Hi Daniel,

Continuing from part B:

Daniel -- Part 4 -- November 11:

> I have trouble justifying why this debate
> should be conducted on such a public level, since my only
> personal interest in it is not in promoting myself, my
> ideas, or even the substance of the debate itself; but only
> in subjecting my ideas to criticism and developing/absorbing
> new ideas, so that I might become a better activist in my
> own undertakings in the "real world".

I commented on this passage earlier today. I would like to add
something now. Having the discussion between you and me take
place as a public debate will help to keep us both honest. The
existence of an audience who can watch in real time as the debate
unfolds, who have the ability to vote using the "bullshit meter"
and similar polls on the website at: http://struggle.net/ALDS
will assist us in our own personal struggles against
self-deception.

I have seen many good comrades fall victim to self-deception of
various kinds. Self-deception is extremely common in the left.
As humans we tend to fall victim to the pressure to deceive
ourselves because of the structure of the left--which is
_saturated_ with both reformism and sectarianism. Even the most
dedicated, selfless and sterling comrades frequently end up
acting like manipulative, lying assholes because the imperative
of creating revolutionary organizations in conditions of the
existing crisis of theory--leads us to have extremely distorted
views concerning what should be the most basic principles.

If we think that we are somehow immune from the pressure that
distorts our perceptions and our actions--then we have _already_
fallen victim to self-deception.

One of the most powerful weapons against this kind of
self-deception will be principled _public debate_.

The overwhelming tendency is for activists to believe what they
_want_ to believe. The revolution in communications will prove a
powerful weapon to smash up all kinds of denial.

I have been involved in a number of confrontations with activists
who have surrendered to the pressure of self-deception. My
experience is very consistent: those who are dishonest are afraid
of the light. They are afraid of transparency. These people
believe that they have superpowerful arguments that "prove" that
they are right. But they are afraid of making these supposedly
powerful arguments public. Those who have surrendered their
principles are afraid of transparency like an animal is afraid of
fire.

Knowing that an audience will critically read what we write will
help to keep us honest. Knowing that we will be held accountable
for our exaggerations, distortions and overblown generalizations
will help us to make them less often. The struggle to win over a
critical and unrestricted audience will assist us in _listening_
and in recognizing the necessity of struggling to better
understand the living thoughts of our audience--and ultimately
the living thoughts of our opponents.

> Now for the really 'shocking' bit. A communist society -
> i.e. a society in which the free development of each is the
> condition for the free development of all - is neither
> historically inevitable nor historically probable.

I hope that I don't come across as arrogant in what follows.

I suppose that before, when you were a "Leninist" you thought
that a genuine communist society _was_ inevitable. Now you think
it is unlikely. But your basic ideology has actually changed
very little. You show no evidence that you have ever understood
_why_ a genuinely communist society is inevitable. Previously
you simply took it on faith (ie: like a religion). Now you have
lost your religion.

But real marxism is not a religion.

A genuine communist society is inevitable because the
relationships between people who create things will be sincere
under genuine communism--the flow of information between people
will, as a result, be unblocked under communism--and, as a
result, the productivity of labor will reach heights that are not
possible under capitalist relations of production where each side
in a class-divided workplace has a vested material interest in
withholding vital information from its antagonist.

This difference between the productivity of labor in
class-divided and classless society--finds expression in all
sorts of ways. For example this difference is the fundamental
reason, underneath all else, for the excitement around the Linux
operating system and other similar types of open source or free
software projects. And as the complexity of modern production
processes continues to increase--this difference, this delta,
between the productivity of labor in sincere and insincere
worlds--will also increase and will find expression in all sorts
of places--inspiring many and eventually providing confidence to
the working class that it can run society better than its class
enemy.

> In
> fact to speak of "communism" as anything other than the real
> movement which abolishes the present state of things, is as
> far as I can tell essentially messianic; and as far as I can
> tell, it was in this messianic sense that Marx spoke of
> 'communism' in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of
> 1844. There is nothing wrong with having a vision of what
> future society might be like, and there is certainly nothing
> wrong with fighting for that vision. But we must see that
> there is no force of fate on our side that is going to get
> us there - there is no guaranteed "path".

The key phrase here is "as far as I can tell" ;-)

The force of "fate" exists. We can choose to understand this
force and harness it--or continue to allow it to harness us.

> How will we even know when we have ever reached this "goal"?
> The simple answer is, we won't. The "communism" described by
> Marx in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts was
> messianic precisely because it was not any objectively given
> state of affairs that they could describe. All we ourselves
> can know is when we are being exploited, and that we want to
> organise and continuously re-organise our lives so that we
> are no longer being exploited. That is all that I think we
> can say about "communism", and that is why it is so
> important not to delay in the slightest this real movement
> which abolishes the present state of things.

So apparently "communism" is something that can be neither
described nor understood. There is no way of knowing what it
is--or how we will get there--but we will feel it when we have
it.

Such a view is opposed to materialism which holds that all
phenomena, by their very nature, are capable of being understood
and described. Many phenomena are not understood at this time.
But there is nothing that, by its nature, is beyond human
understanding. Often, as a cultural phenomena, people have
retreated into various forms of mysticism as a refuge from the
dominant "rational" ideology which preaches that bourgeois rule
and exploitation are eternal. But we don't need to retreat into
mysticism because real science, science based on the
investigation of the laws of motion of matter--is on our side.

--snip--

> Ben might well say that liberation is all well
> and good, but when it comes to the crunch, 'someone' - a
> 'democratically accountable' someone (of course.) - has to
> make the 'hard decisions' that are 'necessary' to preserve
> what autonomy the class has 'concretely' achieved up until
> that point. The proletarian state, he will say, must be
> careful that these measures make as few inroads against the
> autonomy and sovereignty of the working class as is
> 'absolutely necessary'. He will really hammer home that
> 'absolutely necessary' part. In fact, he will probably
> argue - under the very important proviso of what he will
> call "ideal circumstances" or "Modern Conditions" - that it
> has "become" possible for a proletarian state to "suppress"
> the remnants of the bourgeoisie without suppressing the
> political life of the proletariat in the slightest. There
> will be a few minor 'bumps' at the beginning whereby the
> proletarian state is 'forced' to take certain more or less
> restrictive measures against autonomous proletarian
> organisations, in order to "suppress" the bulk of the
> remaining bourgeois forces - but once these bumps have been
> carefully smoothed over, using only those measures against
> proletarian autonomy that are 'absolutely necessary', it
> will be possible for this workers' state to carry out its
> economic experiments and gradually progress toward
> "communism". And only in this way, furthermore.

(see my comments below)

> But this proviso of "ideal circumstances" is worth directing
> some attention to. For if it were true under all possible
> conditions that a "proletarian state" could 'suppress' the
> bourgeoisie without interfering at all with the political
> life of the proletarian class, then Ben would have to
> abandon all those cherished Leninist positions regarding the
> practical necessity of certain actions carried out by the
> Bolsheviks between 1917-21 - particularly in its response to
> the Kronstadt uprising. But Russia, Ben may well argue, was
> a 'worst case scenario' where economic and geopolitical
> conditions deteriorated to the point where the strictest and
> harshest measures 'had to be taken' in order to prevent what
> ended up happening anyway, as the direct consequence of
> these measures: the restoration of the bourgeoisie as an
> organised class. He will argue - just as the Bolshevik right
> wing did so very effectively in its day - that if these
> measures had not been carried out, the proletariat would
> have faced what it ended up facing anyway, as the direct
> consequence of these measures: mass executions, mass
> reprisals against the entire body of the working class for
> attempting to exercise the political autonomy it had fought
> so hard to gain. In the circumstances of a revolution in a
> developed capitalist state such as Australia or the USA, Ben
> will assert, such measures should not be necessary. But as I
> have said, this is assuming things go relatively smoothly.
> And assumption, as they say, is the mother of all fuck-ups.

This all sounds very nice but you neglect to give any mention of
the _material factors_ that would allow a workers' revolution to
be on more solid ground in a modern country: (a) a developed
economy capable of providing for the needs of the masses, (b) a
working class majority, (c) a communications infrastructure, etc.
To simply compare modern circumstances with the situation in
1920's Soviet Russia (a shattered economy and a deeply
dissatisfied peasant majority) leaves readers in the realm of
total abstraction.

But truth is always concrete.

--snip--

> Ben
> and myself argued that, since both Marx and Lenin defined
> the state as "a machine for the suppression of one class by
> another", this functionalist definition left the question of
> what forms states can take as an open question. We therefore
> concluded that a workers' state could take "any form
> imaginable", so long as it suppressed the remnants of the
> bourgeoisie and thereby served the class interests of the
> proletariat. Whether it was centralised or decentralised, or
> whether or not it involved the political activity of large
> numbers of working people, were questions we thought to be
> of no relevance to this definition of the state;

"We" ? This reminds me of the story of the Lone Ranger and Tonto
on top of a hill. The Lone Ranger says: "Tonto, we are
surrounded by thousands of angry Indians". Tonto says: "What do
you mean 'we' white man?"

> we thought
> that the form taken by the state could totally be abstracted
> from the function it performed.

This was never my view.

> It became apparent
> to me that this a priori functional definition was
> inherently loaded with a statist political agenda - since
> there are many good historical reasons to infer that the
> state is the means by which a small section of society
> maintains control over a larger section of society (as Lenin
> himself says in his lecture on The State, at Sverdlov
> University, 1919)

I took a look at Lenin's lecture. Lenin never said that a state
must be the means that a minority controls the majority. Rather
he said that it had been that way in the past.

> Now, it seems rather obvious to me that if the state could t
> ake any form imaginable, the debate we are having now - not
> too mention the arguments that took place between Marx and
> Bakunin - would be largely irrelevant, or semantic at best.

Your confusion is taking place because you persist in ignoring
the concrete, material side of this question. The workers' state
can take any form imaginable so long as this form SERVES THE
MATERIAL INTEREST OF THE WORKING CLASS. Some forms will not
serve the material interest of the working class. Other forms
(for example forms that rely on the political activity of large
numbers of people) will be necessary. If you leave out the
material side of this question you are lost.

> But the debate between Marx and Bakunin was not just a
> question of semantics.

Correct. It was not.

> If the state could take any form
> imaginable, then Bakunin could have just said to Marx (or
> vice versa) "lets just call my federation of communes a
> state, and be done with it". The fact is that Marx
> quarrelled with Bakunin because he believed that Bakunin's
> model could not secure the class rule of the proletariat
> because it was not a state - not the other way round.

If I go to a gas station to ask directions to someplace--I
sometimes do not start by asking how to get where I want to go.
I may first ask a "test" question to determine the competency and
reliability of the guy I am talking to. For example: if the gas
station is on the corner of First and Main, the test question
might be: "How do I get to First and Main?" If the guy at the
gas station doesn't know his own location, I don't trust him with
anything more important.

My knowledge of Marx's fight with Bakunin is limited but I do not
trust your description of it. You correctly describe my own
views only about 50% of the time so why should I trust your
description of Marx/Bakunin?

It is unfortunate that you frequently misrepresent my views. I
do not consider you to be deliberately dishonest. Rather it
tends to be your method to "translate" everything thru a series
of abstractions that strip my views of all meaning. This is how
you sometimes report my view to be the opposite of what they are:
my views have been processed by the "abstraction machine" and
what comes out is not necessarily what has gone in.

And part of the problem here is that some readers to this debate
choose only to read a single installment: yours. I have had the
experience of meeting someone, finding out that they have heard
of the site and learning, in the course of the discussion--that
all they really know about it is what _you_ said.

So I hope you are more careful in the future ;-)

Sincerely and with revolutionary regards,
Ben Seattle
----//-// 31.Jan.2003
http://struggle.net/Ben (my elists / theory / infrastructure)

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