Welcome to Gaia! ::

Maybe I will deal with the question of those 'petty struggles' and your obviously lacking understanding of the social causes behind the degeneration of the SU and the creation of the deformed workers' states in China, Cuba, NK, Vietnam and (maybe?) Laos.

Maybe I won't, regardless, it will be dealt with in some thread or other.

I will, however, deal with this question: What do you wish for communism to 'grow and evolve' into?
Where is it lacking?
What does it not explain accurately?
in short, what ir /wrong/ with it? Unless you answer these questions, your post is empty of revolutionary content.


No Engels?
What this statement ignores is that marx was a human, not a divine fount of knowledge. He could only know what was evident in his time and extrapolations from that through the use of dialectics.
While we see the beginings of a groping toward the theory of Imperialism in some of Engels later stuff (as we would have in Marx's had he lived, that is an other problem: they could only write so much in a finite period of time), the conditions were not such that it could be completely grasped. That was left for Bakharin and Lenin.
With Trotsky we have the Permanent Revolution thing. This is evident in many of ME's works, but only in embryo, incompletely developed. It took the experience of the '05 revolution for Trotsky to formalise it in terms of Russia, and the defeat of the 2nd chinese revolution for him to generalise it for all under-developed/colonial countries.

The point here is that while ME (you cannot rely solely on Marx if you are going to refer to early Marxism, Engels is necessary) had many great insights beyond their immediate conditions, relying solely on them today would be just like the Saint-Simonians and the Fourierists and the Owenists in Marx's day.

Haywood was a great man, and heroic defender and leader of the proletariat, but I cannot say I am overly fond of his theoretical work.



The question of where we get our basic theory from is not empty. Unless we want to start from scratch, we must look to the past, to see what is good, and use it where necessary.
We are living here and now, that much is true, but this world is conditioned, created, by the events of the past. We do not just live in 2008, shortly 9, but rather in a world conditioned by the counter-revolutionary destruction of the world's first workers state. We mush understand this, we must understand where we stand in relation to the remaining worker's states, and we must understand where we stand in relation to the various political groupings of today, based on their actions yesterday.

We are living in a world where the only superpower is collapsing under its own weight, its foundations weakened by deindustrialisation (something we cannot understand without theory) and the great powers are scrambling to pick up the pieces and the only too likely event of a nuclear confrontation within the next decade.
We cannot understand anything abou the world now without understanding how the world came to be that way: Dialectics, Mere, Dialectics.

Ok, well put in such an abstract way, I cannot argue, noone except the Buddha would argue against that.

So, just as I asked what should be changed, soo to you I ask: what are the practiacal implementations of this idea that you call for?
When put like that, the question is no longer about standing or moving, it is when we should stand, when we should move forward and (GASP!) when we should even move back.

All these questions are tactical, they are to be decided at each moment based on the balance of forces between any group and the rest of the world, not just to those claiming to communism.

Are you talking about me or the OP?

The complaint is neither idealist nor materialist. It is empty of content.

The thing is, because it is empty it can be taken so many ways, which is why I asked her to elaborate. When she ceases busyness and comes back to reply, then we shall see the idealism or materialism behind her words.

That is what we can expect it to be, but she hasn't put any answer forward, so we cannot actually say. You never know, we might be wrong: she might say something decent.

Dude... Wah?
Not quiet sure what you were saying there.

I am sorry. Maybe it is just me being tired, but I can't understand half of what you're saying... The grammar is all wierd.


Of course. If they didn't there would be something else in power.

I really don't get what you are saying here...
I really don't get what you are saying here.

It has been read, and this summary is similarly devoid of content.
Don't be religious about past thinkers. All well and good, however unless we are to study the whole of the wold anew, to do what other have already done many times in the past, we must have recourse to past thinkers.
But that is empty. Empty as all ********. It is empty because it only says 'think for yourself.' Nothing more.
If you want to change the world, you have to know three things:
1) what you want as the end product
2)the transition stages on the way to the final product (or if there are transition stages)
3)How to get their in practice

Without these things you have nothing but the dream of a beggar for a house of gold.

The point of this guild is, AFAIK, to gather people of roughly similar interests and provide a forum where they can learn, that is, where they can come to a agreement, about these three criteria.

My job, as a proponent of my views, is to convince people (even if those people only consist of me) that a given manifestation of these criteria are correct. The admonishment: Think for yourself is only valid where the first criterion is agreed upon, and preferably the second.

Think for yourself, is only valid when demanding original thought on the question of how. The very name of the guild does away with independant thinking of the final aim, classless society, it assumes we are all in agreement there. The very name also declares where we are assumed to stand on the second criterion: we all can all be expected to accept the existence of transition stages, though which and where are only agreed upon by the Marxists, and even there, not all the time.

The point is that the majority of people here, and the most senior/experiencd members can be considered Marxist. So the question becomes: If we are to think for ourselves, is it to be a 'reinterpretation' of what we know, or someething more, overthrowing all we think we know and staring again? And if the latter, in what direction are we to look?

That is why it is empty: It is full of many possibilities. Once it becomes more definite it loses that emptyness, but that includes the possibility of being wrong.