Laws Without A State?

Your post merits a more considered response than I can give right now, but here are a few brief points:.

- the state after the revolution is a semi-state. In other words, there is a tension between the tendency to be subordinate to the needs of the proletariat, to develop structures which make it entirely accountable and controllable (the 'Commune-state'), and a counter-tendency which contains the danger of it detaching itself from society. Whether the first tendency or the second tendency wins out depends on the forward movement of the revolutionary transformation;
- the post-revolutionary state is not the instrument of an exploiting class but it is still the instrument of a ruling class - the proletariat. The working class has to maintain its rule after the revolution because the working class and the bourgeoisie are not the only classes in society. One of the reasons why a transition period is necessary is because the working class has to integrate all the other non-exploiting classes (and even the dispossessed members of the old ruling class) into associated labour;
- one of the roles of the state you mention becomes very important after the old exploiting class has been overthrown: the role as a 'mediator', of containing class conflicts in a framework which doesn't tear society apart. This is why it is important to understand that the structure through which the workers' assemblies and councils relate to the general councils which regroup the entire population is essentially a state structure.

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Give me one single practical example where this would apply because i tend to think your talking nonsense since the state refers to something quite specific in any decent analysis worth its salt.

You've been aggressive from the beginning you fucking cocksucker so let's be clear. I use examples from the present day world because otherwise they wouldn't make any sense.
I'm not describing an identical world. For example some tasks (is it the word work that upset you?) must be done at certain times, it follows that whoever happens to be doing the task on a particular day could want to go to bed early. Notice that you haven't offered anything in response apart from odd posturing and this insistence on human communication that makes you sound like an idiot.

There will still be disputes because people will have different ideas, opinions and priorities (or would individuality disappear too in your paradise?) especially during any transition period.

The benefits of communism is that our productive power will be used for our own benefit and not stolen from us or deliberately wasted. Things will still have to be done in this utopia. This will require agreement negotiation and above all a structure for organising what is produced. A society full of people like yourself would starve because instead of growing crops they'd be making wallets with Bad motherfucker on them.

Cantdo wrote: "Give me one single practical example where this would apply because i tend to think your talking nonsense since the state refers to something quite specific in any decent analysis worth its salt".

Paris Commune 1871, Soviet state Russia 1917. Both regrouped the entire population, not just the workers. Certainly in the second case the working class was a minority of the population.

what utterly pathetic lil utopian arsewipes youse are.

is it any wonder that the working class prefers capitalism to the boring communitarian world youse describe? It's the same way kids would rather fight each other than be in sunday school.

It's times like this when I have great empathy for Lazy Riser's distain of slave morality communism and it's social worker proponents.

nah i don't want to force anyone to be nice, nor do i imagine communism as a society were everyone is. The idea that locking up rapists and the such is about making them be nice is ridiculous, they can be as cuntish as they like when they're locked away from the rest of society.

As for revenge, you are the one who thinks they should just be shot, I'd not have a problem with that except if you make a fuck up you can't release someone from death.

The historic dialog between communists and the working class in a nutshell.

i'm not quite sure that i know what the icc think a semi-state will involve. a representative democracy for elements which aren't working class? prisons and militia to keep this the citizens of the representative democrcacy contained?

fantasist how are your temporary death camps working out better than prisons

Lem, it's not possible to draw up a constitution. We can only arrive at some general indications on the basis of past experience. We certainly don't want a 'representative democracy' if by that you mean a parliamentary type body. The whole population could be organised through soviet-type structures with revocable delegates. But while the working class needs to be organised as a class, i.e principally through soviets elected from workplace assemblies, the population as a whole (which includes proletarians in their situation as residents of a particular area) could elect soviets from neighbourhood and village assemblies. We don't know the exact way that the working class will organise as a distinct force in society, but it's certainly vital that it does, because it has a direct interest in the communist transformation, whereas other strata, not being based on associated labour, have to be won over to the revolution and gradually integrated into the proletariat.

This problem was understood to some degree in the Russian revolution: for example, in the congresses of soviets, votes from workers' soviets were weighted disproportionately over votes from village soviets

RedH:

a society without class division could only come about because of a truly massive working class movement and no such movement is likely to come into being without a conception of where it is headed. not having a program is only likely to lead right back into class society. that's because the existing system sustains itself in habits and expectations it drills into people's heads. if you live all your life in a situation where you are not expected to make the decisions, but expected to obey orders, you may end up not having complete confidence in your own abilities, being in the habit of defering to people who seem to be more authoritative or educated, etc.

to unravel the class system requires a protracted struggle in which a large fraction of the working class develops a movement through which they change their habits, develop self-confidence, get the experience of running their own organizations, and so on. but such a movement is also not likely without an inspiring vision of how things could be otherwise. capitalism persists in part also because it has developed all sorts of sophisticated ideology that justify a hierarchical arrangement.

Now you're being completely silly. I've worked in high-tech for over 20 years. all the companies i've ever worked for are essentially hierarchical command structures. they may practice what they call "participative management" -- they listen, they respond to complaints -- but they still have a hierarchy and people at the top maintain ultimate control, and the bottom line is always about making money for the investors. moreover, the reason that tech companies are more accommodating to their employees, and encourage more autonomy, is because of their heavy dependency on highly educated professionals. to attract them, and keep other outfits from attracting them away, they have to treat them with kid gloves and give them autonomy in their work.

but they always evolve highly specified systems of rules, and there is always a hierarchical command structure, and ultimately the financial planning is as centralized as Gosplan.

syndicalistcat wrote: "a society without class division could only come about because of a truly massive working class movement and no such movement is likely to come into being without a conception of where it is headed. not having a program is only likely to lead right back into class society. that's because the existing system sustains itself in habits and expectations it drills into people's heads. if you live all your life in a situation where you are not expected to make the decisions, but expected to obey orders, you may end up not having complete confidence in your own abilities, being in the habit of defering to people who seem to be more authoritative or educated, etc",

Spot on. Also about the laid back informal hierarchies of hi-tech hip capitalism.

Ha ha. Yeah but Alf, the abolition of money and the ending of “commodity” production isn’t desirable. Besides there’s no point in making recipes for tomorrows cooks when we haven’t reached the anointed time of international alignment required to sustain socialism, we have yet to make the necessary sacrifices required. I thought you believed the working class was still a global minority, why now your advocacy of blueprints, for programmes?

you are very confused. A law is a rule in society that is articulated by whatever body has authority in that society to establish rules that aren't merely voluntary and can ensure that they are enforced. A program of a revolutionary movement is obviously not a "law" since a revolutionary movment doesn't yet have authority over a society. I have no idea what "a set program that is essentially a law" means but i have not used such language. trying to put words in people's mouths is called a strawman fallacy.

if a revolutionary movement is to prefigure a society that is without classes, and is thus self-managing, that movement must also be self-managing. this means its program evolves out of the internal debates, experiences and needs of that movement, in its particular context.

what does it even mean to suppose that a program is a "a control system that will issue orders to all participants making sure they stay within its parameters" and when have i ever advocated any such conception of a mass movement? another one of your men of straw.

i also don't see "soviets" in the sense of the Russian revolution of 1917 as embodying the sort of program i would favor, as those were hiearchical bodies that concentrated control into the hands of the executive, who were typically party stalwarts. I tend to think more in terms of the control by worker assemblies, and delegate bodies controllable by them, and maybe similar bodies of residents in neighborhoods. you seem to be stuck in the mode of aping the lingo of past movements of a century ago.

I have no idea what you mean by "central organs". The reality is that the society as a whole will in fact need to have methods through it can ensure that its socially owned means of production are used for social benefit. This means that local groups cannot simply do what they want with local resources. That certainly won't be "communism" if they can act unlaterallly, as I've argued before.

The methods through which social accountability is ensured need not include setting up some hierarchical state structure, and doing so would be self-defeating, since it would simply tend to generate a new class system. There can be agreement on the basic overall structure reached through some major congress of delegates in the revolutionary region, as a proposal, and then ratified (or not) by debate and vote of the base assemblies. The content of the agreement for a new classless structure would need to include some overarching rules such as how groups get and retain use rights over socially owned means of production.

Nope. No such "central control mechanism" is required. Participatory economics is a system of negotiated coordination. You said above in your reply that coordination is needed, but that is just handwaving if you don't say what what that means. In the case of the participatory economics proposal, the idea is that individuals, local communities (assmeblies) and federations of these (via congresses as explained above) make requests for what they want produced. Workplace self-management orgnizations (worker assemblies and federations of these) make proposals on how they will meet those requests. Because it is likely these will not right at the outset spontaneously match, there is then some negotiation. advocates of participatory planning have put forward ideas about how this negotiation might occur. the idea is that it is a horizontal, interactive process. that's why it's not central planning, dig?

ultimately if a group is to retain its right to make use of a certain work facility to earn its share of the social product, it needs to produce social benefit in accordance with that cost to society they thus incur. If they fail to do so, their facility and its equipment can be "repo'd" by the worker federation for their industry or whoever the responsible body is within the overall social federation. but that would be a last ditch thing that would be likely to occur only very rarely. The point is, in a society where the economic system is for the common benefit, it's not "anything goes."

as to the rest, I don't think RedH says anything at all.

I desire it, therefore it is desirable, by definition.

"Ha ha. Yeah but Alf, the abolition of money and the ending of “commodity” production isn’t desirable".

Lazy, I wonder if you recall an episode of Star Trek in which a billionaire from our times, having been cryogenically frozen (is that the word?), is revived some thousands of years later in the era of Captain Kirk and inquires where he has to go to cash in the vast fortune he had invested in futures stocks before going into the freezer. He calculates, inflation taken into account, that the value of these shares will now be incalculable. Kirk has to break the news to him gently: "Mr Riser, he says, we have developed our technology to the point where we have almost unlimited material abundance. We got rid of money centuries ago. I'm sorry, but your shares are worthless".

You may have guessed that I lied about him being called Mr Riser. However, if the makers of Star Trek can imagine a society without commodities, surely you can do it too, even within your own lifetime?

Yeah yeah. The makers of Star Trek also imagined Romulans as major players in the dilithium trade, Ferengi Capitalism and the currency Latinum. A viable currency because it couldn't be copied in a replicator, nor for that matter teleported. I can imagine a society without commodities, in the same way I can imagine a society without high heels and make-up. However, whether I’d want one is a different matter. Now...

Alf, there’s no point in making recipes for tomorrows cooks when we haven’t reached the anointed time of international alignment required to sustain socialism, we have yet to make the necessary sacrifices required. I thought you believed the working class was still a global minority, why now your advocacy of blueprints, for programmes?

Please, don't even joke about Star Trek being a model for communism. If the world we have to offer is one where no-one listens to any music before the 1950s, unless it's "alien", and is full of patronising crypto-fascist racism I'm going to throw in the towel right now.

On a point of fact, Alf is actually referring to "The Neutral Zone", the last episode of Season One of the The Next Generation and the Captain in question was Picard, not Kirk.

Dammit, where's the sad geeky emoticon on this thing?

How about this one: "imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do".

We can't get rid of nation states without getting rid of commodity production. You want them as well? I think there is indeed a profound failure of imagination in your view of the future society.

There's nothing new about our advocacy of the need to elaborate a programme. It's not the same as a blueprint, which implies a rigid, predetermined plan. It's a series of principles, sign posts for the future as Rosa called them, based on the experience of previous revolutions and their lessons, positive and negative, and requiring both concretisation and revision in the light of new experiences.

That's right. And the billionaire was mightily upset that there was no TV anymore as well.

Ha ha. You said "countries", not nation states. I wouldn’t mind, put it like that. They’re almost essential for the World Cup and Eurovision Song Contest for instance.

I don’t have a “view of the future society”, and like I was saying to a Local Government bourgeois the other day, we could do with bit less imagination and bit more delivery.

Fair play. That’s not a programme at all then, it’s just a load of waffle and non-actions like some wet middle management meeting or the KAPD programme. Hardly warrants the “spot on” you lobbed at our man syndicalistcat, who, I’m assuming has a much harder edged approach.

The contradicitions between the state and soviets and workers councils have never been more aparrent than in 1917. Plus we all know that in the paris commune the actual first international itself was pretty crap and mostly comprised of trade union bureaucrats, most of the actual taking over of industries was carried out indepedently by workforces or by what at the time would have been seen as the insurrectionist wing of anarchism eg revolutionaies like louis michel and so on.

Anyway the very fact that you use two abstract historical examples from a century ago or more is a pretty good indicator that you have little understanding of what we're talking about when we say 'the state'. For example when we talk about the state with reference to the NHS, or soclal services we are talkimg about a specific style of managing an enterprise, this is what the state is, not some airy fairy nonsense about how ''the state, its just like a government yeah, so if you don't liek the state then you want chaos1!!111!!''. It s absolutely absurd to extend the term state to any form of social organisation, and tbh it just reminds me of the hopeless social democratic whimperings of miitant or something.

Sorry, Can'tdo, I don't recall any other examples of a state arising out of situation created by the revolutionary seizure of power by the working class (ie 1871 and 1917). I gave you the two concrete examples, which are indeed historical but not at all "abstract". I don't see what the existing bourgeois state (NHS, etc) has got to do with this discussion.

Apologies to all the true Star Trek geeks of the world for my elementary rookie error. It would be a very different matter if we were talking about the Second Age of Middle Earth or half-forgotten memories of Cthulhu and other blasphemies.

"The Marginalised Psychology of Communism, Volume II"

This from someone who clearly collects Thor comics?

Playing "Marvel Ultimate Alliance" with my daughter on Xbox 360, as it happens.

I'd go for comics any day against all these new fangled gizmos.

I challenge you to a spot quiz on Lovecraft the next time we meet!