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751 [lbo-talk] Bair: Nationalize the Banks -- rank: 1000

Patrick Bond: "Those who declare that the Great Crash of late 2008 heralds the end of neoliberalism..." I would have said neoliberalism died in 1988. The old social-democratic welfare state was dismantled, but a much higher spending and more regulatory state was put in its place.

Document Size:	4961
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Apr 27 16:44:34 PDT 2009

752 [lbo-talk] Robert Frost Defends Robespierre, Lenin, Mao -- rank: 1000

Mike Beggs wrote: "I think a dictatorship of a party is not a Dictatorship of the Proletariat." I agree, and I think Trotsky and Lenin would have agreed, too. The suspension of the soviets was not a decision that they welcomed, nor saw as permanent, but as an emergency measure that if it persisted would lead to bureaucratic dictatorship. Lenin said so at the time, Trotsky made Lenin's warning the organising principle of the next great battle in his life. My parents were anarchists (wh ...

Document Size:	5932
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Apr 27 02:04:01 PDT 2009

753 [lbo-talk] Robert Frost Defends Robespierre, Lenin, Mao -- rank: 1000

Robert Wood writes, kindly, of me, that "the valuable part of his critique is the critique of the particular party form that Trotsky seemed to hold on to ...I think that James actually agrees with you about the need for a new approach to the revolution, in fact, he sees the party form itself as an inherently problematic one." I don't think that Trotsky was wrong to hold to a Leninist party model in his time (indeed, I would have said that his greatest failure was not to follow the Leni ...

Document Size:	5816
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Apr 27 01:46:21 PDT 2009

754 [lbo-talk] Robert Frost Defends Robespierre, Lenin, Mao -- rank: 1000

Mike Beggs says he finds my argument "really annoying" because I pushed the point to its logical conclusion to show that there was a basic choice before us, for Trotsky's socialism, or for SA's Austrian School methodological individualism. Robert Wood, too, thinks that it is frustrating that we do not make Trotsky "profoundly contradictory", which would of course make it easier to avoid the choice that is set out between "Trotsky the Socialist Jerk" and Trotsky the ...

Document Size:	6358
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Apr 27 01:35:38 PDT 2009

755 [lbo-talk] Robert Frost Defends Robespierre, Lenin, Mao -- rank: 1000

Eric Beck writes: "I wonder if it's possible to count how many times in the last 80 years this conversation arc has happened: The Trot is faced with overwhelming historical evidence that Trotsky was a tyrant, and lots else besides. Cornered, the Trot starts accusing his opponent of being a closet capitalist and bourgeois apologist. Not a novel approach you are taking here, James." Well, if it seems unremarkable, that's because the truth often is mundane. And when it comes down to it, h ...

Document Size:	5793
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Apr 26 15:44:30 PDT 2009

756 [lbo-talk] Robert Frost Defends Robespierre, Lenin, Mao -- rank: 1000

OK, so now SA makes himself clear: he favours the free market and opposes socialism. He considers democratic planning an impossibility ("it probably could not have been so formulated even if that had been the intention") and SA thinks that the coercion of capital over labour through the market preferable to the self-determination of society. And because Trotsky favours socialism over capitalism, SA calls him a jerk! So, finally, it turns out that SA was not making a case against the us ...

Document Size:	6569
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Apr 26 14:56:28 PDT 2009

757 [lbo-talk] Robert Frost Defends Robespierre, Lenin, Mao -- rank: 1000

SA writes: "I was referring specifically to Trotsky's explicitly stated belief that socialism means the *permanent* and *universal* use of forced labor throughout the economy. Note especially the first and last lines of this excerpt" Ah, yes, I understand your confusion now. You mean that you prefer free market capitalism to a planned socialist economy. When Trotsky says that labour will be subordinated to the plan, he means that the plan is labour's, and that society will determine th ...

Document Size:	5520
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Apr 26 13:17:30 PDT 2009

758 [lbo-talk] Robert Frost Defends Robespierre, Lenin, Mao -- rank: 1000

Mike Ballard writes "Thus socialism/communism implied the abolition of wage labour, classes and the State..."an administration of things", administered by a "free association of producers". That's the way Marx and Engels were thinking about the communist project." but that would be to miss out Paris Commune, where Marx argued a new kind of state power was born, the dictatorship of the proletariat. There is very little in Lenin that isn't already in The Paris Commune ...

Document Size:	6746
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Apr 26 10:21:27 PDT 2009

759 [lbo-talk] Liberal austerity -- rank: 1000

Doug Henwood wrote: '...the creditor class, whose power is now being shored up by the Obama administration', which struck me as a good description, though aren't they also the debtor class?

Document Size:	4658
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Apr 26 06:26:16 PDT 2009

760 [lbo-talk] Robert Frost Defends Robespierre, Lenin, Mao -- rank: 1000

SA wrote: "the belief that society should be turned into a concentration camp in the interests of historical development - that was their ideology" which suggests that 'SA' (which stands for what, anyway, 'Sturmabteilung'?) is essentially untrustworthy as a correspondent. It is one thing to say that Lenin and Trotsky's beliefs could lead to the view that society should be turned into a concentration camp, or that they did turn society into a concetration camp, but to say that their *go ...

Document Size:	5336
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Apr 26 06:15:40 PDT 2009

761 [lbo-talk] Americans kinda like torture -- rank: 1000

Bill: "Of course the problem with with non-violence is that it is democratic. You aren't going to select that strategy if you don't believe you have any hope of getting the support of the people." Pacifism works if one assumes that society is essentially non-conflictual, or only trivially so. But if opposing interests are substantial, then entrenched power will not give up without a fight. If the latter is true, then pacifism could only be a counsel of forebearance in the face of domin ...

Document Size:	5625
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Apr 25 18:02:40 PDT 2009

762 [lbo-talk] tasting the ashes of defeat -- rank: 1000

Chris writes: 'The "White Reaction" was to a large extent the result of Bolshevik heavy-handedness with the population' And there are German historians who claim that fascism, too, was an understandable reaction to bolshevism.

Document Size:	4785
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Apr 25 03:01:31 PDT 2009

763 [lbo-talk] Americans kinda like torture -- rank: 1000

Gar says that I should support rape and paedophilia as well as torture. But I don't support torture in the abstract. I just point out that liberation movements and workers movements have often engaged in violence that would be called torture under current legal definitions. Viet Cong prisoners were ill-treated in ways that one would surely call torture. Martin McGuinness (currently northern Ireland's education minister) is alleged to have been head of the IRA's intelligence team, which interroga ...

Document Size:	5738
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Apr 25 01:42:35 PDT 2009

764 [lbo-talk] Americans kinda like torture -- rank: 1000

Shane Mage: "class war demands *only* those "tactics" that lead to victory for the working class. None of the torturing "national liberation movements" that James celebrated (in his original post) led to or could possibly lead to anything like victory for the working class--in reality. as in Algeria and South Africa, quite the contrary. Now, appealing to history against theory (not in itself at all wrong), all he can come up with is a litany of failed movements." Th ...

Document Size:	5860
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Apr 25 01:30:35 PDT 2009

765 [lbo-talk] Trotsky's ashes made into cookies -- rank: 1000

Bill writes of Lenin "Maybe it wasn't easy back then, but some people still managed to work it out despite the difficulties. Easy to say now who was right and who was wrong, you seem to be saying. But even now there are still some who haven't grasped the lesson. " You need to spell that out. What is the lesson you think that should be learned? That it would have been better not to make a revolution?

Document Size:	5005
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Apr 25 01:21:13 PDT 2009