tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62635771333332720852024-03-19T09:14:33.281+00:00Boffy's BlogAnalysis of Politics, Philosophy and Economics from a Marxist PerspectiveBoffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.comBlogger7792125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-84137513044356478702024-03-18T14:00:00.023+00:002024-03-18T14:00:00.248+00:00The Chinese Question After The Sixth Congress, 3. The Soviets and The Constituent Assembly - Part 3 of 15<div style="text-align: justify;">Trotsky quotes Lenin on the experience of 1917, to show just to what extent this <i>revolutionary/transitional</i> approach differs from that of the opportunists, and their support for <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/11/bourgeois-democracy.html">bourgeois-democracy</a>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>““Even a few weeks before the victory of the soviet republic, even <b>after</b> this victory, the participation in a parliament of bourgeois democracy, far from injuring the revolutionary proletariat, helps it to prove to the backward masses that these parliaments deserve to be dissolved, <b>facilitates</b> the success of their dissolution, <b>brings nearer</b> the moment when it could be said that bourgeois parliamentarism had ‘had its day politically’.” (Lenin, <b>Works</b>, Vol.XVII, 1920; <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/index.htm">The Infantile Sickness of Communism</a>, p.149.)” (p 188)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Trotsky describes the way Lenin ordered a contingent of Lettish infantry, composed of agricultural workers, to disband the Constituent Assembly, rather than rely on the Petrograd Garrison, comprised largely of peasants. The latter, Lenin feared, may have baulked at the task, and Trotsky explains why. The peasants had no history or reason to place confidence in an urban leadership, even one that is proletarian. The proletariat and peasantry are two different classes, with different class interests, and the same is true of the petty-bourgeoisie.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The strength of the proletariat, even in still largely agricultural economies, like Russia, in 1917, comes from its role in production, its concentration in the towns and cities, and mostly homogeneous class interest. Even where it does not form a numerical majority, its this which enables it to take a leading role. By contrast, the bourgeoisie is tiny. Its strength resides in its control of <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/capital.html">capital</a> and the state. The peasantry, like the petty-bourgeoisie, has neither of those things, and its strength derives from its numerical size, which is most influential in terms of formal democracy.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Even today, in a developed country like Britain, where the petty-bourgeoisie comprises around 15 million voters, they have no economic power, nor industrial strength, nor resort to the state – indeed, even when they get a reactionary Tory government elected, its policies such as <i>Brexit</i> are resisted by that state, and where it challenges the interests of the ruling class more significantly, the ruling class can bring down the government, as it did with Truss's government in Autumn 2022.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The electoral power of that petty-bourgeoisie, was seen in its ability to get a reactionary, petty-bourgeois government elected, and the Brexit vote, and, indeed, its ability to seize control of the Tory Party, as it did with the Republican Party in the US, but the limits of that, and of bourgeois-democracy, are also illustrated by it. Fetishising bourgeois-democracy is, then, to limit the strength of the proletariat, and to play into the hands of its class enemies, particularly the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, which provides the shock troops of fascism.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Revolutionary_Party">Social Revolutionaries</a> were the party with the greatest numbers in the Russian Revolution. In the first period, everyone who was not either a conscious bourgeois or a conscious worker voted for them. Even in the Constituent Assembly, that is, after the October Revolution, the Social Revolutionaries formed the majority. They therefore considered themselves a great national party. They turned out to be a great national zero.</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>We do not want to equate the Russian Social Revolutionaries with the German National Socialists. But there are, undoubtedly, similarities between them that are very important In clarifying the question under discussion. The Social Revolutionaries were a party of hazy popular hopes. The National Socialists are a party of national despair. The petty bourgeoisie has always shown the greatest capacity to pass from hope to despair, dragging a part of the proletariat along with it. The great bulk of the National Socialists is, as was the case with the Social Revolutionaries, human dust.”</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>(<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1931/311126.htm">Trotsky – Germany Is The Key To The International Situation</a>)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It was the failure of the Stalinists to recognise that, in Germany, and Spain, in the 1930's, which led them to underestimate the strength of the proletariat, and overestimate the strength of the fascists, and, as in China in 1925-7, led them into a timid, opportunist and tailist strategy, based on an alliance with its untrustworthy class enemies. In all those cases, it led not only to the defeat of the workers, but also to the victory of reaction and counter-revolution.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-chinese-question-after-sixth_0298688934.html">Back To Part 2</a></div>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-1054153502175136232024-03-17T14:00:00.054+00:002024-03-17T14:00:00.133+00:00Chapter II, The Metaphysics of Political Economy, 5. Strikes and Combinations of Workers - Part 7 of 7<div style="text-align: justify;">Modern industry creates the conditions in which, not only is the proletariat created, but in which it is brought together in large concentrations, as Lenin pointed out in his polemics against the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narodniks">Narodniks</a>, not necessarily just in factories, but in the towns and cities.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/wages.html">wages</a>, this common interest which they have against their boss, unites them in a common thought of resistance – <b>combination</b>. Thus combination always has a double aim, that of stopping competition among the workers, so that they can carry on general competition with the capitalist. If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and in the face of always united <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/capital.html">capital</a>, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them than that of wages. This is so true that English economists are amazed to see the workers sacrifice a good part of their wages in favour of associations, which, in the eyes of these economists, are established solely in favour of wages. In this struggle – a veritable civil war – all the elements necessary for a coming battle unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, association takes on a political character.” (p 159)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Some time ago, in response to one of my posts, where I had described this function of capital as progressive, a US reader objected, citing the fact that US employers had sought to prevent the unionisation of workers and so on. But, as I responded, had there been no <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2020/08/industrial-capital-summary.html">industrial capital</a>, nor would there have been a modern proletariat, and no unions! And, in fact, as Marx describes, here, in response to Proudhon, the bosses never are able to prevent the combination of workers, particularly in times of economic expansion.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle.” (p 160)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Again, this emphasises the difference between <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-class-struggle.html">the class struggle</a>, as a political struggle, as against the purely <i>sectional, distributional struggle</i> of unions for higher wages. In fact, as Marx and Lenin set out, this latter struggle, whilst inevitable, is itself an acceptance of <i>bourgeois ideology</i>, and the trades unions, like the <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/11/social-democracy.html">social-democratic</a> parties that rest upon them, are <i>bourgeois institutions</i>. Workers must break from the limitations of these bourgeois ideas and institutions, if they are to become <i>a class for themselves</i>, and bring about their own <i>liberation</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Marx compares the process with that of the <i>bourgeois revolution</i>, and its liberation from feudalism.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“In the bourgeoisie we have two phases to distinguish: that in which it constituted itself as a class under the regime of feudalism and absolute monarchy, and that in which, already constituted as a class, it overthrew feudalism and monarchy to make society into a bourgeois society. The first of these phases was the longer and necessitated the greater efforts. This too began by partial combinations against the feudal lords.” (p 160)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The organisation of workers into trades unions and social-democratic parties, represents this same phase of development, into <i>a class in itself</i>, but it has yet to become <i>a class for itself</i>. The fact that these <i>bourgeois workers' organisations</i> exert such a dead weight upon it is one reason for that, but so too is <i>the crisis of political leadership</i>, as those that call themselves Marxists so frequently pass off these actions of bargaining within the system, by the unions and social-democrats as actual class struggle.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“An oppressed class is the vital condition for every society founded on the antagonism of classes. The emancipation of the oppressed class thus implies necessarily the creation of a new society. For the oppressed class to be able to emancipate itself, it is necessary that the productive powers already acquired and the existing social relations should no longer be capable of existing side by side. Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself. The organization of revolutionary elements as a class supposes the existence of all the productive forces which could be engendered in the bosom of the old society.” (p 160)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Note that Marx does not speak, here, of such transformation coming from above, by the state, but by the workers emancipating themselves, a point he also emphasises in <i>The Critique of the Gotha Programme</i>. It follows on from his view set out, in <i>Capital III, Chapter 27</i>, of the <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2015/10/socialised-capital-part-1-of-2.html">socialised capital</a> representing the <i>transitional form of property</i>. In other words, the <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-social-revolution.html">social revolution</a>, creating these new material foundations and social relations of the new society has already taken place. As Lenin pointed out to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Mikhaylovsky">Mikhailovsky</a> and others, Marx's theory of <i>historical materialism</i> does not make predictions of the future, but only describes what has already occurred, and its inevitable completion.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/chapter-ii-metaphysics-of-political_059821652.html">Back To Part 6</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-poverty-of-philosophy-table-of.html">Back To Table of Contents</a></div>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-56505741469224799792024-03-16T14:00:00.033+00:002024-03-18T15:06:36.226+00:00The Chinese Question After The Sixth Congress, 3. The Soviets and The Constituent Assembly - Part 2 of 15<div style="text-align: justify;">In every case, this Bonapartist/military regime is highly inefficient, draining <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/surplus-value.html">surplus value</a>/product that should be used for <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/capital.html">capital</a> accumulation. The bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie are continually thrown against it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“Before these collisions develop to the point of becoming an open revolutionary struggle, they will pass, from all the available facts, through a “constitutional” stage. The conflicts between the bourgeoisie and its own military cliques will inevitably draw in the upper layer of the petty-bourgeois masses, through the medium of a “third party” or by other means. From the standpoint of economics and of culture, the former are extraordinarily feeble. Their political strength lies in their numbers. Therefore, the slogans of <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/11/bourgeois-democracy.html">formal democracy</a> win over, or are capable of winning over, not only the petty-bourgeois masses but also the broad working masses, precisely because they reveal to them the possibility, which is essentially illusory, of opposing their will to that of the generals, the country squires and the capitalists. The proletarian vanguard educates the masses by using this experience, and leads them forward.” (p 187)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This illustrates the illusion of <i>bourgeois-democracy</i>, and why the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie is benefited by it, as against the workers, particularly in these still essentially agrarian economies. In them, the peasantry constitutes the largest mass, and the petty-bourgeoisie of small producers is often larger than the industrial working-class. The working-class grows rapidly, and sees the illusion of its numbers, in the same light as that of these middle-classes. But, as Trotsky points out, elsewhere, that is an <i>illusion</i> of the <i>comparative social power</i> of different strata.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The bourgeoisie is tiny, but controls the state, and its own interests coincide with the peasants and petty-bourgeoisie, as against the workers. The middle classes are large in size, which is significant in terms of votes, but are economically and socially feeble. Even, today, for example, the petty-bourgeoisie in Britain comprises about 15 million small business people, self-employed etc., or a third of the electorate, which is the electoral and membership base of the Tory Party, and Brexit. But, they are economically and socially impotent.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“the main strength of the fascists is their strength in numbers. Yes, they have received many votes. But in the social struggle, votes are not decisive. The main army of fascism still consists of the petty bourgeoisie and the new middle class: the small artisans and shopkeepers of the cities, the petty officials, the employees, the technical personnel, the intelligentsia, the impoverished peasantry. On the scales of election statistics, a thousand fascist votes weigh as much as a thousand Communist votes. But on the scales of the revolutionary struggle, a thousand workers in one big factory represent a force a hundred times greater than a thousand petty officials, clerks, their wives, and their mothers-in-law. The great bulk of the fascists consists of human dust.”</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>(<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1931/311126.htm">Trotsky – Germany Is The Key To The International Situation</a>)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The experience of Russia, Trotsky says, shows that, during this process, the proletariat, organised in soviets, can draw behind it large sections of the peasantry. So, note, here, that <i>nothing</i> Trotsky says, involves <i>support</i> for bourgeois-democracy, which is <i>illusory</i>, and <i>detrimental to workers interests</i>, as against being beneficial to the interests of its class enemies, and that the means of fighting for it, in so far as it has to, is that of the <i>proletarian revolution</i>, of soviets and <i>workers self-government</i>, based on <i>proletarian</i>, not bourgeois democracy. The soviets are <i>not</i> posited as an alternative to that formal democracy, but developed as part of the struggle for it, and so, from the start, offer the prospect of simply by-passing it, or quickly supplanting it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“The experience of Russia shows that during the progress of the revolution, the proletariat organized in soviets can, by a correct policy, directed towards the conquest of power, draw behind it the peasantry, fling it against the front of formal democracy embodied in the Constituent Assembly, and switch it on the rails of soviet democracy. In any case, these results were not attained by simply opposing the soviets to the Constituent Assembly, but by drawing the masses towards the soviets while maintaining the slogans of formal democracy up to the very moment of the conquest of power and even after it.” (p 187-8)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-chinese-question-after-sixth_0193820585.html">Back To Part 1</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-chinese-question-after-sixth_01116899176.html">Forward To Part 3</a></div>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-87682080610950595412024-03-16T07:00:00.003+00:002024-03-16T07:00:00.156+00:00Northern Soul Classics - How Do You Like It - The Sheppards<p style="text-align: center;"> </p><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/z8vw_9vXKuc?si=Rp575fopR4HUNo6O" title="YouTube video player" width="380"></iframe></div>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-4428603069994254992024-03-15T19:30:00.007+00:002024-03-15T19:30:00.241+00:00Friday Night Disco - Be My Lady - The Astors<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gT-WbT2PBtg" width="433" youtube-src-id="gT-WbT2PBtg"></iframe></div><br /><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-7013403914420650832024-03-15T17:34:00.003+00:002024-03-15T17:34:21.051+00:00More Weasel Words From AWL Zionists<div style="text-align: justify;">As Palestinians face a continuing genocide in Gaza, and oppression in the West Bank and elsewhere, and their supporters, in Britain, face attacks by the British state, the Zionists of the AWL, issue weasel words, and join in the attack.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The weasel words come in the form of the most flaccid criticism of the Tories attempts to ban protests. But, the AWL basically accepts and endorses many of the lies put out by the Tories and Zionists, used to support the proposals for such bans. For example, <a href="https://shirazsocialism.wordpress.com/2024/03/15/defend-psc-but-not-the-slogans-it-tolerates-and-endorses/">AWL member Jim Denham, writes</a>, in relation to the chant <i>“From The River To The Sea, Palestine Will Be Free”</i>,</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“Some may first think it’s a bland “freedom everywhere” call. But by now most protesters must know that many Jews see it as threatening; as meaning Arab or Islamic rule in all of 1918-48 Palestine, “from the river to the sea”, and the wiping-out of Israel. So, using that slogan must either mean you want to make the threat, or that you simply don’t care.”</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Well, that is odd, then, isn't it, and seems to confirm the Tories claims about many Jews in London being legitimately afraid, and their statements about <i>“No Go Areas”</i>. Its odd, because, there have been large numbers of Jews on all those demonstrations, who most certainly did not appear to be at all afraid, and who marched, as distinct and identified Jewish groups. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@OwenJonesTalks/videos">Owen Jones</a> has covered it in some of his videos. Yet, no mention of it, from the Zionist Jim Denham, no thought from him that, maybe, if there <i>are</i> Jews in London who feel afraid of these marches, those fears are not legitimate, and have simply been stoked up by Tories, and Zionists, just as with the ridiculous fears that some had that a Corbyn Labour government was going to be introducing gas chambers! Jim Denham, in simply talking about those fears, is part of the process of stoking them.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Meanwhile, Denham asserts his own interpretation of what that chant means, as calling for the violent destruction of Israel. No doubt some of those responsible for it, have that intent, and it is an intent that no Marxist could support. Yet, oddly, the same slogan <i>“From The River To The Sea”</i>, forms part of the programme of the Zionist Likud Party, which dominates the current government of Netanyahu. It sets out clearly the intention of Zionism to remove Palestinians from historic Palestine (and beyond) so as to establish a racist, confessional state, in which Jews have exclusive rights, and non-Jews are either excluded, or reduced to second-class citizens. Netanyahu has even presented maps in speeches to the UN, in which such a state is presented, and in which Palestine does not exist. What is more, as against the inability of the Palestinians or their supporters to eradicate the state of Israel from existence, the Zionists do have the power, backed by western imperialism, of eradicating the Palestinians, and though Denham seems to have missed it, that is precisely what the Zionists have been doing for the last six months!</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But, Denham does not seem to care that the slogan <i>"From the river to the sea"</i>, is the mantra of the Zionism he supports, and that, as we speak, it is being implemented by the Zionist state, via a genocide against the Palestinian people.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Denham gives us more weasel words and slipperiness, linked to his previous social-patriotic clap-trap, <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2023/11/awl-cant-defend-their-zionism.html">about capitalist states' right of self-defence</a>. He says,</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“The gist is: smash Israel. Not have the workers within it “smash” capitalist rule within it, but simply wipe out the country itself (something that socialists have never in the whole of history sought to do to any other country).”</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That, of course, is precisely what the AWL supported when they backed NATO's bombing of Libya, and before that, they had carried articles, basically supporting the idea of backing <i>“democratic imperialism”</i> in destroying Nazism in Germany, in WWII. Today, they back NATO imperialism in backing Ukrainian imperialism in its war against Russian imperialism. But, the weasel words, here, are not just contained in what is said, but what is not said. True, socialists have never interpreted <i>“revolutionary defeatism”</i> to mean that we actively seek the defeat of our own state, by some other state in war. But, unlike the AWL, what we do interpret it to mean is that we do not recognise any right of self-defence for any capitalist state, in war. We start from the principle that <i>our main enemy is at home</i>. We start from the principle that we seek <i>only</i> to defend the working-class, in opposition to our own ruling class, including in Israel, and that to do that its necessary to solidarise with workers elsewhere, not with that ruling class. The AWL has abandoned that basic Marxist principle to pursue its Zionism and pro-imperialism.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Denham says,</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“The slogan “Free Palestine” was brought into currency on demonstrations in 2002 precisely because it was ambiguous. It could mean freeing Palestinian territories from Israeli occupation and founding an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel (i.e., two states for two peoples). But its promoters meant “freeing” the whole of 1918-1948 Palestine from any “Zionist” (i.e., Jewish) presence whatsoever.”</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">He seems to have no concern for actual people as human beings, but only for bits of land, in which people live, typical of a nationalist. <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-debate-on-two-states-forty-years-on.html">As I pointed out forty years ago</a>, when I was a member of the WSL, which was a predecessor organisation of the AWL, before it degenerated, the whole two-states idea was a fantasy, and did not, for one thing deal with the national minorities that would be trapped inside these two sectarian hell-holes. Everything I said would happen, has happened. The reality is that <i>there have been two states</i> – a Palestinian state, divided between Gaza and the West Bank, and the Zionist state in Israel. Did it resolve the issue, no, it made it worse. The Zionist state in Israel, would never allow the Palestinian state to function as a state, and it has been backed by the US, in that endeavour.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Palestinians were left with one leadership that sought to suck up to western imperialism and the Arab bourgeoisie, and was led to police its own population, and an alternative leadership – Hamas – that looked to other reactionary, <i>“anti-imperialist forces”</i>. Neither offered the Palestinian masses any progressive solution to their plight, just as, inside Israel, the Zionist state apparatus, locked the workers into a Bonapartist, militarised state, doomed to perpetual conflict with a large portion of its own population, and its neighbours, unless it could inflict a <i>“final solution”</i> upon them.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Denham seems to have no concern in his above formulation for the fact that, not only is the two-state solution a reactionary fantasy, but that, even were such a fantasy to be realised, in some kind of Motherhood and Apple Pie scenario, a quarter of Israel's own population, around 2 million people, are Israeli-Arabs, who are also, currently, neither equal, nor entirely free citizens. These are not Palestinians in the West Bank, and other occupied territories, but in Israel itself. Does Denham not think that <i>these</i> Palestinians, should also be free? Does he not think they should have equal rights to Israeli Jews, indeed, the same rights that the Zionist state offers to all Jews, wherever they live in the world, but does not offer to Palestinians?</div>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-86514511755824721402024-03-15T14:00:00.036+00:002024-03-17T15:44:25.012+00:00Chapter II, The Metaphysics of Political Economy, 5. Strikes and Combinations of Workers - Part 6 of 7<div style="text-align: justify;">The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardian_socialism">Ricardians</a>, out of whom emerged the <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/11/social-democracy.html">social-democrats</a>, and the Utopian socialists, both opposed combinations of workers, but for different reasons.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“The economists want the workers to remain in society as it is constituted and as it has been signed and sealed by them in their manuals.</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>The socialists want the workers to leave the old society alone, the better to be able to enter the new society which they have prepared for them with so much foresight.” (p 158)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Yet, the workers continued to form more and bigger unions, and the degree of that development was also an index of the degree of <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/capital.html">capital</a> development in each country. It became so, because, for as long as workers had not yet developed to a stage of breaking with bourgeois ideology, of positing themselves as <i>a class for themselves</i>, in opposition to the bourgeoisie, they were doomed to continue to stay within the confines of bourgeois production and social relations, simply engaging in periodic <i>distributional struggles</i> over the <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/price.html">price</a> of their<a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/labour-power.html"> labour-power</a>. That reality forced them to create such unions the better to engage in those negotiations. It was a dead-end, as Marx sets out in <i>Value, Price and Profit</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the <b>material conditions</b> and the <b>social forms</b> necessary for an economical reconstruction of society...</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Trades Unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. They fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system.”</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But, it was also an inevitable part of the process of the workers forming themselves as <i>a class for themselves</i>, so as not to engage in a purely <i>economic, distributional struggle</i>, but a <i>political struggle</i>, for the creation of <i>a new type of society</i>. As Lenin put it, strikes, other than a political General Strike, are <i>not</i> <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-class-struggle.html">class struggles</a>, but only <i>sectional struggles</i>, but they are also at the same time, a <i>school</i> for real class struggle.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“Strikes, therefore, teach the workers to unite; they show them that they can struggle against the capitalists only when they are united; strikes teach the workers to think of the struggle of the whole working class against the whole class of factory owners and against the arbitrary, police government. This is the reason that socialists call strikes “a school of war,” a school in which the workers learn to make war on their enemies for the liberation of the whole people, of all who labour, from the yoke of government officials and from the yoke of capital.</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“A school of war” is, however, not war itself. When strikes are widespread among the workers, some of the workers (including some socialists) begin to believe that the working class can confine itself to strikes, strike funds, or strike associations alone; that by strikes alone the working class can achieve a considerable improvement in its conditions or even its emancipation. When they see what power there is in a united working class and even in small strikes, some think that the working class has only to organise a general strike throughout the whole country for the workers to get everything they want from the capitalists and the government. This idea was also expressed by the workers of other countries when the working-class movement was in its early stages and the workers were still very inexperienced. It is a mistaken idea. Strikes are <b>one</b> of the ways in which the working class struggles for its emancipation, but they are not the only way; and if the workers do not turn their attention to other means of conducting the struggle, they will slow down the growth and the successes of the working class.”</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>(<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1899/dec/strikes.htm">Lenin – On Strikes</a>)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/chapter-ii-metaphysics-of-political_02124958380.html">Back To Part 5</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/chapter-ii-metaphysics-of-political_01262955516.html">Forward To Part 7</a></div>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-4428163043769323312024-03-14T14:00:00.070+00:002024-03-16T14:44:33.907+00:00The Chinese Question After The Sixth Congress, 3. The Soviets and The Constituent Assembly - Part 1 of 15<h2 style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;">3. The Soviets and The Constituent Assembly</span></h2><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Trotsky's comments, in this section, are highly significant, in relation to the attempt of sections of the social-imperialist <i>“left”</i>, to turn him into an opportunist supporter of <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/11/bourgeois-democracy.html">bourgeois-democracy</a>, as against a revolutionary opponent of it. That attempt, used to justify their support for Zelensky's corrupt regime, and its NATO backers, leads them into, and flows from, the same Menshevik/Stalinist <i>stages theory</i>, against which Trotsky was fighting. It is also the basis of the petty-bourgeois nationalist privileging of bourgeois-democracy over international socialism that led to them being mere cheerleaders for the former, for the last 80 years, and <i>de facto</i> opponents of the latter. It is the essence of <i>idiot anti-imperialism</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Trotsky begins by quoting Lenin.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“We hope that it is not necessary to raise here the general question of formal, that is, of bourgeois democracy. Our attitude towards it has nothing in common with the sterile anarchist negation. The slogan and the norms of democracy, from the formal point of view, are deduced in a different way for the various countries of a well-defined stage in the evolution of bourgeois society. The democratic slogans contain for a certain period not only illusions, not only deception, but also an animating historical force.</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“So long as the struggle of the working class for full power is not on the order of the day, it is our duty to utilize every form of bourgeois democracy.” (Lenin, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/jan/20.htm">Report at the 2nd All-Russia Trade Union congress</a>, <b>Works</b>, January 20, 1919, Vol.XX, Part 2, p.298.)” (p 186)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That Trotsky opens with this quote arises from the attempts of the Mensheviks/Stalinists to tie Trotsky's revolutionary position to the anarchists, in contrast to their own opportunism. Trotsky's position, as with that of Lenin, was <i>not</i> that of a <i>supporter</i> of bourgeois-democracy, but an <i>opponent</i> of it. However, both recognised that, not only the large mass of the peasantry/petty-bourgeoisie continued to hold <i>illusions</i> in that formal democracy, but so did the majority of workers. If that were not the case, then the proletarian revolution would, long before, have been a relatively easy matter. It's the <i>same</i> recognition that leads to the tactic of <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-united-front-summary.html">the United Front</a>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But, Trotsky's and Lenin's position is <i>never</i> that of <i>opportunism</i> in supporting bourgeois-democracy, as some kind of <i>inevitable stage</i> through which the working-class must pass. The whole <i>method</i> of <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2021/07/permanent-revolution-summary.html">permanent revolution</a>, and of <i>transitional demands</i>, is one in which, having accepted a reality of support for that formal democracy, by a large section of the masses, the revolutionaries say, <i>“okay, you do not, <b>yet</b>, agree with us about the sham nature of this formal democracy, but <b>we will show it to you, in practice</b>. Although <b>we</b> do not support it, we will support <b>your</b> attempts to bring it about or defend it against fascist attacks. However, <b>we</b> insist that, in <b>your</b> fight for that democracy, <b>you</b> fight for it to be <b>consistent democracy</b>. If <b>you</b> do that, <b>you</b> will see that it is a <b>sham</b>, and <b>empty camouflage</b> for the <b>dictatorship of the bourgeoisie</b>. Moreover, in fighting for that democracy, where it does not exist, or fighting against attacks on it by fascists, or other states, <b>we</b> will show <b>you</b> that, any successful fight will require use, <b>not</b> of the <b>methods</b> and <b>institutions</b> of that <b>formal democracy</b>, but those of direct, <b>proletarian democracy, and workers' power.”</b></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That is what Marx proposed, in his <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm">1850 Address</a>, and it is what the Bolsheviks attempted in 1905, and again in 1917. In China, the revolution had proceeded in a similar fashion, with the lower strata of the petty-bourgeoisie and peasantry engaging in agrarian revolts, and attacks on government troops and bureaucrats. But, as against Marx's 1850 advice, to separate the workers, and build centres of proletarian power and self-government, and its application in 1905 and 1917, in the creation of soviets, the Stalinists and Menshevists blocked any such development, as they sought to retain the support of the bourgeoisie, and to limit the revolution to the achievement of formal democracy.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The result was the defeat of the revolutionary movement, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_massacre">victory of the KMT coup</a>, which ushered in a period of Bonapartism and military rule. The same process has been witnessed, repeatedly, across the globe, in the post-war period. These Bonapartist/military regimes, though <i>socially</i> based on the <i>middle classes</i>, become the vehicle for <i>modernisation and industrialisation</i> – or else they inevitably collapse, by trying to swim against history. The actual <i>forms</i> of that depend on a series of other conditions. Some were dependent on the USSR, as with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba#Revolution_and_Communist_Party_rule_(1959–present)">Cuba</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam#Vietnam_War">Vietnam</a> etc., and become <i>deformed workers' states</i>; others, like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_republican_Egypt">Egypt</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Syrian_Republic">Syria</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_Republic_(1958–1968)">Iraq</a> created <i>state capitalist</i> economies, whilst the regime of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge">Khmer Rouge</a>, in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_Civil_War">Cambodia</a>, rather than seeking modernisation and industrialisation, attempted to move backwards, and inevitably collapsed.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-chinese-question-after-sixth_062072864.html">Back To The Inter-Revolutionary Period</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-chinese-question-after-sixth_0298688934.html">Forward To Part 2</a></div>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-31792227320787238622024-03-13T14:00:00.044+00:002024-03-15T14:32:08.495+00:00Chapter II, The Metaphysics of Political Economy, 5. Strikes and Combinations of Workers - Part 5 of 7<div style="text-align: justify;">Marx notes that the concern of the foreman, in the Bolton meeting, was that higher <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/wages.html">wages</a> would reduce <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/02/profit.html">profits</a>, because the capitalist could not control the <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/price.html">price</a> of their <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/a-commodity-is-use-value-that-is.html">commodities</a>, sold on world markets, whereas Proudhon's objection was that it would mean higher prices, and reduction in supply, i.e. a shift of the supply curve to the left.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP5OXEHmfD3ep3aw4CFoyhT7tS3Q1AhVloxPGMpVxm-nWrf8ASxo5Z__9odAieDtf20DrNyofA3X-T9ftOueEV0YjFAaw_Tv6MM9hyphenhyphenK8rD6QgOqZvz2AbZvWmkiyaie5ggx10PWk2I5ocpBv86izZVzVV8-rE3JmpoxW7n0kmHHihTHwXyT8NHhuntNDxn/s317/Supply%20and%20Demand.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="159" data-original-width="317" height="247" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP5OXEHmfD3ep3aw4CFoyhT7tS3Q1AhVloxPGMpVxm-nWrf8ASxo5Z__9odAieDtf20DrNyofA3X-T9ftOueEV0YjFAaw_Tv6MM9hyphenhyphenK8rD6QgOqZvz2AbZvWmkiyaie5ggx10PWk2I5ocpBv86izZVzVV8-rE3JmpoxW7n0kmHHihTHwXyT8NHhuntNDxn/w492-h247/Supply%20and%20Demand.jpg" width="492" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">As Marx sets out in <i>Value, Price and Profit</i>, and <i>Wage Labour and Capital</i>, the argument that wages are determined by supply and demand for <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/labour-power.html">labour-power</a> is correct, but, only because wages are a <i>price</i> for labour-power sold as a commodity, i.e. only so long as you accept bourgeois production relations as eternal. In the same way, its true that the best conditions for workers is when the demand for labour-power is strong, which is when capital accumulates more rapidly, but capital accumulates more rapidly when profits are high, which implies that wages are low.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The reactionary petty-bourgeois ideology of Proudhon is exposed when he says,</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“A workers' strike is illegal, and it is not only the Penal Code that says so, it is the economic system, the necessity of the established order....</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“That each worker individually should dispose freely over his person and his hands, this can be tolerated, but that workers should undertake by combination to do violence to monopoly, is something society cannot permit.” (p 157)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The same sentiments could be expressed by any Brexitory. In fact, Marx notes legislation only <i>rubber stamps</i> the actual <i>social relations</i> established in society. The fact that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premiership_of_Margaret_Thatcher">Thatcher's government</a> could not have existed in the 1960's, and the same is true of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Ronald_Reagan">Reagan's government</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Volcker">Volcker's</a> policies, has been mentioned. In the 1960's, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_government,_1964%E2%80%931970">Harold Wilson</a> had to abandon the anti-union laws set out in <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Place_of_Strife">In Place of Strife</a></i>, and, in the early 1970's, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heath_ministry">Heath's government</a> had to discover the <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Solicitor">Official Solicitor</a></i>, to get the <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentonville_Five">Pentonville Five</a></i> out of gaol, and avoid a General Strike, against its anti-union laws. The Tories will find the same problem, as is Macron in France.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Marx notes that, in England, parliament had to repeal <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combination_Act_1799">The Combination Acts</a></i> that made unions illegal, and that was simply a reflection of reality, as it had developed under pressure of <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/capital.html">capital</a> accumulation.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“Parliament had to modify the law in order to bring it more and more into line with the conditions resulting from free competition, it had of necessity to abolish all laws forbidding combinations of workers. The more modern industry and competition develop, the more elements there are which call forth and strengthen combination, and as soon as combination becomes an economic fact, daily gaining in solidity, it is bound before long to become a legal fact.” (p 157)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The same was seen in the 1950's, and is being seen again, now, as trades union membership and activism rises alongside increased economic activity and competition between employers for scarce labour supplies. All that Proudhon's statement about the French Penal Code showed, was the lower level of capitalist development in France.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/chapter-ii-metaphysics-of-political_01187685915.html">Back To Part 4</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/chapter-ii-metaphysics-of-political_059821652.html">Forward To Part 6</a></div>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-38792281988876242522024-03-12T14:00:00.031+00:002024-03-14T14:04:15.577+00:00The Chinese Question After The Sixth Congress, 2. The Inter Revolutionary Period - Part 5 of 5<div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“The process of economic recovery will, in turn, correspond to the mobilization of new tens and hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers, to the tightening up of their ranks, to the increase of their specific gravity in the social life of the country and by that an increase in their revolutionary self-confidence.” (p 179)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">However, that is not some mechanical process. As seen after WWII, its first manifestation takes the form of economistic, syndicalist, sectional industrial struggle, not <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-class-struggle.html">class struggle</a>. It takes years for the workers to rebuild their organisations and leadership, and the existing leadership exercises a huge <i>conservative</i> weight on that development. In China, the Communist Party turned away from the working-class, and towards the peasantry, and the guerrilla war conducted in rural areas, so it prevented this development of the working-class, described by Trotsky.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“At the beginning, the augmentation of the specific gravity and the class self-confidence of the proletariat will make itself felt in a rebirth of the strike struggle, in the consolidation of the trade unions. It is needless to say that serious possibilities are thus opened up before the Chinese Communist Party. Nobody knows how long it will have to remain in a clandestine existence. In any case, it is necessary to reinforce and to perfect the illegal organizations in the course of the coming period. But this task cannot be accomplished outside of the life and the struggle of the masses.” (p 179)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Trotsky, again, sets out the way Marxists <i>“support”</i> <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/11/bourgeois-democracy.html">bourgeois-democratic</a> institutions in the same way that a rope supports a hanged man. The Chinese bourgeoisie had held a conference in Shanghai that reflected its victory over the workers and peasants, and represented a pre-parliament in which it set out its agenda for a National Assembly. What should be the position of Marxists? Recognising that the majority of the masses did not yet have a revolutionary consciousness, the Marxists should also demand the convocation of a Constitutional Assembly.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“<b>The Communist Party can and should formulate the slogan of a Constituent Assembly with full powers, elected by universal, equal, direct and secret suffrage</b>. In the process of agitation for this slogan, it will obviously be necessary to explain to the masses that it is doubtful if such an assembly will be convened, and even if it were, it would be powerless so long as the material power remains in the hands of the Guomindang generals. From this flows the possibility of broaching in a new manner the slogan of the arming of the workers and the peasants.” (p 183)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In other words, just as the Bolsheviks did, in 1917, as they agitated for soviets alongside the demand for a Constituent Assembly, and as Trotsky did in <i><a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1934/06/paf.htm">The Action Programme For France</a></i>. It is a means of working alongside the reality that the masses have not yet broken with bourgeois-democracy, whilst creating the means and dynamic for achieving that break.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“By judiciously combining these slogans, by advancing each of them at the proper time, the Communist Party will be able to tear itself out of its clandestine existence, make a bloc with the masses, win their confidence, and thus speed the coming of the period of the creation of soviets and of the direct struggle for power.” (p 184)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The demand for a Constituent Assembly, and other facets of bourgeois-democracy, is not in order to obtain <i>“breathing space”</i> as the Stalinists and opportunists argue, but only a recognition of the fact that the masses have not yet broken from their illusions in them. All the while, the Marxists keep up their relentless criticism of the sham nature of that bourgeois-democracy, and, in their practical activity, for example, solving the problems of the agrarian revolution, do so by proposing revolutionary, proletarian solutions.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“If it should succeed, in this connection, in passing over a period of parliamentarism (which is possible, even probable, but far from inevitable), this will permit the proletarian vanguard to scrutinize its enemies and adversaries by examining them through the prism of parliament. In the course of the pre-parliamentary and parliamentary period, this vanguard will have to conduct an intransigent struggle to win influence over the peasants, to guide the peasantry directly from the political point of view. Even if the National Assembly should be realized in an arch-democratic manner, the fundamental problems would nevertheless have to be solved by force. Through the parliamentary period, the Chinese Communist Party would arrive at a direct and immediate struggle for power, but by possessing a maturer historical basis, that is, surer premises for victory.” (p 184-5)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That is the antithesis of the approach of the Stalinists and their <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-popular-front-summary.html">Popular Front</a> with the bourgeoisie, which, all along, sought to even oppose the spontaneous action of the masses and creation of soviets. It sought, instead, to channel it into arbitration panels and negotiation with the bourgeoisie, via the institutions of bourgeois-democracy.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-chinese-question-after-sixth_01406733659.html">Back To Part 4</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-chinese-question-after-sixth_0193820585.html">Forward To The Soviets and The Constituent Assembly</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2023/07/lessons-of-chinese-revolution-table-of.html">Back To Table of Contents</a></div>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-52902406902106531102024-03-11T14:00:00.031+00:002024-03-13T15:26:37.363+00:00Chapter II, The Metaphysics of Political Economy, 5. Strikes and Combinations of Workers - Part 4 of 7<div style="text-align: justify;">Marx, in <i>Capital</i>, notes that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ricardo">Ricardo</a> had commented that, often, machines are only introduced when <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/wages.html">wages</a> rise above a minimum level. As noted earlier, this is part of the dynamic of <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-long-wave-summary.html">the long wave cycle</a>, by which the <i>relative surplus population</i> is used up, <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2020/03/crises-of-overproduction-summary.html">capital overproduced</a> relative to labour supply/<a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-social-working-day-part-1.html">social working-day</a>, wages rise, demand for wage goods rises, stimulating aggregate demand, and conditions of boom, which turn into crisis, as <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/02/profit.html">profits</a> are squeezed, resulting in <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/capital.html">capital</a> engaging in a new technological revolution to replace <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/labour.html">labour</a>, and create a new relative surplus population, starting the cycle all over again.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“In England, strikes have regularly given rise to the invention and application of new machines. Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalist to quell the revolt of specialized labour. The <b>self-acting mule</b>, the greatest invention of modern industry, put out of action the spinners who were in revolt. If combinations and strikes had no other effect than that of making the efforts of mechanical genius react against them, they would still exercise an immense influence on the development of industry.” (p 154-5)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The arguments of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardian_socialism">Ricardians</a> that wages were determined by the interaction of the demand and supply for <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/labour-power.html">labour-power</a>, were, then, correct, as far as they went. As Engels pointed out, in <i>The Condition of The Working-Class</i>,</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“The history of these Unions is a long series of defeats of the working-men, interrupted by a few isolated victories. All these efforts naturally cannot alter the economic law according to which wages are determined by the relation between supply and demand in the labour market. Hence the Unions remain powerless against all great forces which influence this relation. In a commercial crisis the Union itself must reduce wages or dissolve wholly; and in a time of considerable increase in the demand for labour, it cannot fix the rate of wages higher than would be reached spontaneously by the competition of the capitalists among themselves.”</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Capital always had the whip hand, because it determined the demand, and, if wages rose too high, the demand fell, in part, because capital engaged in technological development. That's what happened in the 1870's, 1920's, and 1970's. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premiership_of_Margaret_Thatcher">Thatcher's government</a> could not have survived in the conditions of the 1960's, and nor could the policies of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Volcker">Paul Volcker</a> at the Federal Reserve. It was not Thatcher that did for the British labour movement, but the microchip.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Marx quotes Proudhon's account of a meeting in Bolton, which Proudhon put forward as evidence that British workers were also turning away from trades unions. Marx dismantles the argument and report. The workers in Bolton, Marx notes, were the most advanced, and most revolutionary. But, those workers were refused entry to the kinds of meeting referred to in the report, where it was only the foremen and other agents of the bosses that were permitted.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“At the time of the great agitation in England for the abolition of the Corn Laws, the English manufacturers thought that they could cope with the landowners only by thrusting the workers to the fore. But as the interests of the workers were no less opposed to those of the manufacturers than the interests of the manufacturers were to those of the landowners, it was natural that the manufacturers should fare badly in the workers' meetings. What did the manufacturers do? To save appearances they organized meetings composed, to a large extent, of foremen, of the small number of workers who were devoted to them, and of the real <b>friends of trade</b>.” (p 155)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Until 1843, the long wave cycle was in a period of downtrend/stagnation, which, as with the 1880's, 1930's, and 1980's, put workers in a weak position to negotiate wages. In such conditions, competition between workers outweighs the potential for combination of workers, in competition with capital. After 1843, when a new upswing began, it takes time for workers to rebuild confidence and their organisations, as also seen in the post-war period. Often, the upswing, with increased employment and wages, may even deter workers from joining unions, as they think they can raise their wages without them, simply by moving jobs, as was also seen in the 1950's, and is seen, now, with the rise in the Quit Rate, and the fact that the average rise in pay for workers moving jobs is 14%, as against an average rise in wages of workers remaining in the same job of only around 7%.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/chapter-ii-metaphysics-of-political_0856284495.html">Back To Part 3</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/chapter-ii-metaphysics-of-political_02124958380.html">Forward To Part 5</a></div>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-83114806582511099502024-03-10T14:00:00.164+00:002024-03-12T14:04:18.331+00:00The Chinese Question After The Sixth Congress, The Inter Revolutionary Period - Part 4 of 5<div style="text-align: justify;">As Trotsky sets out in his later writing, in the 1930's, the Stalinists were to become even more overt, in seeking to enable imperialism to bring about such stabilisation, on the bones of workers. It was the basis of their <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-popular-front-summary.html">Popular Front</a> policy in France and Spain, and of their attempt to form an international military bloc with <i>“democratic imperialism”</i>, against Hitler and Mussolini. Today, one camp of social-imperialists, represented by the USC, does exactly the same, seeking a rotten bloc with NATO/Ukraine, whilst an opposing camp of social-imperialists seek a rotten bloc with Russia and China.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That social-imperialism, driven by petty-bourgeois moralism, picks a side (campism) based upon which imperialist bloc it views as the lesser-evil. The fact that the Zionist led genocide against Palestinians, has broken out, in the ensuing period, showed the bankruptcy of that petit-bourgeois, moralist approach, creating contradictions that blew it apart. Biden's latest <i>"senior moment"</i>, was revealing, when, actually discussing the air-dropping of aid into Gaza (itself simply a futile, face-saving gesture) he mistakenly referred to Ukraine. The difference being, of course, that the US is supplying the arms to the Zionists that are bringing about that genocide, and famine, whilst providing no arms to the Palestinians to defend themselves against it, whereas, in Ukraine, they impose global sanctions on Russia, and arm the Ukrainian imperialist state to the hilt, as well as putting its own troops on the ground!</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As US imperialism backed the Zionist holocaust in Gaza, contradicting all of the claims about <i>"democratic imperialism"</i> supporting an <i>"international rules based system"</i>, based on <i>the rule of law</i>, right of national self-determination and other such crap, it also sent those in the USC that had allied with it, into an inevitable contradiction, as the petty-bourgeois milieu in which they operate, and which daily presses down on them, were led to support the Palestinians. Not least was that contradiction faced by those, such as the AWL, who are not only openly social-imperialists, but self-confessed Zionists. It appears that for whatever reason, of which we can only speculate, the AWL's commitment to Zionism, and US imperialism, has been greater than its need to respond to the pressure on it from its own petty-bourgeois milieu.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">At the same time, the social-pacifists of <i>Stop The War</i> sit in the middle, pointlessly calling for peace, as though peace, in the short-term, is possible without the military victory of one of these imperialist camps over the other, or, in the longer-term, without a revolutionary war conducted by the working class to overthrow the ruling classes of both camps, and their states. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">All of the similar hypocritical and moralistic talk from those, such as A. Blinken, that the genocide committed by Zionism in Gaza, alongside its continued occupation and oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank, is contradictory to its long-term interests, is nonsense. If the Zionists wipe out Palestinians in the West Bank, as their open public statements now, admit is their aim, that clearly is in the interests of Zionism, as it will annexe that territory, and eradicate a continuing military threat to it. It will facilitate its further subjugation and annexation of the West Bank, enabling it to commit a similar genocide against Palestinians there, and so creating a <i>stabilisation</i> based upon the original founding principles of Zionism, restated by Netanyahu and others, now, of creating a single Zionist state from the river to the sea. That is the real bourgeois solution, and not the delusion of <i>two bourgeois states</i>, which has been used simply to fob off western, gullible liberals, and bourgeois Arab leaders.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“The domestic depression, in the face of the available resources, makes more than likely an extensive economic intervention in China by the United States, before which the Guomindang will evidently hold the door wide “open”. One cannot doubt the fact that the European countries, especially Germany, fighting against the rapidly aggravated crisis, will seek to debouch upon the Chinese market.” (p 176-7)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Yeltsin performed that role in Russia, and Zelensky does so, now, in Ukraine. It is clearly the strategy of US imperialism in the Middle-East, which has long since been trying to develop its ties with the Gulf States, and other bourgeois regimes in the Middle-East, which it seeks to ally with Israel, but which has been frustrated by the existence of those pesky Palestinians, who just won't just lie down, and whose plight has also rallied the Arab Street to their cause. From the perspective of US imperialism, the faster Netanyahu can do to the Palestinians what <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tecumseh_Sherman#Indian_Wars">Sherman did to the Native Americans</a>, or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Australians#Frontier_wars_and_massacres">Britain did to the aborigines in Australia</a>, the better, and the sooner, then, Israel can normalise relations with Saudi Arabia and so on, opening the door for large-scale western, particularly US, investment in the region, and the more effective exploitation of Arab workers, and the resources of the region. Hence their willingness to openly support genocide, to be willing accomplices in it, to finance it, and arm it, and to even militarily support it themselves with the military intervention in the Red Sea.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Trotsky elaborates the conditions, in China, which made possible a recovery, in its economy, and opening for direct investment, particularly in infrastructure, by the US and other imperialist states. Such investment was desirable, not least because the economic recovery creates the best conditions for the rebuilding of the working-class. It was inevitable, however, that any such investment would be undertaken on terms favourable to the imperialist powers, making a mockery of the idea of <i>“anti-imperialism”</i>, on the part of the KMT, and the same is true in Ukraine, today, as witnessed by the London Conference, called to discuss the future exploitation of Ukrainian workers and resources. In both these cases, that is also facilitated by the corrupt nature of the political regime in the recipient country.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Trotsky points out that the US would be keen to build roads, in China, as a necessary condition of it, then, being able to sell its surplus car production, there. Ironically, it is, today, China that directly invests billions of Dollars in infrastructure, in developing economies, in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Central Asia, as part of its <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative">Belt and Road programme</a>, which not only facilitated its access to resources, but also opens markets for its manufactured products, whilst extending its global strategic influence. Hence, also the need for the US to challenge it, by reasserting its own influence in the Middle-East by a <i>"final solution"</i> to the Palestinian problem at the hands of Netanyahu's Nazis, opening the door to its alliance with other US clients, like Saudi Arabia, in the region.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">China is already positioning itself for the point where NATO's war against Russia, in Ukraine, hits the buffers, and Ukraine negotiates a peace deal with Russia. It will be able to offer cheap financing and infrastructure construction to a shattered Ukraine. The US will lose interest, and the EU will not want, and be in no position, to take in a bankrupt Ukraine. If it does, the EU, itself, is likely to fail and disintegrate, as the problems of having taken in Hungary, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria previously indicated. For China, however, it fits, perfectly, into its ambition of creating a Eurasian politico-economic bloc. The further advantage, for China, is that the social-patriotic leaders of the Ukrainian labour movement will have proved themselves bankrupt, by their opportunism and support for Zelensky, and NATO imperialism.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As Ukraine does a deal with Russia, and the vast might of NATO/EU is found impotent, the Ukrainian workers will be set back, as happened with the Chinese workers, after 1927. They will be in a poor condition to resist the onslaught of Ukrainian <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/capital.html">capital</a>, and its state, as it seeks to do deals with China, for large-scale direct investment, conditioned on Ukrainian workers being screwed. Something similar is happening with Chinese investment in Afghanistan, following the defeat and withdrawal of NATO imperialism. Its rather like the way US imperialism expanded, after WWII, after the old European colonial empires were disbanded.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-chinese-question-after-sixth_0975977541.html">Back To Part 3</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-chinese-question-after-sixth_062072864.html">Forward To Part 5</a></div>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-53648873448774178842024-03-09T19:30:00.008+00:002024-03-09T19:30:00.138+00:00Genocide Joe and Holocaust Harris<div style="text-align: justify;">Genocide Joe Biden, and his Vice President, Holocaust Harris, are doing a bad cop worse cop act, in their PR stunts, in relation to their support for the Zionist final solution being committed against Palestinians. For nearly six months, now, Biden and Harris, along with all of their spokespeople, like Kirby, Blinken and co., have stood soldier to soldier with the Zionist regime, as it slaughtered Palestinians, men, women, children and babies, blowing their body parts asunder, with the 2000 pound bombs that the US supplied. Of course, they have not been alone, as the European subordinates of US imperialism, in the UK and EU, have done likewise, whilst, sections of the social-imperialist left have acted as merely a feint echo of a conscience to the supposed social-democratic parties that have also, simply formed a chorus to the refrain coming from The Whitehouse. They have all, taking their lead from Biden, simply repeated <i>ad nauseum</i> the most blatant lies and fabrications put out by the Zionist regime, as though it were gospel truth, and have repeated them, even after those lies have been comprehensively and publicly debunked. <a href="https://youtu.be/0el9wiOBmmM?si=NQsFt8Ge258LJO6f">The bourgeois media has done the same</a>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As Owen Jones has previously noted, the supporters of Genocide Joe have complained that young people have been more affected by all of the vast array of available video online – some of it provided by Zionist soldiers themselves, glorying in their atrocities – which witnesses the genocide being inflicted on Gaza, than they have by the media claims about Biden having harsh words over the phone with Nazi Netanyahu. Well, <i>quelle surprise</i>! Of course, Biden and his carers are a bit slow on the uptake, having grown used to being able to pump out any old rubbish, and have it accepted by the public, just as the Zionist regime has been used to doing and saying what it wants, without challenge, because the western media backs it, in the same way it backs the actions of western imperialism, and acts as its propaganda arm.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But, there are limits to that, as Biden <i>et al</i> have discovered. The Zionist propaganda was never believable, precisely because it was so far removed from the truth, much like the propaganda in any other totalitarian regime, where there is no freedom of the press. In Israel, <i><a href="https://www.haaretz.com/">Ha'aretz</a></i>, within its own bourgeois limits, does challenge the Zionist propaganda put out by the state, and its views are often cited by people outside Israel, but the overwhelming power of the Zionist state, inside Israel, is such, especially given the fact that, increasingly, Israel has attracted Zionist fanatics from the US, and elsewhere, to become settlers, changing its own demographic structure, and particularly in conditions of what the Zionist state presents as <i>“war”</i>, those oppositional voices, inside Israel, are easily marginalised, whilst still provoking hostility from the Zionists, which tries to shut them up, much as the state has tried to do in Germany, and other parts of the EU, as well as in the US, and now with the attempts of the Starnakists in Britain, to close down debate and protest.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In the US, the problem for Genocide Joe and Holocaust Harris is that this is a Presidential election year, and a senile Biden was already massively unpopular amongst US voters, including Democrat and Independent voters, let alone Republicans and Trumpists. Indeed, the one thing that has saved Biden and the Democrats from even greater humiliation, is the fact that they are up against Trump. For US voters, 70% of them want neither Trump nor Biden as their President, but currently, given a choice between the two, many seem to be choosing Trump as the less smelly piece of shit. Given that Trump is an even bigger supporter of the Zionists and their final solution against Palestinians that makes it a difficult choice for Democrats. Nevertheless, a significant number of them, by no means just Muslim Democrats, have chosen not to support Biden, voting in primaries for <i>“None of The Above”</i>. In fact, Biden seems to have pulled off the difficult task of making Trump look the lesser-evil, and of opening the door to his return to the Whitehouse, and the Democrat Party, if such it can be called, has enabled him to do it! Its a bit like what happened in Rochdale, but on a much more vast scale. Its the inevitable consequence of the politics of lesser-evilism. There is always a greater evil, and the dynamic drives towards it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As voters saw the reality of the final solution being inflicted on the Palestinians, Biden's parroting of Zionist lies simply was not cutting it any more. That was significant, not just in the US, but for US imperialism, globally. Even the global institutions of imperialism, such as the UN, and its institutions like the ICJ, WHO, UNWRA and so on, were, now, no longer reliable vehicles. Instead, the US found itself in the same position that other rogue states have been placed in the past, as overtly ignoring the findings and rulings of these global <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/11/bourgeois-democracy.html">bourgeois-democratic</a> institutions. That, in itself, blows apart all of those claims about the rule of law, and international rules based system and so on, that acted as a cover for US imperialism over the last 80 years. Even when, US imperialism has set down what the rules of that system are, it can no longer, even abide by them itself! Of course, whenever the ruling class faces that problem, it always has the option of simply sweeping that façade of democracy aside, <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/britain-heads-towards-bonapartism-and.html">as the Starnakists are proposing in Britain, now</a>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But, that tends to be a last resort. Once the camouflage of bourgeois-democracy is thrown off, via a coup by the ruling class, it is not so easily acquired once more, the iron hand behind the velvet glove is exposed. So, as popular opposition to the holocaust, and the complicity in it of western imperialism, grows, the imperialist politicians have had to try to assuage it, not with any real measures to end it, but with PR stunts, to present another façade of humanitarianism. Holocaust Harris came out to say publicly that there had to be an immediate ceasefire, but that was quickly walked back by Genocide Joe, and his staffers, who continued the narrative of only a humanitarian pause, and only to get out the remaining hostages, after which the Zionist, industrialised killing machine, armed by the US, would be able to resume its butchery.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Then, they talked about the need for aid, whilst continuing to supply the Zionist juggernaut with massive amounts of weapons to continue its killing spree, and whilst it continues to deny passage of existing aid into Gaza! The idea that they could just say to the Zionists, let in the existing aid trucks, or all weapons to you stop, was never an option. On the contrary, as the Houthis and others have implemented the ICJ ruling for all countries to act to end the genocide, by seeking to stop shipments to Israel via the Red Sea, the US and UK have, instead, sought to ensure the continuation of those shipments to the Zionists, and have launched their own military strikes against the Houthis.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The action of Genocide Joe to drop aid into Gaza by plane was clearly a publicity stunt ahead of his State of The Union Address. The amount dropped amounted to only the equivalent of one truck load, some of it landed in the sea, causing danger to starving Palestinians who went into the sea after it, whilst another load, literally dropped on the heads of some Palestinians, killing several of them, and seriously injuring others. Now, Biden has proposed building a temporary dock on the Gazan coast to take in aid shipments across the Mediterranean, from Cyprus. It is another PR stunt, designed simply to waste time, to give the the Zionist murder machine time to complete its grisly work.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Yodd5Hb6WUY?si=oC-QNcakwvxflVjv" title="YouTube video player" width="380"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Even the US says it will take more than two months to build, whilst Palestinian children are dying from famine, and disease, now. But, even if it were built, the shipments have to get from the coast into the rest of Gaza. The problem with that is that the Zionist military controls that coast, and the rest of the territory. They will simply block the transit of that aid into Gaza, in the same way they have blocked aid going into Gaza, via the existing crossings, whilst Zionist fanatics, have set up camps on those crossings, complete with bouncy castles, to while away their time, and turn genocide into an amusement park, as they block any transit of aid into Gaza, looking forward to the day, <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/starmers-zionist-allies-look-forward-to.html">as they have tweeted, when cannibalism comes to the Palestinians trapped inside</a>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The ludicrous nature of Biden's proposal, as simply a PR stunt, for the benefit of his election campaign, has even been noted by the likes of David Cameron, himself, now, perhaps, looking to the problem of facing criminal proceedings at the ICC, in the Hague, for complicity in war crimes and genocide, resulting from Britain's support for the Zionists slaughter of innocents. But, Cameron is impotent, in the face of US imperialism, to force the opening of existing crossings, and if Britain's puny contribution was removed to supporting the holocaust in Gaza, it would make little difference, as the US continues to flood the Zionist regime with all the weapons it needs.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Workers should learn from this. None of these imperialists, not those of so called <i>“democratic-imperialism”</i>, represented by the US/EU/NATO, nor the imperialists in the opposing camp of China/Russia/BRICS are our friends or allies, and nor are the bourgeois nationalists of the various smaller states and movements aligned with them. In all cases, as Lenin and others stated in 1914, <i>our main enemy is at home</i>, it is our own ruling class. We cannot rely on that ruling class, at home or internationally, to act in our interests. It will not do so, other than incidentally, in pursuing its own interests. It is up to workers, via our own organisations, and via our own efforts, our own self-activity, and self-government to look after ourselves, to pursue our own class interest in direct opposition to those of the bourgeoisie. The sooner we do that, that we also build our own independent, revolutionary workers' party to codify and fight consciously for those interests, the sooner these global problems can be resolved, in the only truly progressive way possible, the overthrow of capitalism/imperialism, and the creation of a global socialist society, based upon the cooperative commonwealth.</div>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-41181351367821531092024-03-09T14:00:00.032+00:002024-03-11T16:59:38.388+00:00Chapter II, The Metaphysics of Political Economy, 5. Strikes and Combinations of Workers - Part 3 of 7<div style="text-align: justify;">Marx, then, sets out the ideas contained in <i><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2015/08/capital-iii-chapter-12-part-1.html">Chapter 11 of Capital III</a></i>, where he examines the effect of a general rise in <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/wages.html">wages</a> and fall in <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-average-or-general-rate-of-profit.html">the average rate of profit,</a> on <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/price.html">prices</a>. This shows that, as early as 1846, Marx had resolved the question of the transformation of <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/exchange-value.html">exchange-values</a> into <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/price-of-production.html">prices of production</a>. In <i>Chapter 11</i>, Marx sets out why a rise in wages and fall in <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2018/03/average-profit.html">average profits</a>, affects <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/capital.html">capitals</a> with different compositions, in different ways. A capital with a high <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-organic-composition-of-capital.html">organic composition</a> sees its cost of production (c + v) rise by less than a capital with a low organic composition, because the former employs relatively less <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/labour.html">labour</a>. In order that the latter obtains the new average profit, it must obtain higher <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/market-price.html">market prices</a> for its <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/a-commodity-is-use-value-that-is.html">commodities</a>, whereas the former must see the price of production for its commodities fall, because the fall in its average profit is greater than the rise in its wage bill. The means by which this comes about is a reallocation of capital into those spheres with a high organic composition/increased supply, and a reduction in the capital employed in spheres with a low organic composition.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“... a general rise in wages can never produce a more or less general rise in the price of goods. Actually, if every industry employed the same number of workers in relation to <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/fixed-capital.html">fixed capital</a> or to the instruments used, a general rise in wages would produce a general fall in profits and the current price of goods would undergo no alteration.” (p 154)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That is the condition Marx sets out in <i>Capital III, Chapter 11</i>, in relation to those capitals of average composition.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“But as the relation of manual labour to fixed capital is not the same in different industries, all the industries which employ a relatively greater mass of capital and fewer workers, will be forced sooner or later to lower the price of their goods. In the opposite case, in which the price of their goods is not lowered, their profit will rise above the common rate of profits. Machines are not wage-earners. Therefore, the general rise in wages will affect less those industries, which, compared with the others, employ more machines than workers. But as competition always tends to level the rate of profits, those profits which rise above the average rate cannot but be transitory. Thus, apart from a few fluctuations, a general rise in wages will lead, not as M. Proudhon says, to a general increase in prices, but to a partial fall – that is a fall in the current price of the goods that are made chiefly with the help of machines.” (p 154)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In fact, in the 20th century, as I have set out, elsewhere, central banks respond to a rise in wages that squeezes profits, by increasing liquidity, and devaluing <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-standard-of-prices.html">the standard of prices</a>, so that firms can all raise prices to protect profits, thereby, creating an <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2022/07/inflation-summary.html">inflationary spiral</a>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/chapter-ii-metaphysics-of-political_01141460032.html">Back To Part 2</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/chapter-ii-metaphysics-of-political_01187685915.html">Forward To Part 4</a></div>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-73481787359596017872024-03-09T07:00:00.002+00:002024-03-09T07:00:00.143+00:00Northern Soul Classics - Do The 45 - The Sharpees<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="387" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3Jdmt0NnMTQ" width="465" youtube-src-id="3Jdmt0NnMTQ"></iframe></div><br /><p></p>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-85379555963858411552024-03-08T19:30:00.001+00:002024-03-08T19:30:00.135+00:00Friday Night Disco - Njia Walk - The Fatback Band<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="387" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MFtRHPv5XeI" width="466" youtube-src-id="MFtRHPv5XeI"></iframe></div><br /> <p></p>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-65555758682035182252024-03-08T14:00:00.054+00:002024-03-10T15:14:44.656+00:00The Chinese Question After The Sixth Congress, The Inter Revolutionary Period - Part 3 of 5<div style="text-align: justify;">Stalin/Bukharin, in their theses, and evaluation of the conditions, had concluded that the revolutionary situation was assured <i>“for many years”</i>, thus emptying the concept of <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2021/07/permanent-revolution-summary.html">permanent revolution</a> of all meaning. But, if that was the case, then the potential for any <i>“stabilisation”</i> was also excluded. However, Trotsky points out, whilst the proletariat seeks to utilise a condition of crisis for its revolutionary ambitions, the bourgeoisie seeks to bring about stabilisation. Both are, then, premises for <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-class-struggle.html">class struggle</a>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“We once wrote that stabilization is an “object” of the class struggle and not an arena established for it in advance.” (p 174)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Bukharin had sneered at this <i>“Trotskyist”</i> formula, only later to smuggle it into his own report to the ECCI. But, like all of the other <i>“Trotskyist”</i> positions that the Stalinists/Bukharinists subsequently adopted, it was done without understanding the actual content of the formula.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“Naturally, absolute stabilization is absolutely opposed to an absolute revolutionary situation. The conversion of these absolutes into each other is “absolutely impossible”. But if one descends from these ridiculous theoretical summits, it turns out that before the complete and final triumph of socialism, the relatively revolutionary situation will very likely be converted more than once into relative stabilization (and vice versa). All other conditions remaining equal, the danger of the conversion of a revolutionary situation into bourgeois stabilization is all the greater the less capable is the proletarian leadership of exploiting the situation.” (p 174-5)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Not only are the objective, material conditions necessary, and the conditions of <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-long-wave-summary.html">the long-wave cycle</a>, favourable to <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/labour.html">labour</a> rather than <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/capital.html">capital</a>, but, also, this subjective factor of adequate revolutionary leadership is required. In the post-war period, the material conditions, and the long-wave cycle was highly favourable to proletarian revolution, but the subjective factor of revolutionary leadership, most certainly was not.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The bourgeoisie, via imperialism, pressed down on Stalinism, most visibly in the form of the adoption of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful_coexistence">“peaceful coexistence”</a>, by the USSR, and its active role in sabotaging proletarian revolutions, wherever they arose, spontaneously. It was channelled into the policies of the individual Stalinist parties, across the globe, which became merely national, <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/11/social-democracy.html">social-democratic</a> parties, often to the Right of the Left flank of the established social-democratic parties. But, that, in turn, was transmitted into those social-democratic parties, themselves. In turn, as the <i>“Trotskyists”</i> and <i>New Left</i> competed for influence, it was also transmitted into these organisations too, most clearly seen in their collapse into <i>economism, syndicalism</i> and <i>workerism</i>, in relation to domestic activity, and into <i>petty-bourgeois nationalism/anti-imperialism</i>, and <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-popular-front-summary.html">popular frontism</a>, in respect of their international activity. They became cheerleaders for these petty-bourgeois forces and ideas, and more so, when the period of <i>stagnation</i> set in, and the arena of industrial struggle was closed down.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“The leadership of the Chiang Kai-shek clique was superior to that of Chen Duxiu and of Tang Pingshan. But it is not this leadership that decided: foreign imperialism guided Chiang Kai-shek by threats, by promises, by its direct assistance. The Communist International directed Chen Duxiu. Two leaderships of world dimensions crossed swords here. That of the Communist International, through all the stages of the struggle, appeared as absolutely worthless, and it thus facilitated to the highest degree the task of the imperialist leadership. In such conditions, the transformation of the revolutionary situation into bourgeois stabilization is not only not “impossible”, but is absolutely inevitable. Even more: it is accomplished, and within certain limits it is completed.” (p 175)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The same can be seen today with the imperialist leadership's guidance of Zelensky and Netanyahu, but today, without any global proletarian forces to confront them, such is the debasement and degeneration of the international socialist movement. Indeed, as with the false leadership of that movement by Stalinism in the 1920's, and 30's, today, a large part of the false leadership of that movement has simply become apologists for, and cheerleaders of imperialism, i.e. has become social-imperialist.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-chinese-question-after-sixth_036884210.html">Back To Part 2</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-chinese-question-after-sixth_01406733659.html">Forward To Part 4</a></div>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-2770204081169293512024-03-07T14:00:00.066+00:002024-03-09T14:02:52.106+00:00Chapter II, The Metaphysics of Political Economy, 5. Strikes and Combinations of Workers - Part 2 of 7<div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith">Smith's</a> <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-labour-theory-of-value.html">Labour Theory of Value</a>, as with that of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ricardo">Ricardo</a>, and Marx, sets out that the <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/value.html">value</a> of <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/a-commodity-is-use-value-that-is.html">commodities</a> is determined by the <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/abstract-labour_3934.html">labour-time</a> required for their production. That labour-time comprises two components. Firstly, there is the labour-time required to <i>reproduce</i> the consumed <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/constant-capital.html">constant capital</a> (<a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/10/wear-and-tear.html">wear and tear</a>, and materials) that Smith refers to as <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/fixed-capital.html">fixed capital</a>, and then there is the <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/labour.html">labour</a> currently expended to process that constant capital into new commodities. Only a part of this <i>new value</i> is returned to the worker as <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/wages.html">wages</a>, equal to <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-value-of-labour-power.html">the value of their labour-power</a>, whilst the rest, the <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/surplus-value.html">surplus value</a>/<a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/02/profit.html">profit</a>, remains in the hands of the capitalist, who also pays from it an amount for <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/02/rent.html">rent</a> to the landlord, and <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/02/interest.html">interest</a> to the <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2020/09/interest-bearing-capital-summary.html">money-lender</a>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A rise in wages does not change the amount of <i>new value</i> created. It changes <i>only</i> the <i>proportion</i> in which it is <i>resolved</i> into wages and profit. If we take Robinson Crusoe, he might labour for 10 hours, only 6 of which are required to produce what he needs to replace his <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/labour-power.html">labour-power</a>, the other 4 hours constituting <i>surplus labour</i>, which he uses to produce additional means of production, so as, later, to increase his <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2022/12/productivity-summary.html">productivity</a>. If he chooses to expend 8 hours out of the 10 producing things for his immediate consumption (a rise in his wage), this does not change the fact that he has still created 10 hours of new value. It simply changes the proportion into which that new value is divided into consumption and accumulation of means of production – <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2020/05/necessary-labour-summary.html">necessary labour</a> and surplus labour.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Smith, seeing that wages could not be equal to the new value created, but failing to distinguish labour-power from labour, abandoned the <i>Labour Theory of Value</i>, and, instead, developed a <i>cost of production theory of value</i>, by which the value of commodities was determined by the value of the <i>factors of production</i> used in their production. That is essentially the theory taken over by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_economics">neoclassical</a>, marginalist economics, and by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics">Keynesian</a> theory. On this basis, if wages rise, the cost of production rises, and so <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/price.html">prices</a> rise, and the supply curve shifts to the left.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2sJMrJeVPGJ_5OKAYqCfFvBCpuZ_7wnnzRDc9iugZybsRNTsVtgubsOEIoxgcWnTIKwoj_CCJLqQkK-Zbh7aSBe115wSATS9n8hh7qIJkkWBmKaECupu1VOsbDQSuTkXn68bnyAByEbaVdFO7x79cgyCffXMTIbLYee-MZyAcXl1Q6EyX7SnJr_RlSkXs/s317/Supply%20and%20Demand.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="159" data-original-width="317" height="245" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2sJMrJeVPGJ_5OKAYqCfFvBCpuZ_7wnnzRDc9iugZybsRNTsVtgubsOEIoxgcWnTIKwoj_CCJLqQkK-Zbh7aSBe115wSATS9n8hh7qIJkkWBmKaECupu1VOsbDQSuTkXn68bnyAByEbaVdFO7x79cgyCffXMTIbLYee-MZyAcXl1Q6EyX7SnJr_RlSkXs/w488-h245/Supply%20and%20Demand.jpg" width="488" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">Ricardo rejected Smith's cost of production theory, but also failed to distinguish between labour-power and labour, leaving him with a contradiction he simply ignored rather than resolving. Ricardo, however, as with his followers, also noted that, if wages rise, and consequently, profits fall, at some point, <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/capital.html">capital</a> would stop being accumulated, and capitalists would introduce new labour-saving technologies, reducing the demand for labour-power, leading to unemployment, misery, and falling wages. This is the basis of <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/11/social-democracy.html">social-democratic</a> ideology, by which workers must always subordinate their interests to those of capital, so as to secure their longer-term interests.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Marx sets about destroying Proudhon's argument, in the same way he later destroyed the argument by Weston. He says,</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“We deny all these assertions, except that two and two make four.” (p 154)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Reinforcing the analysis in <i><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2022/06/a-contribution-to-critique-of-political_0923033777.html">A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy</a></i>, that <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2022/07/inflation-summary.html">inflation</a> is a monetary phenomenon, resulting from the devaluation of <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-standard-of-prices.html">the standard of prices</a>. Marx notes,</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“If the price of everything doubles at the same time as wages, there is no change in price, the only change is in terms.” (p 154)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In other words, there has been no change in values, and so no <i>real</i> change in prices, measured against a <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-money-commodity.html">money commodity</a>, such as gold. If all prices double, including wages, profits, rents, interest that can only be because <i>the standard of price</i> has been halved in value, for example, 0.5 grams of gold, not 1 gm., and with, then, double the quantity of such <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2022/04/money-tokens-summary.html">currency</a>, put into circulation.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/chapter-ii-metaphysics-of-political_0487400370.html">Back To Part 1</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/chapter-ii-metaphysics-of-political_0856284495.html">Forward To Part 3</a></div>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-83937521056688253012024-03-06T14:00:00.039+00:002024-03-08T14:02:45.279+00:00The Chinese Question After The Sixth Congress, The Inter Revolutionary Period - Part 2 of 5<div style="text-align: justify;">Trotsky sets out the different conditions, in Asia and Europe, and North America, which, at the time, contributed to the potential for a revolutionary situation.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“But the predictions which announce that the revolution will break out in Asia first and then in Europe already have a more conditional character. It is possible, even probable, but it is not at all inevitable. New difficulties and complications, like the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, or else the accentuation of the commercial and industrial crisis, under the pressure of the United States, can in the nearest future confront the European states with a directly revolutionary situation, as was the case in Germany in 1923, in England in 1926 and in Austria in 1927.” (p 170-171)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In fact, as a consequence of the laws of <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2021/07/permanent-revolution-summary.html">Permanent Revolution</a>, as Marx had set out, back in 1849, the defeat of the proletariat, becomes also, the defeat of its erstwhile bourgeois and petty-bourgeois allies too, as well as of other aspirations for national liberation, because the tasks of that <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/11/bourgeois-democracy.html">bourgeois-democratic</a>, national revolution, are, now, only capable of being truly fulfilled by a successful proletarian revolution, on an international scale. The old bourgeois-democratic ideals, such as national independence, were no longer truly achievable without international proletarian revolution, and so became, utopian and, therefore, reactionary delusions, dividing and distracting the global proletariat from its real enemy, its own ruling bourgeois class.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“It was necessary, beyond everything else, to follow the development of the class struggle in the history of our own day, and to prove empirically, by the actual and daily newly created historical material, that with the subjugation of the working class, accomplished in the days of February and March, 1848, the opponents of that class – the bourgeois republicans in France, and the bourgeois and peasant classes who were fighting feudal absolutism throughout the whole continent of Europe – were simultaneously conquered; that the victory of the "moderate republic" in France sounded at the same time the fall of the nations which had responded to the February revolution with heroic wars of independence; and finally that, by the victory over the revolutionary workingmen, Europe fell back into its old double slavery, into the English-Russian slavery. The June conflict in Paris, the fall of Vienna, the tragi-comedy in Berlin in November 1848, the desperate efforts of Poland, Italy, and Hungary, the starvation of Ireland into submission – these were the chief events in which the European <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-class-struggle.html">class struggle</a> between the bourgeoisie and the working class was summed up, and from which we proved that every revolutionary uprising, however remote from the class struggle its object might appear, must of necessity fail until the revolutionary working class shall have conquered; – that every social reform must remain a Utopia until the proletarian revolution and the feudalistic counter-revolution have been pitted against each other in a world-wide war.”</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>(Marx – Wage Labour and Capital)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The fact that the revolutionary wave had only just risen in China, did not make the resumption more, but less, likely, especially given the circumstances of defeat.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“In the course of the period which followed the revolution of 1905, it produced great revolutionary disturbances and <b>coups d’état</b> in the countries of the East (Persia, Turkey, China). But in Russia itself, the revolution revived only twelve years later, in connection with the imperialist war.” (p 171)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It was another imperialist war, and the dissolution of the old colonial empires that opened the door for the 1949 Chinese Revolution. But, again, Trotsky sets out the difference between that revolution, which was really a Peasant War, with the Russian Revolution, of 1917, which was a proletarian revolution, subsuming the Peasant War within it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“With us the wave of fall and decline went through the years 1907-08, 1909 and partly 1910, when, thanks in large measure to the revival of industry, the working class began to come to life.” (p 171)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-chinese-question-after-sixth_0461788713.html">Back To Part 1</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-chinese-question-after-sixth_0975977541.html">Forward To Part 3</a></div>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-3401001805215258132024-03-05T14:00:00.042+00:002024-03-07T14:32:58.480+00:00Chapter II, The Metaphysics of Political Economy, 5. Strikes and Combinations of Workers - Part 1 of 7<h2 style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02e.htm"><span style="font-size: large;">5. Strikes and Combinations of Workers</span></a></h2><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Proudhon shared with the Utopians an hostility to trades unions and strikes for higher <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/wages.html">wages</a>. For the Utopians, strikes distracted from their schemas to persuade the bourgeoisie of the logic of cooperative production. For Proudhon, of course, as the representative of the interests of the petty-bourgeois small producer, there was a very good reason to oppose unions, strikes and higher wages. The small producer is the least able to afford such higher wages, which eat into their <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/02/profit.html">profits</a>. The same interests motivate the petty-bourgeoisie, today, and their ideologists, amongst the Anarcho-capitalists and libertarians, which is why they support things like Brexit, as an attempt to escape the rules and regulations that establish minimum civilised standards.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As Marx and Engels pointed out, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Owen">Robert Owen</a>, coming later than <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_de_Saint-Simon">Saint-Simon</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fourier">Fourier</a>, and seeing the development of a large working-class, in Britain, was distinguished from them, and also from his own followers. He did not rely on simply convincing other bourgeois of the rationality of the cooperative commonwealth. He actively supported the setting up of unions, and the idea of One Big Union, which he sought to establish with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_National_Consolidated_Trades_Union">GNCTU</a>, as part of the process of social transformation. That was not true of many of his followers, who continued on the path of the earlier Utopians, and whose <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/11/social-democracy.html">social-democratic</a> ideas also flowed from an acceptance of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardian_socialism">Ricardian theory</a>. The best known example of that is Marx's polemic against the Owenite, Weston, detailed in <i>Value, Price and Profit</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The same ideas, presented by Weston, and repeated by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics">Keynesians</a>, today, were also put forward by Proudhon. At a time of high levels of <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2022/07/inflation-summary.html">inflation</a>, and renewed discussion over its cause, its worthwhile citing Proudhon's comment, presented, here, by Marx.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“Every upward movement in wages can have no other effect than a rise in the <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/price.html">price</a> of corn, wine, etc., that is, the effect of a dearth. For what are wages? They are the cost price of corn, etc.; they are the integrant price of everything. We may go even further: wages are the proportion of the elements composing wealth and consumed reproductively every day by the mass of the workers. Now, to double wages ... is to attribute to each one of the producers a greater share than his product, which is contradictory, and if the rise extends only to a small number of industries, it brings a general disturbance in exchange; in a word, a dearth....</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“It is impossible, I declare, for strikes followed by an increase in wages not to culminate in a general rise in prices: this is as certain as that two and two make four.” (p 153)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Contained, here, are all the same fallacies presented by Keynesians, today. Higher wages cause higher prices/inflation, and higher prices leads to a curtailment of demand/recession/stagflation, and so on. All of which is intended to show that workers should simply accept <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2023/10/real-wages-summary.html">real wage</a> cuts, or suffer worse consequences. A starting point of the fallacy, here, is that a rise in wages is the same as a rise in <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/value.html">value</a>, and consequently, prices. It assumes that <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-value-of-labour-power.html">the value of labour-power</a> is the same as the value created by <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/labour.html">labour</a>, i.e. it makes no distinction between the <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2012/07/a-commodity-is-use-value-that-is.html">commodity</a> <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/labour-power.html">labour-power</a>, sold by the worker, in exchange for wages, and the <i>activity of labour</i>, which is the <i>process by which value is created</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Yet, these must be two distinct things, because otherwise, there could be no <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/surplus-value.html">surplus value</a>, and so no profit. If wages equal the <i>new value</i> created by labour, there is nothing left over for profit, and <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/capital.html">capital</a> would not employ labour in those conditions. The assumption of Proudhon, and those who make this argument, is based on <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2021/10/adam-smiths-absurd-dogma-summary.html">Adam Smith's absurd dogma</a>, and cost of production theory, that the value of commodities resolves entirely into <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/revenue.html">revenues</a>, and not on his <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-labour-theory-of-value.html">labour theory of value</a>, taken over by Ricardo and Marx.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/chapter-ii-metaphysics-of-political_0505912993.html">Back to 4. Property Or Rent</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/chapter-ii-metaphysics-of-political_01141460032.html">Forward To Part 2</a></div>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-39654906521303038392024-03-04T14:00:00.032+00:002024-03-06T14:56:06.514+00:00The Chinese Question After The Sixth Congress, The Inter Revolutionary Period - Part 1 of 5<div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“Bolshevik policy is characterized not only by its revolutionary scope, but also by its political realism. These two aspects of Bolshevism are inseparable. The greatest task is to know how to recognize in time a revolutionary situation and to exploit it to the end. But it is no less important to understand when this situation is exhausted and is converted, from the political point of view, into its antithesis. Nothing is more fruitless and worthless than to show one’s fist after the battle. That, however, is just where Bukharin’s speciality lies.” (p 169)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In fact, Trotsky, also, erred in his evaluation. He was right that the revolutionary wave had ebbed, in China, but it was not just in China. Moreover, whilst Trotsky held out the prospect that this ebb was one running for a number of years, the reality was that it was ebbing for a couple of decades, consonant with the turn in <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-long-wave-summary.html">the long wave cycle</a>. In <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/04/capdevel.htm">The Curve of Capitalist Development</a>, Trotsky had, himself, set out the underlying, objective basis of that, residing in the long-wave cycle. But, unfortunately, he had placed too much weight, within the mechanism of that cycle, on subjective factors, and, particularly, of the revolutionary party.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The reality was that the <i>crisis phase</i> of the cycle, at the conjunctures of which, as he set out, wars and revolutions occur, had begun in 1914. By 1926-7, that phase was already transitioning into the <i>stagnation phase</i>, during which counter-revolutionary tendencies predominate. A new long wave <i>upswing</i> would not occur until after WWII. It provided the material basis, from 1949 to 1974, for workers to rebuild their strength and confidence, to renew their organisations, leaders and ideas. But, its only at the conjuncture, in the mid 1970's, as the <i>boom phase</i> of the cycle transitions into <i>a new crisis phase</i>, that a new revolutionary wave arises.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div> <div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_of_1968">It starts to manifest in the late 1960's</a>, in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_68">May '68</a>, in France, with also <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Spring">The Prague Spring</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights_movement#Nationwide_riots_of_1967">Civil Rights Movements in the US</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Ireland_civil_rights_movement#Derry,_5_October_1968">Northern Ireland</a>, as well as the rash of <i>national revolutions</i> across Africa, and similar movements in Latin America, but its <i>proletarian</i> character is more clearly manifest, in the 1970's, as large-scale, <i>industrial conflicts</i> continually spring up across Britain and Europe, and North America. The inadequate, economistic, syndicalist and reformist nature of the leadership, still heavily influenced by Stalinism, failed to utilise that period to take workers forward, politically, and, by the mid 1980's, as the cycle moved again into the <i>stagnation phase</i>, not even the sectional, industrial victories were possible, and workers were put on the back foot, as a new, counter-revolutionary period began.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That was the kind of period, also, that began in the mid 1920's, seen in the defeat of the British General Strike, the Chinese Revolution, defeat of Italian workers, and rise of fascism, in Italy, and later in Germany, Spain and elsewhere, as well as the consolidation of the conservative, petty-bourgeois, bureaucratic caste in the USSR, and its reflection in the Communist Parties globally.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Trotsky, speaking again of Bukharin, notes,</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“In so far as he did nothing but amend or “complete” Lenin, his caricatured aspect did not exceed certain modest limits. In so far as he pretends to give leadership himself, profiting by the total lack of knowledge in international questions on the part of Stalin, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Rykov">Rykov</a> and Molotov, little Bukharin swells up until he becomes a gigantic caricature of Bolshevism. His strategy reduces itself to finishing off and mutilating, in the epoch of decline, that which escaped alive in the abortive and besmirched revolutionary period.” (p 169)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">He notes that, contrary to the position of the ECCI, there was a counter-revolutionary, not revolutionary period, in China. Only in the sense that all of the contradictions lead to, and are only resolvable by revolution, was it true that a revolutionary situation existed in China.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“But from this point of view, there is not a single country in the world where there does not exist a revolutionary situation which must inevitably manifest itself openly with the exception of the USSR, where, in spite of five years of opportunist back-sliding, the soviet form of the proletarian dictatorship still opens up the possibility of a renascence of the October revolution by means of reformist methods.” (p 170)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Even in this latter evaluation, Trotsky was soon to change his mind, and to conclude that it had experienced <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermidorian_Reaction">Thermidorean</a> counter-revolution, requiring a <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-political-revolution.html">political revolution</a> to oust the petty-bourgeois, bureaucratic caste, and restore the political regime of proletarian democracy.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-chinese-question-after-sixth.html">Back To The Permanent Revolution and The Canton Uprising</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-chinese-question-after-sixth_036884210.html">Forward To Part 2</a></div>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-32157820700849804522024-03-03T16:12:00.004+00:002024-03-03T16:12:20.945+00:00Britain Heads Towards Bonapartism and Totalitarianism<p style="text-align: justify;">Britain is hurtling towards totalitarianism and Bonapartism, driven by the combined forces of Sunak's Tories and Starmer's Blue Labour. In the 1950's, as social-democracy ascended, promoted both by the Tories and Labour, it was referred to as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-war_consensus#Butskellism">"Buttskellism"</a>, combining the name of Labour's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Gaitskell">Hugh Gaitskell</a>, and the Tories <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rab_Butler#">R. A. Butler.</a> Today, we might talk about <i>"Sumerism"</i>, or <i>"Starnakism"</i>, but based upon the complete opposite of <i>"Buttskellism"</i>. Starnakism", does not represent the ideas of even conservative <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/11/social-democracy.html">social-democracy</a>, or even the <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/11/liberal-democracy.html">liberal bourgeois democracy</a> that preceded it, in the 19th century, as <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2020/08/industrial-capital-summary.html">industrial capital</a> became dominant. It represents a thoroughly reactionary ideology dating back to before that time, which was manifest at the end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century, in the <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jacobin">Anti-Jacobin</a></i>, movement that arose in knee-jerk response to the liberal-bourgeois ideas that flowed from the French Revolution.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">That reactionary movement led to the introduction of the <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combination_Act_1799">Combination Acts</a></i> that outlawed workers forming trades unions, or even meeting in significant numbers on pain of being charged with conspiracy, sedition and so on, and pain of being transported. Its what led to the transportation of <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolpuddle_Martyrs">The Tolpuddle Martyrs</a></i>. As Marx notes, in <i>The Poverty of Philosophy</i>, those laws and the reactionary ideology that lay behind them, was eventually overturned by the development of that very industrial capitalism, which, in turn, led to the development of the ideology of social-democracy.</p><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>"In England, combination is authorized by an Act of Parliament, and it is the economic system which has forced Parliament to grant this legal authorization. In 1825, when, under the Minister Huskisson, Parliament had to modify the law in order to bring it more and more into line with the conditions resulting from free competition, it had of necessity to abolish all laws forbidding combinations of workers. The more modern industry and competition develop, the more elements there are which call forth and strengthen combination, and as soon as combination becomes an economic fact, daily gaining in solidity, it is bound before long to become a legal fact.</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Thus the article of the Penal Code proves at the most that modern industry and competition were not yet well developed under the Constituent Assembly and under the Empire."</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But, a racist and reactionary Tory Party, indistinguishable from a reactionary, racist, jingoist and Zionist Blue Labour Party, has regressed, following Brexit, logically to supporting those ideas and methods that preceded the rise of large-scale industrial capitalism, and of the social-democracy that emerged from it. It would be tempting to describe the development of Starmer and Blue Labour in this reactionary nationalist direction as equivalent to the similar previous direction of travel of the Polish national socialists, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3zef_Pi%C5%82sudski">Pilsudski</a>, or of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini">Mussolini</a>, or the former British Labour Minister, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Mosley">Oswald Mosely</a> into Nazism. However, all of the former, clearly represented the interests of developed industrial capital; their programmes, as with the <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Mosley#Mosley_Memorandum">Mosely Memorandum</a></i>, supported by Nye Bevan and others, were based upon the development of that industrial capital, and, as such, far more radical than anything Starmer's Blue Labour is proposing, as it is hamstrung by its reactionary jingoist support for Brexit, and a desire to get the votes of the petty-bourgeoisie, by not proposing further state intervention, which in turn requires more taxation.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmJPjR1hdshBUeaF1OqUgp92VNk4H4ZDu7sfdqu6UR_Vs7S-iiK0tEDIPun6t1Uc2QmovRYoEX7twPHi8p95LFhT-eXf2kDbLbbjoYavBiAmSKpyS3CnDq9MyrYTHKwQQSfEmU2QlAwaL2aaedDVuFmt5yhi8_HHKKVPN5SGjgFBwEXeYPsKKrZPFhULse/s2048/Oswald%20Moseley.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="355" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmJPjR1hdshBUeaF1OqUgp92VNk4H4ZDu7sfdqu6UR_Vs7S-iiK0tEDIPun6t1Uc2QmovRYoEX7twPHi8p95LFhT-eXf2kDbLbbjoYavBiAmSKpyS3CnDq9MyrYTHKwQQSfEmU2QlAwaL2aaedDVuFmt5yhi8_HHKKVPN5SGjgFBwEXeYPsKKrZPFhULse/w473-h355/Oswald%20Moseley.jpg" width="473" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The centre ground has collapsed, because the peculiar conditions that existed from the 1980's onwards, which enabled the development of the delusion that wealth could come from asset price inflation, has itself collapsed. But, the main bourgeois parties cannot reconcile to that reality. It had a putative alternative in Corbynism, and Sanders, and similar progressive social-democratic movements in Europe, but the unsound nature of the ideas behind them, the attempts to conciliate the right-wings of social-democracy, inevitably led to their collapse, and the revenge on the working-class by those right-wing, overtly reactionary elements within those parties, whose main concern is to feather their own nests, at whatever cost.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Unable to reconcile their ideas with material reality, they have inevitably resorted, as the <i>"anti-Jacobins"</i> did, to the methods of fore and repression, and of the most grotesque lies against the masses they fear, in order to justify their headlong rush into the development of Bonapartism and totalitarianism.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="433" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9Bwgp0qqAY8" width="520" youtube-src-id="9Bwgp0qqAY8"></iframe></div><br /><p style="text-align: justify;">The Starnakists talk about society being driven into division, but it is they that have stoked that division. It is the Tories that have stoked the racist hostility to migrants with their endless wittering on about <i>"stopping the boats"</i>. It is they that have talked about <i>"no go areas"</i> in British cities, about the introduction of Sharia Law, and other such blatant lies, who have talked about London being taken over by the Islamist mates of Saddiq Khan, and so on. Now, when they and their Blue Labour clones get wiped out by the voters in Rochdale, they want in total conformity with the method of such totalitarians, to blame the voters, and to get a new electorate more to their liking, or better still, to restrict the voting altogether, as though having a choice just between two reactionary twins is not bad enough.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">But, that bad choice is illustrated by the fact that, much as the Starmer component of Starnakism, makes verbal challenges to the Sunak component, it has no grounds to do so. It too is racist, and Islamophobic, and equally jingoist, if not more so. In pursuance of its reactionary nationalist agenda, it has sought to wrap itself even more in the flag than has the Tories. In pursuit of its Zionism it has expelled anyone even pointing to the genocide committed by its allies in Tel Aviv, as it justifies continuing to support arms sales to them, the better to butcher even more Palestinian babies, whose body parts get flung in all directions, by the huge bombs dropped on them. The Zionism of Blue Labour inevitably manifests as a racist disregard for Palestinians, and the expulsions of those that object to the genocide being committed against them.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">It was manifest in the expulsion of lifelong anti-racists, such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Wadsworth">Marc Wadsworth</a>, purely on the spurious statements of Zionist proponents such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Smeeth">Ruth Smeeth</a>, who previously worked for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britain_Israel_Communications_and_Research_Centre">BICOM</a>, itself stuffed full of former members of the Zionist state apparatus. But, typical of Zionism's approach, which also disparages <i>"the wrong kinds of Jews"</i>, i.e. those that oppose Zionism, more Jews have been expelled under Starmer's regime than at any previous time, simply for opposing Zionism.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Society is being divided, but those responsible for that division along ethnic and communal grounds are the reactionary Starnakists, who are desperate to distract from class divisions, and the chaos arising from their continued backing of Brexit. <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/02/28/uk-eu-are-being-pushed-back-together/">Even the Torygraph has been forced to admit that Brexit has been a disaster</a>. The opinion polls continue to show that the majority of the population oppose the genocide that the Starnakists are supporting in Gaza, but the attitude of such totalitarians is to first turn a blind eye to that opposition, then, to libel its visible manifestation on the streets, and in the actual polls, such as in Rochdale, and then to look to the methods of the police state to smash it by physical force.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">The Left has been complicit in this development. For those that ask the question <i>"what is fascism"</i>, or how to fight it, look, now to the actions of the Starnakists.</p></div>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-42276168122230463702024-03-03T14:00:00.034+00:002024-03-05T14:26:14.365+00:00Chapter II, The Metaphysics of Political Economy, 4. Property or Rent - Part 8 of 8<div style="text-align: justify;">Proudhon believed that technological improvements, in industry, which, then, enabled more efficient use of the land, acted to increase <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/02/rent.html">rent</a>, but the opposite is true. The basis of <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/09/absolute-rent.html">absolute rent</a> is the lower, average <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-organic-composition-of-capital.html">organic composition of capital</a> in primary production. But, as technology is applied to primary production, this difference between primary production and other industrial production is narrowed. Consequently, <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-rate-of-profit.html">the rate of profit</a> in primary production falls, relative to that of industrial production, so that <i>surplus profits</i> are reduced.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“Wherein consists, in general, any improvement, whether in agriculture or in manufacture? In producing more with the same <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/labour.html">labour</a>; in producing as much, or even more, with less labour. Thanks to these improvements, the farmer is spared from using a greater amount of labour for a relatively smaller product. He has no need, therefore, to resort to inferior soils, and instalments of <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/capital.html">capital</a> applied successively to the same soil remain equally productive.</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Thus, these improvements, far from continually raising rent as M. Proudhon says, become on the contrary so many temporary obstacles preventing its rise.” (p 153)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Indeed, this process, described by Marx, in <i>Value, Price and Profit</i>, is a perfect example of the operation of <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-long-wave-summary.html">the long wave cycle</a>; the relative shortage of labour, at points within it, causing <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/wages.html">wages</a> to rise, and profits to be squeezed (<i>overproduction of capital</i>), which, in turn, leads to a technological response, by capital. In the long wave uptrend, running from 1843-1865, workers left rural areas for industrial employment, work on the railways, and so on, leading to a shortage of agricultural labour. It was particularly marked between 1849-1859.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As Marx notes, competition prevented farmers from raising prices to meet the higher wage costs, so that profits were squeezed. They responded by introducing new, labour-saving machines, which raised <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2022/12/productivity-summary.html">productivity</a>, and created a new, <i>relative surplus population</i>, enabling wages to be reduced and profits to be raised. Such is the cycle of events in every long wave, with <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2020/03/crises-of-overproduction-summary.html">the crisis of overproduction of capital</a>, shortage of labour, provoking a technological revolution that raises productivity and <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-rate-of-surplus-value.html">the rate of surplus value</a>, and mass of profit.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/chapter-ii-metaphysics-of-political.html">Back To Part 7</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/chapter-ii-metaphysics-of-political_0487400370.html">Forward To 5. Strikes and Combinations of Workers</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-poverty-of-philosophy-table-of.html">Back To Table of Contents</a></div>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-29179164607206997732024-03-02T19:00:00.025+00:002024-03-02T19:00:00.150+00:00Who Should Pay For The Capitalist Police?<p style="text-align: justify;">The Tories are again trying to close down democracy by banning the right to protest, just as they have closed down the right to strike for large numbers of workers, and imposed conditions on all other workers that make it very hard, conditions that are not applied to any other sphere of life. The Tories claim that these new proposals are required because of <i>"mob rule"</i>, by which they mean the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest at the fact that the Tories and their Blue Labour shadow have given full support to the genocide being undertaken by the Zionist state against Palestinians, and have been helping to arm and facilitate their genocide.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">This amounts to a repeat of the <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(politics)#United_Kingdom">"anti-Jacobin"</a></i> wars conducted by reactionaries at the end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th century, that introduced the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combination_Act_1799">Combination Acts</a>, against trades unions, and lambasted all liberal, progressive thinkers of the time, such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine">Tom Paine</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth#Religious_and_philosophical_beliefs">Wordsworth</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley">Shelley</a> et al. Ironically, it was those radical ideas coming out of the French Revolution, and promoted by the likes of Paine that were the basis of the American Revolution, as it freed itself from the oppression of Britain, and George III. It is an indication of just how reactionary, today are the likes of Sunak and Starmer.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Yet, the demonstration including hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of London have been remarkably peaceful. Proportionally, far fewer people have been arrested than with the average football match. Some months ago, when Tory Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, warned about the likelihood of such violence, as she called on the police to ban the march, it was, in fact, the fascists that came out, responding in support of Braverman who were the ones who ended up drunk and causing violence, and attacking the police!</p><p style="text-align: justify;">All of the hysterical nonsense, again whipped up by the sensationalist capitalist media, followed on from the claims by Speaker Lindsay Hoyle that he had broken parliamentary procedure, and prevented a vote on the SNP motion calling for a ceasefire, and condemning the genocide in Gaza, because of a threat to MP's if they were not seen to be supporting such a motion. Well, in fact, the reality as exposed both before and after that happened was that it was not threats from "the mob" that led Hoyle to that decision, but threats from Starmer and the Blue Labour PLP, who intimated that his job lay in their hands, after the next election.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="347" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/U0EghA4hjXA" width="418" youtube-src-id="U0EghA4hjXA"></iframe></div><p style="text-align: justify;">The Tories have pointed to the fact that the cost of policing the demonstrations has run into tens of millions of pounds. Well, there is a simple answer to that, don't use the capitalist police to police those demonstrations. Indeed, don't use the capitalist police to police workers' picket lines, workers' communities and so on. The police are there to protect the interests of the ruling class, not workers. Workers defence Squads can protect workers' picket lines from attack by fascists, and goons employed by employers to break them, and the same is true about policing demonstrations. Keep the capitalist police out of our affairs.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">This came in the same few days that Harry Windsor had spent several million in legal expenses to try to argue that when he comes here from the US, he should get special police protection. The Tories and he media who currently have a bit of a downer on Harry, were only too keen to quote the court decision that he was not that special, and should pay himself for any special protection. Well, if MP's and so on feel they need protecting - and given their very vocal support for genocide in Gaza, you can see why they might think that - then let them pay for it, too.</p>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6263577133333272085.post-71391453197829467552024-03-02T14:00:00.027+00:002024-03-04T14:03:18.313+00:00The Chinese Question After The Sixth Congress, 1) The Permanent Revolution and the Canton Insurrection - Part 8 of 8<div style="text-align: justify;">As Marx describes, in <i>The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte</i>, the peasantry, due to their individualist ideology, and heterogeneous nature, as a class, cannot lead the revolution, or become ruling-class. Even where the industrial proletariat forms a minority, relative to the peasantry, it takes on this leading role, which is why Lenin dropped the slogan of <i>The Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry</i>, and replaced it with the slogan of <i>The Dictatorship of The Proletariat Leading The Peasantry</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In China, it was necessary for the workers to have had time to recover from the defeats in Shanghai etc., to fight defensive battles, as part of regaining confidence, replacing leaders, and rebuilding organisations, as happened in Germany, between 1921 and 1923. During such time, the role of the communists was to advise them to pick their battles, to that end, avoid any general battles that might further lead to defeat and depletion of their resources. Under those conditions, its unlikely the workers in Canton would have spontaneously risen in revolt, but, if they had, that would be a different matter, again requiring the Marxists to respond to it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“But it is just the reverse that happened. The uprising had been commanded in advance, deliberately and with premeditation, based upon a false appreciation of the whole atmosphere. One of the detachments of the proletariat was drawn into a struggle which obviously held out no hope, and made easier for the enemy the annihilation of the vanguard of the working class. Not to say this openly, is to deceive the Chinese workers and to prepare new defeats. The Sixth Congress did not say it.” (p 166)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Canton insurrection, however, Trotsky says, has more significance than just seeing it as an adventure by that leadership. It took place in less than propitious conditions. It came after all of the defeats and betrayals, with poor leadership, in an area that was more characterised by the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie than the industrial proletariat. Yet, despite all of these disadvantages, the insurrection succeeded, and established a revolutionary government.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“We have here a fact of enormous importance. It shows anew how considerable is the weight of the proletariat in its own right, how great is the political role which it can eventually play, even if the working class is relatively weak in numbers, in a historically backward country, where the majority of the population is composed of peasants and scattered petty-bourgeois. This fact, once more after 1905 and 1917, completely demolishes the philistines <b>à la</b> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Wille_Kuusinen">Kuusinen</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Martynov_(Russian_politician)">Martynov</a> and consorts, who teach us that one cannot dream of speaking of the dictatorship of the proletariat in “agrarian” China. Yet the Martynovs and the Kuusinens are at the present time the daily inspirers of the Communist International.” (p 166-7)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Of course, outside of the concept of <a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2021/07/permanent-revolution-summary.html">Permanent Revolution</a>, this coming to power is itself a meaningless adventure. As Lenin and Trotsky explained, the workers had come to power, in Russia, but, without them utilising that to support revolution internationally, to come to their aid, that power could only be short lived. Even had the Chinese workers come to power, in 1927, that would have benefited the Russian revolution, but it would still have been two backward, largely agricultural economies, which required the support of revolutions in industrialised economies in Europe and Japan.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It showed something else, which was that, even in this area, heavily dominated by the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie, with an associated history of petty-bourgeois nationalism, of Sun Yat Senism, the workers had not been able to find an ally for its government from those classes. That was in contrast to Russia, in 1918, in which the Bolsheviks were able to form a government in alliance with the S.R.'s.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“This means that the vital task of establishing the alliance between the workers and the poor peasants in China devolves exclusively and directly upon the Communist Party. The accomplishment of this task is one of the conditions for the triumph of the coming third Chinese revolution. And the victory of the latter will restore the power to the vanguard of the proletariat, supported by the union of the workers and the poor peasants.” (p 167)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In fact, under Mao, the Communist Party based itself on the peasants, rather than the workers. Rather than a proletarian revolution, it undertook a prolonged rural, guerrilla war that became a model for other such forces, across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. That disproved Trotsky's conclusion from these events.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“The Canton insurrection showed that only the proletarian vanguard in China is capable of carrying out the uprising and of capturing power.” (p 167)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">However, it proved the further part of that conclusion.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“The revolt showed, after the experience of collaboration between the Communist Party and the Guomindang, the complete lack of vitality and the reactionary character of the slogan of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, opposed to the slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat drawing the poor peasants behind it.” (p 167)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Peasant War, conducted by Mao, as well as similar <i>“revolutions”</i> undertaken in Korea, Vietnam and Cuba, in the specific conditions, following WWII, did not result in proletarian revolutions, but the creation, from the start, of Bonapartist regimes, resting upon the petty-bourgeoisie and peasantry (as all Bonapartist regimes do) and implementing totalitarian, anti-working-class policies. Only the inevitable requirement of these regimes to industrialise their economies, which they did on the basis of having liquidated the old forms of property, and classes based on them, represented an <i>objectively</i> progressive development, in a similar manner to the role of colonialism, as described by Marx, in relation to India. Where these Bonapartist regimes failed to do that, as with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge">Khmer Rouge</a>, and instead tried to create agrarian societies, they collapsed. A similar fate awaited the petty-bourgeois nationalists backing Brexit, as seen with the collapse of Truss's government in a matter of weeks.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Trotsky's second conclusion was that the Canton insurrection, and its aftermath deepened the decline of the revolutionary wave, already taking place, and so facilitated the bourgeois counter-revolution, and destruction of proletarian forces.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>“This stamps the inter-revolutionary period with a painful, chronic and lasting character. The greatest problem now is the renascence of the Communist Party as the organization of the vanguard of the proletariat.” (p 168)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That was entirely vindicated, and the Communist Party was never to achieve any such renascence, going from one mistake to another, turning into outright betrayal, as it became the hang man of revolutions, not just in China, but across the world.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-chinese-question-after-sixth_01939358190.html">Back To Part 7</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-chinese-question-after-sixth_0461788713.html">Forward To The Inter-Revolutionary Period</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2023/07/lessons-of-chinese-revolution-table-of.html">Back To Table of Contents</a></div>Boffyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08157650969929097569noreply@blogger.com0