tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post2170435610412984046..comments2024-03-28T11:04:16.315+00:00Comments on Boffy's Blog: The Politics And Programme Of The First International - Part 2Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-3902814565321232382010-07-24T10:01:46.232+01:002010-07-24T10:01:46.232+01:00Jacob,
Its all a matter of what you demand, and w...Jacob,<br /><br />Its all a matter of what you demand, and when (under what conditions) you demand it. I do not consider the TP itself "revolutionary phrase-mongering". As I pointed out in a letter to the WW a few weeks ago on this point, when Trotsky developed the TP, he thought he was still in a revolutionary situation - it was after all only 20 years since the greatest revolution in history, and the intervening period had hardly been quiet! Communist Parties still mobilised millions of workers, and there were millions more workers organised in Socialist Parties who he believed could be won over too.<br /><br />The TP was designed as a programme for such conditions, workers with a high degree of class consciousness, mobilied, organised already struggling for reformist demands etc. It was designed to take them from that situation to the next stage. He thought the demands WERE achievable, but as they were achieved they would hieghten the conflict with a collapsing Capitalism, and would mean that this mobilised class would have to engage in developing its own forms to achieve them in conflict with bourgeois forms. The Workers Government becomes the pinnacle of that development the last stage before Workers are led to the conclusion that they have to take power directly.<br /><br />The reason I believe that the demands of many Trotskyists today IS revolutionary phrase-mongering is because a)they don't seem to understand this historical context of the TP, and so demands such as the establishment of a Workers Government are ludicrously unconnected to the actual situation we are in b)other demands such as the Sliding Scale of Wages amount to nothing but reformist demands c) others such as Nationalisation under workers Control are either Utopian (the bosses are not going to concede such control) or actually reactionary, they are demands for workers to look to the bouregois state for solutions, and for that state to expand its scope and control ove them, and finally d) are purely propagandistic calling on that State to undertake these latter actions only for the purpose of saying to workers "look it won't do what we want"! Our task as marx shows in these posts is rather to put forward practical solutions that workers can develop themselves or can win from the bosses, which strengthen their position to wage the real struggle to transform property relations.Boffyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-34981829508078332202010-07-24T04:28:53.802+01:002010-07-24T04:28:53.802+01:00You forget that the Programme of the French Worker...You forget that the Programme of the French Workers Party contained three sections and not two. The section in the middle is the actual pre-ortho-Marxist minimum program, which basically says that the working class has to take power in order to achieve the goals established in the Preamble. In light of the Paris Commune, that section wasn't as complete as it should have been, but demands like freedom of class-strugglist assembly and association, suppression of the state debt, militias replacing the standing ground forces, and local control over the police are mentioned.<br /><br />---There was no point Marx believed in including within the programme demands that Capital could not concede just for the purposes of propaganda against the existing State.---<br /><br />I'm with Guesde on this one actually: "I am a Marxist." The difference between so-called "revolutionary phrase-mongering" and the Trotskyist TP is that there shouldn't be *too much emphasis* on measures such as these:<br /><br />1) Eliminating information asymmetry by first means of establishing full, comprehensible, and participatory transparency in all governmental, commercial, and other related affairs;<br /><br />2) Matching the transnational mobility of labour with the establishment of a transnationally entrenched bill of workers’ political and economic rights, and with the realization of a globalized and upward equal standard of living for equal work, thus allowing real freedom of movement through instant legalization and open borders, and thereby precluding the extreme exploitation of immigrants;<br /><br />3) Legally considering all workplaces as being unionized for the purposes of political strikes and even syndicalist strikes, regardless of the presence or absence of formal unionization in each workplace;<br /><br />4) Enabling the full replacement of the hiring of labour for small-business profit by cooperative production, and also society’s cooperative production of goods and services to be regulated by cooperatives under their common plans;<br /><br />5) Abolishing all public debts outright, suppressing excessive capital mobility associated with capital flights, ending the viability of imperialist conflicts and not just wars as vehicles for capital accumulation, and precluding all predatory financial practices towards the working class – all by first means of monopolizing all central, commercial, and consumer credit in the hands of a single transnational bank under absolute public ownership;<br /><br />6) Applying not some but all economic rent beyond that of the natural environment towards exclusively public purposes;<br /><br />7) Establishing an equal obligation on all able-bodied individuals to perform socially productive labour and other socially necessary labour, be it manual or mental; and<br /><br />8) Extending litigation rights to include class-action lawsuits and speedy judgements against all non-workers who appropriate surplus value atop any economic rent applied towards exclusively public purposes.<br /><br />There is indeed a crucial divide between education and agitation, and the Trotskyist "transitional" method is on the wrong side of the divide.<br /><br />---It is the same logic that some Trotskyists put forward today in calling for the Capitalist State to do this, that or the other, not because they believe it will, but because they argue it will lead workers to lose their illusions in that State.---<br /><br />Well, that is admittedly the logic of the "state aid" theme in my lesser demands, most notably "the wholesale absorption of all private-sector collective bargaining representation into free and universal legal services by independent government agencies acting in good faith and subjecting their employees to full-time compensation being at or slightly lower than the median equivalent for professional and other skilled workers."Jacob Richterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13595821621256547971noreply@blogger.com