Marx found deficient for revolution the consciousness of the working class, in its PRESENT condition, due to bourgeois cultural hegemony (an idea explored by Marxist Antonio Gramsci) and due to the alienated nature of labor under capitalism (explored by Marx in his 1844 Economic and Philosophic Mss, the chapter on Estranged Labor).
This analysis in no way, as you falsely charge, constitutes evidence that Marx was a follower of Blanqui--whose totalitarian views he fought against strenuously--in believing that the working class cannot be trusted with democratic decision making.
Again, you need to understand that Marx's thought was DIALECTICAL. He believed that socialists could raise the consciousness of the working class to socialist consciousness, and that their intelligence and their egalitarianism would be the backbone of the revolutionary process and the new society it created.
Lenin both further refined Marx's ideas on this score, in his advocacy for the creation of an internally democratic centralist vanguard party--and perverted these ideas, when he, following the Russian Blanquist Populist Tkachev's views, created a one party state, by destroying, under the pretext of what looks like a false flag operation, the Bolsheviks' alliance with the majority party: the Left Social Revolutionaries.
But you need to stop confusing Lenin's Blanquism in Power, with Marx's original, extremely democratic ideas.
Let's talk about the Paris Commune. That went down in flames because there was no Party TO LEAD these "egalitarian" masses to march on Versailles or seize the national bank: giving time to the bourgeoisie to drown this revolution in blood.
Or how about Germany, 1918-19? The Spartakusbund Communists were still weak to lead the working class to victory. And so they were...drowned in blood.
Or how about the Spanish (Counter)Revolution? Again, no centralized authority! We're too good and too egalitarian for that! And so THAT revolution was...drowned in blood.
John, this seems to be a hard-wired article of faith with you, one we have heard MANY times:
"The chief obstacle to building the massive egalitarian revolutionary movement is this: people think that hardly anybody else agrees with them in having their egalitarian revolutionary aspiration (i.e., to “remove the rich from power, etc.”). They therefore feel hopeless about the possibility of such a revolution" But the rest of us dimply are not convinced that this is THE main obstacle, although it is a valid point and needs to be part of the strategy. Hearing you state it for the upteenth time does not move the needle.
I am identifying the CHIEF CURRENT obstacle. One needs to do that in order to know what strategy to pursue. Right?
Furthermore, the reason activists fail to see what is the chief obstacle is their wrong view of ordinary people, a view that is elitist and reflecting the centuries-long elitism of virtually all intellectuals including Karl Marx.
John, perhaps we can discuss this on December 2nd. But you make the tasks we have to perform, equivalent to having some kind of mass group therapy session.
Group therapy is wonderful. Everyone in the group finds out they have similar problems! It's a great thing...
But it's not "What is to be Done".
The masses of people are not all spontaneously get together and discover that they all feel they are equal.
Look at that text, by Lenin (not Chernyshevsky) to find out what is to be done.
It's not mass group therapy.
I suggest you read what happened at Dartmouth in 1969 but not in 1968 to see the effect of people learning they are not alone. I was one of the organizers of the 1969 building take over that abolished ROTC from Dartmouth in an anti-Vietnam War effort. Please read about it at https://www.pdrboston.org/what-causes-a-political-sea-change . After you read about this event, please tell me if you think that when people learned in 1969 that they were not alone that that was just "therapy" but not the KEY thing that made people abolish ROTC in 1969 instead of 1968. OK?
What you cite is valid, but not the SOLE issue here. Removing the rich from power is hugely complex and not merely an acknowledgement of a certain truth. I too had similar experience as you during the Vietnam era and we won over the majority at University of Hawai'i, I think at least not to OPPOSE us.
I don't want to get into your anarcho mishegas, John. The fact remains that you were an ORGANIZER among a number of OTHER ORGANIZERS. So it just wasn't the case that people just spontaneously listened to you and discovered they like equality.
And 1969 came at the end of almost a DECADE of an ORGANIZATION known as the Students for a Democratic Society. Which fell apart later because they lacked THEORY and because they were anarchistic, and thus fell prey to a bunch of Stalinist Maoist groups that destroyed their internal democracy.
You are criticizing a straw man since I am an advocate of organizing.
But you are not assuredly, from multiple articles I (and Jon) have read, an advocate of a centralized pole of authority, alongside decentralism.
In other words, you have consistently advocated for the idea of "voluntary communalism"--that all authority, all sovereignty, should be vested in local communities. These communities, governed by participatory assemblies of the local residents themselves, should always and evermore have the (dubious) "right" to decide, on their own, whether they wish to follow the directives of more centralized, delegated bodies elected by the citizens.
I am certainly not opposed to local communal assemblies, governing their own affairs particular affairs: within reason, during the Revolutionary process, and afterward.
But I have at length gone into problems with your advocacy of making these local communities completely SOVEREIGN, to the point where they may completely ignore centralized body directives.
The result, historically, has inevitably been that the revolution has been indeed "drowned in blood" by the bourgeoisie, AND that the economic devolves into chaos, as in Barcelona in 1936, where each factory committee vied with each other to appropriate more resources and more market share for themselves.
See the following:
I. Talk on Behalf of the White Rose Dec. 2nd
https://bmccproftomsmith7.substack.com/p/talk-on-behalf-of-the-white-rose
II. We need Central Economic Planning
https://bmccproftomsmith7.substack.com/p/we-need-central-economic-planning
III. Pie in the Sky Voluntary Communalism
https://bmccproftomsmith7.substack.com/p/pie-in-the-sky-voluntary-federation
John, your contributions to the medical freedom movement, as a university trained public health expert and former official, are impressive. And I am not one to "pull rank", and I will not here. I am NOT going to tell you that you need to defer to my views, because of my "superior" training, as a Ph.D. in political theory. That would be pedantic, arrogant bullshit, on my part.
What I will say, however, is that your lack of training in my field, mandates (to use that unfortunate word!) that you educate yourself better on these issues, and think more deeply about the problems that your position raises.
I have no doubt that if you put an effort into such a project, you will see the error of your way here.
Such a project might also lead you to question your great animus against the work of Marx and of Marxists like myself: branding us, falsely, as elitists, merely because Marx found deficient for revolution the consciousness of the working class, in its PRESENT condition, due to bourgeois cultural hegemony (an idea explored by Marxist Antonio Gramsci) and due to the alienated nature of labor under capitalism (explored by Marx in his 1844 Economic and Philosophic Mss, the chapter on Estranged Labor).
This analysis in no way, as you falsely charge, constitutes evidence that Marx was a follower of Blanqui--whose totalitarian views he fought against strenuously--in believing that the working class cannot be trusted with democratic decision making.
Again, you need to understand that Marx's thought was DIALECTICAL. He believed that socialists could raise the consciousness of the working class to socialist consciousness, and that their intelligence and their egalitarianism would be the backbone of the revolutionary process and the new society it created.
Lenin both further refined Marx's ideas on this score, in his advocacy for the creation of an internally democratic centralist vanguard party--and perverted these ideas, when he, following the Russian Blanquist Populist Tkachev's views, created a one party state, by destroying, under the pretext of what looks like a false flag operation, the Bolsheviks' alliance with the majority party: the Left Social Revolutionaries.
But you need to stop confusing Lenin's Blanquism in Power, with Marx's original, extremely democratic ideas.
See you on December 2nd.
Thomas
And likely an infiltrated "Progressive Labor" Party that made ultra left errors (confirming your last point)
Let's talk about the Paris Commune. That went down in flames because there was no Party TO LEAD these "egalitarian" masses to march on Versailles or seize the national bank: giving time to the bourgeoisie to drown this revolution in blood.
Or how about Germany, 1918-19? The Spartakusbund Communists were still weak to lead the working class to victory. And so they were...drowned in blood.
Or how about the Spanish (Counter)Revolution? Again, no centralized authority! We're too good and too egalitarian for that! And so THAT revolution was...drowned in blood.
Shall I go on or do you get the point?
And of course the well-meaning but hapless Salvador Allende in 1973 Chlle on IS 9/11.