Market madness: the socialist alternative

PS they also supported the theft of the seabed and foreshore by their friends labour!
wankers!

Indymedia is promoting the Workers Party, a Leninist/Maoist party, by making this "article" a feature. I think the eds need to consider what would happen to initiatives like Indymedia - and to anarchists, for that matter - in the unlikely event that the Workers Party ever ruled the country. (Hint: read some history).

And Tim, I have no problem with socialism. I'm a socialist myself (most anarchists are socialists). But I do have a problem with Leninism.

Capitalism = privatising the profit and socialising the losses.

Dude, it took me about a minute to write that post. And I'm not crying or whining. Just expressing my opinion and hopefully provoking some thought. And yes, the USSR collapsed. But Don and other Leninists don't seemed to have learned any lessons from the past.

I've always found it interesting how the people who attack the Workers Party the harshest on Indymedia never seem to have the spine to actually sign their name to their posts. How can you expect to be taken seriously if you're too cowardly to back up your statements?

The anarchists should take the trouble to actually read the WP pamphlet on the economic crisis, rather than moan about nothing.

You'll find it on the WP blog if you scroll down a bit.

It's quite good really and actually traces the cause of the crisis back to the the falling rate of profit and overproduction of capital.

It needs to have some ideas about how to go from the crisis as it hits NZ workers and socialism.
What about workers defence of foreclosures for a start?
Dave B

CWG has written along these lines at
http://redrave.blogspot.com/2008/10/five-point-draft-plan-for-socialism....

Its not untill the scrapping of the war machines and their manufacturies that we can get the fullest freedom on the planet, so yes of course it makes more sense to unite the worlds economy in a non-antagonistic way so maximum harmoey and joy can return to the green organic world. Workers of the world, unite!!!

Aaaah.... left vs right....

I don't support either 100% and think somewhere just left of center is about 'right' for this country in 2008...

As for Maoist theories - that dude even decided what people were allowed to wear ffs.

Anyway the problem is with corruption, not some idea about distributing wealth with rules.

thanks 4 reading my 2 cents
dan from akl

What happens to anarchists after a workers revolution (by definition, Leninist) depends on what the anarchists do.
If they repeat their treachery of the Russian anarchists post October, then of course, the LEninists will kill them again. We have learned from the mistakes of the past, and will not show the leniency that the bolsheviks showed in the early days.
If you join the whites, we will shoot you.

Anon wrote: "If you [anarchists] join the whites, we will shoot you."

Just in case there was any doubt, this is not a Workers party policy . . .
Cheers,
John

btw you rats.
I know you love what capitalism provides you.

And for the record, the Workers Party is not a Maoist organisation.

Alastair Reith.

"Both place class struggle as the tool towards complete social change, but obvioulsy differ on means and ends"

Marxists and anarchists actually agree on our ends - we both aim for communism, a classless, stateless society in whivh "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" applies. What we differ on is how to get there, and what has to be done in the meantime. These differences should not get in the way of working together on an issue by issue basis in a principled, comradely way, espescially in the context of New Zealand where there's no mass support base for either Marxism or anarchism!

Alastair Reith.

Surely the argument is not about whether Marx's followers did something bad to anarchists in 1921, or about whether the Workers Party will put us all in gulags in the unimaginably distant future when it seizes power, but about whether Marx and Lenin's theories and methods of analysis help us to understand the current economic crisis.

Not everything Marx and Lenin came up with is useful, of course - some of it is rubbish (the praise for capitalism in the first section of the Communist Manifesto, for example).

I think that, nevertheless, Marx's theory of capitalist crisis in volume three of Capital and Lenin's theory of imperialism are very important to understanding the current situation.

The dialectical and materialist method Marx and (after 1916) Lenin use to analyse the world is also important, and it contrasts with the one-dimensional, bourgeois method that Paul Bowman uses in the exposition that Jared links to.

Bowman limits himself to a discussion of the *financial* sphere of the economy, which leaves us with the suggestion that the crux of the problem is the activities of people in the financial sector. This is actually the approach of 'bourgeois' commentators, who think that they are dealing not with a correctable malfunctioning of the finance sector, and not with a crisis which is rooted in the basic contradictions of capitalism.
There is no Chinese wall between the finance sector and the rest of the economy.

Perhaps Bowman should take a lead from Bakunin, who liked Marx's Capital so much he wanted to translate all three volumes into Russian.

Bowman's argument that the non-anarchist left has no answer to the crisis because it is fixated with the nation state doesn't follow logically from the rest of his discussion, and is in any case quite false. There have been proposals for Europe-wide action to counter the effects of the crisis by socialists across that continent, for instance. While Bowman is of course right to note that capital is more mobile and less rooted in the nation state than it was forty years ago it is true nonetheless that the nation state is not about to disappear. The whole 'post-national' thesis of Hardt and Negri's Empire collapsed in the face of the US response to 9/11 and the marginalisation of multilateral bodies like the UN. Because the nation state is still so important, it's correct to make demands of national governments. That doesn't mean international demands and campaigns can't be organised.

Where is the WP leaflet on the crisis online, btw?

Scott

"I've found plently of people of other political persuasions hard to work with, but anarchists and social democrats don't usually bother to get involved in causes they aren't actually commited to."

Talk about some specific examples of campaigns where the Workers Party has done that.

Hi Scott,

Thanks for the post. I'd like to point out that Marx and Bakunin had quite a lot of similar ideas, and that this is pretty accepted by anarchists in general. However, translating a comrade's works doesn't mean that one agrees with all aspects of it. In fact, their clashes over the definition of socialism (libertarian vs authoritarian), means (direct action vs parlimentary politics), the nature of the state etc etc clearly show their differences.

Also, in a post-scarcity world Marx and Engels could never have forseen, a lot of what they wrote (which, at the time was spot on) must now be seen as out-dated and irellevant.

In terms of Bowmans talk, I disagree there too. The talk is taking place between anarchists in the Workers Solidarity Movement, a class-bassed anarchist federation obviously aware of capitalism and it's entrenchment in the financial sector. For Paul's further examination on the nature of the financial crisis in the framework you mention, see his artcle which accompanied the talk:
http://www.wsm.ie/news_viewer/3613

Cool,

Jared D

Hi Jared,

I know the WSM and am sure they do have a lot of knowledge about capitalism, but it doesn't come through in Bowman's piece, which only looks at one cog in the huge complex machine that is capitalism - namely, the financial sector.

Because he fetishes this one part of capitalism, Bowman draws conclusions at the end of his talk/article which are wrong.

Bowman discusses the phenomena of cheap credit and fictitious, mobile capital at great length, and notes that these have played roles in causing the crisis. But the credit crunch is only the trigger cause of the crisis - the deeper causes are located in other aspects of capitalism, far from the financial sector.

For instance, we should ask the question - why has household debt gotten so high in the West? Why have people needed to borrow so much money in the first place? We can't answer this question simply by looking at the financial sector and noting the cheap credit offered by banks. We have to look at other parts of the economy, and things like the wage rates and disposable income levels of the working classes in the West.

The decline in the real wage and real disposable income in many Western societies has been a product of neo-liberal policies which have redistributed wealth from the poor to the rich.

In NZ, for instance, the real wage declined by 4% from 1981 to 2001, largely because of Rogernomics in the '80s and the smashing of the unions in the '90s. Although the real wage has risen under Labour real disposable income has not, because people have been paying so much for things like housing.

In order to keep demand for goods strong and keep the economy ticking over, capitalists have been forced, in NZ and elsewhere, to extend large amounts of credit to households that can't afford to buy what they want witrhout getting into debt. That's not the whole reason for the crisis, but it's an important reason. And it was a cause of the 1929 crash and the Great Depression too.

Bowman ends up over-estimating the importance of transnational capital and claiming that the nation state is obsolete as an instrument of capitalism and that Keynesian-style reforms to capitalism within the context of the national economy are also obsolete. This is, frankly, nonsense, as the various neo-Keynesian bailouts - think of Iceland, where all the banks have been nationalised, or the UK, where the government has nationalised two banks and taken a stake in others - of recent days shows.

I don't know what you mean by 'post-scarcity' economy, though I'd like a bit of it, I think!

Fortunately, most marxists today do not take the view of the anonymous poster advocating the shooting of anarchists. Let's not forget that many of the POUM fighters helping to defend the Spanish revolution were Trotskyists, and they also were betrayed by the Stalinists. Guess they must have "sided with the whites" too.

I would expect most of the marxists I've met in this country to end up on the same side as the anarchists in a hypothetical revolution, difficult to work with, and committed to their own form of organisation as they may be (not like any anarchists, no, never!). In Aotearoa, the modern equivalent of those Spanish Stalinists join the Labour party, and consider a Labour government the only realistic form of 'Socialism'. I have the Worker's Party t-shirt that says "I'd Rather Have a Revolution Than a Labour Government" and even wear it sometimes. But then I'm only pretending to be an anarchist (what am I again? ;)

Strypey

I think there should be a moratorium on the use of terms like 'Marxist' and 'anarchist' so that people can actually think about some of the real issues which get lost in all the sound and fury of these branding wars. In the year 2008 in Aotearoa, you really communicate very little by calling yourself either a Marxist or anarchist.

A spurious sort of unity and all sorts of passion is created by the use of these isms and of old symbols like the red flag or the circled a, and by the ritual condemnation of the members of the other ism for some misdeed committed in the distant past.

Really, though, you can't predict what stance someone will take on an issue by what ism they claim to uphold or what symbol they draw on their bag.

Take the question of national liberation, for example. Jared's mates in the anarchist Irish Workers Solidarity Movement have the same 'it's all about class, no support for nationalism' line on the Irish question as the Marxist Workers Party has on tino rangatiratanga here in NZ. And there are Irish anarchists who strongly disagree with the WSM on Irish national liberation, and Kiwi Marxists who disagree with the Workers Party on tino rangatiratanga. The isms are all over the place on this and every other issue.

You can't work out a position on the important issues by saying 'I'm an anarchist' or 'I'm a Marxist'. You have to actually think instead.

In the last twenty-four horus the NZ government has made two very dramatic policy announcements: it has guaranteed bank deposits, and promised to universalise student loans. Both these policies are products of the profound crisis gripping global capitalism.

The Workers Party and the CWG have at least tried to make a contribution to understanding this crisis with their leaflets. Somehow, though, an indymedia thread on the crisis has spiralled off into another tedious brand war, and people are discussing something that happened in the Ukraine in the 1920s. Why don't we get back to 2008?

Scott

"carp endlessly about labels"
"sound and fury of these branding wars"
"another tedious brand war"

Ugh. Why do people want to pretend that this is a silly squabble over nothing, when any reading of history shows Marxists and anarchists have serious political differences that are incompatable in practice?

Just because we are both very small, agree on a few particular issues and generally regarded as 'left' doesn't actually mean we are heading in the same direction. I don't mean to say anarchists should never work with Marxists, but we should be honest and not try and be buddy buddy about it.

Cheers
Sam

Sam: I just doubt the existence of the essentiallyunified 'Marxism' you seem to speak about.

I spent big chunks of 2006 and 2007 reading through the Collected Works of Marx and Lenin (an experience I am not, with the greatest respect to those authors, very keen to repeat!) and various commentaries for a PhD, and it's clear to me that there is no one Marx and no one Lenin, let alone one 'Marxist' or 'Leninist' tradition. I think you'd be quite surprised to learn of some of the changes Marx went through in his last years, for instance:
http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2007/09/
chavez-is-not-marxist-but-neither-was.html

For a long time interpretations of Marx and the Bolsheviks were locked into a certain pattern by the Cold War. Both sides of that conflict, as well as supposedly independent observers, held to a few common beliefs - the unity of the work of Marx, the special character of Lenin's notion of the vanguard party, and so on. Since the end of the Cold War, the opening of Soviet archives, the publication of more of Marx's writings, and the loosening of old habits of thought, the old orthodoxies have been completely overturned. Diehard anti-anarchist Leninists and diehard anti-Leninist anarchists are like bald men fighting over a comb. I blogged a bit about the new literature on left history here:
http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2006/10/
new-light-on-lenin_27.html

I don't know so much about the 'anarchist tradition', but I doubt it is much more coherent than the 'Marxist tradition'. I think that we have to work together as part of the left and the labour movement, creatively read and develop the insights of important writers like, say, Marx, and work out positions on the issues of the twenty-first century, without getting bogged down in baseless generalisations, false dichotomies, and brand wars.

Of course, the emotional appeal of dichotomies and brand wars can never be underestimated.

Alastair,

"The party" or parties plural? If the latter could a decentralized network of autonomous collectives across Aotearoa we described as a "just a way of helping [liberation] along and providing a means for [the working class] to be focused and organised" in the same way?

Apologies to Scott for continuing the hijacking of this thread (good to see you're still around) but I think for a change we've actually got past the "marxists are statists wankers" and "shoot anarchists" bullshit and might be approaching a core issue that can be usefully discussed.

On the subject of responses to the latest capitalist crisis, I agree that this an important opportunity for all self-identified opponents of the globalized state-corporate regime to connect with the concerns of people outside our narrow camps. Passing leaflets around expressing alternative interpretations of the crises and their causes is a good start. In my view it needs to be followed up by finding out what other people see, and want to do about it, and why, and synthesizing that into a shared revolutionary theory and practice.

Along the same lines, I agree with you that maintaining rigid boundaries between 'anarchist' and 'marxist' are about as useful as rigid boundaries between Labour and National. But I also agree with Sam that useful co-operation must include awareness of our theoretical and organizational differences today, rather than trying to paint over them with unitarian platitudes.

Strypey

a political party is a much better way to organise the working class movement than decentralised autonomous entities puling in all different ways.
If there are other entities who choose to minimise their effectiveness, democracy, and strength by refusing to oranise in a party, yet still participate in the revolutionary process, then of course their participation is welcome.
Not every person involved in revolution is in a party. It just so happens that the most democratic, the most effective and the most responsible way to act is through a party.

"It just so happens that the most democratic, the most effective and the most responsible way to act is through a party"

I have to say that I completely disagree with this statement!

What's more democratic: following a directive from the head of a party, who via the party hierachy and centralisation has more power and privilege over fellow members (even if they did get there by a 'vote')...

or

Coming to an agreement via consensus decision making, where each member has equal and proportionate say in the outcome, and when the group directive is carried out with shared, decentralised administration?

I know what method I'd, and most anarchists, would prefer. And please don't argue that consensus is inefficient — it works, and has worker in groups and assemblies as large as 4,000 people (see "Consensus and Community" in "Healing the Wounds" by Judith Plaut). This is the essential, and important, difference in means — even if in a Marxist party it was run 'from below', it's still exercising hierarchal and vertical forms of power, instead of horizontal ones. Of course, I'm generalising here, but if groups do operate in the manner I'd prefer, then they are operating via anarchist principals without knowing it...

Cheers

Jared D

Sam, you ask:
"OK, so we disagree. Can we agree on a common goal and work towards that together, or are you always going to be more interested in furthering theinterests of your particular model?

Cheers

Sam"

I really dont know how I can be any more clear than I was when I said (in the post you responded to)
"if there are other entities who choose to minimise their effectiveness, democracy, and strength by refusing to oranise in a party, yet still participate in the revolutionary process, then of course their participation is welcome."

Even though your model undermines democracy, limits effectiveness etc, I am still happy to welcome your participation.
Is this clear enough?