Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> I'm all for democratic management, but
> it's going to require the delegation of authority - i.e., something
> like parliamentary and executive structures.
You can't either be for or against such a structure until you have _some_ idea of all the activity that leads from here to there. You can no more make sense at this level of detail about the future than someone in 1890 could have planned the Walmart structure of today.
Carrol
Actually I agree with this, without wanting to disagree with any of the anarchist contributions to this thread and without wanting to discourage futuristic speculations either. I often find myself returning to that quote from Marx (in the German Ideology I think) about how communism is not some state of affairs to be achieved but is "the real movement of the people". To me this statement is so deep that I am sometimes amazed at how much wisdom it contains.
I think that there is a nexus of concepts that we need to rethink constantly. One is the dialectic of reform and revolution; another is the relationship of working class power to state power; and a third is the relationship of imperialism to capitalism.
On revolution, I cannot accept this notion if it is supposed to mean some some kind of apocalyptic change after which we will simply 'implement' everything that we have dreamed of in our philosophies. This Jacobin politics is not communist, and I don't agree with the notion of revolution as terror. OK. Then, on reform, this seems to me to be a notion around which there is much confusion. The problem with reforms goes away when you realise that reforms are things that the capitalist ruling class does when faced with working class power. They are not things that we, the communists, do. We force our adversaries to implement these reforms. In this sense reforms are good; they are an index of our adversaries' weakness. As long as we are clear that we will never be satisfied with any of them; we will always want more until the ruling class reforms itself to a point of fatal weakness, if not out of existence completely. But the key is working class power against the state, not a 'workers' state'. Without that alternative form of power, self-organisation, we will always be bending to pick up crumbs of power from the bourgeois table (and I live in a country that has 'communists' in government, believe me), or else we become Stalin.
>From this point of view it is quite wrong to participate in the
management of a nation state, in other words to take the responsibility
for reforming it. It is not our task to run nation states. They are the
conception and the instrument for the rule of the bourgeoisie, nothing
else, ever. Our job is to make that rule untenable. Now from here it is
easy to see why I am against anti-imperialism. (BTW I only argue this
point with people who already think there is something wrong with
anti-imperialism; there is something so pathological in the
'Marxist-Leninist' and anti-imperialist mindset that you cannot
challenge it rationally. It is an emotional investment, which any debate
will only reinforce. You can only debate this with people who through
their own inner contradictions have begun to see the light.) If
communists never accept the role of managing and administering states,
then they will also dissociate themselves from the running of third
world states. Who wants to be a junior manager in the international
system of states, an utter lackey, a 'boss boy' (in old South African
apartheid speak)? That is what the heads of third world countries are,
one and all. Fuck them.
If you are anti-capitalist you are always against the conditions that makes imperialism what it is. But if you are only against imperialism then you are just another species of capitalist. The question of whether you are in the third world or the first is irrelevant. I think that from a communist point of view it is just as wrong to vote Democrat or Labour or Green, as it is to support Ahmadinejad, Qaddafi, Peron, Pol Pot or Chavez. All you are doing is taking communism off the agenda of the here and now and projecting it into some future never never land.
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