New ICC book-comments

Yes, I agree with this. The part I quoted is at best badly phrased. I think that economic trenformation is a weapon in the civil war. I think that the ICC's argument against self-managementism, sometimes leads it to go to far the other way. What you say is true, but only the working class can manage production. This is not a minor issue. The begining of the 'dismantl[ing] capitalist social relationships' is an imediate task confronting the revolution.

Devrim

I think this is true, but only for the reason I've highlighted.

To an extent, the Hebrew religion is grounded in a repudiation of cyclical time in and through its renunciation of earth-based fertility-type religions. Later on, the prophetic tradition led to a view of time that was profoundly end-directed.

However, couldn't you argue that Christianity actually marks a step backwards from this? I'm thinking about the Christian appropriation of pagan festivals (christmas, easter, the feast of St John the Baptist -- or the summer solstice, as it's also known, harvest festicals, etc).

A materialist exaplanation of this (a bit simplistic maybe, but hey) is that the Hebrew religion was a religion of nomads -- always going somewhere, never quite there, not tied to a specific location, and so on. As soon as the Hebrews settled, elements of pagan mythologies started to sneak back in. Under those circumstances, the prophetic tradition served to reassert the nomadic core of Judaism (OK, it wasn't "Judaism" until the return from the Babylonian exlile, but anyway). A good example of this would be stories about the prophet Elijah.

Christianity, on the other hand, was largely a "settled" religion pretty much from the start. Thus it was always more exposed to, and more liable to incorporate, elements of a cyclical model of time. One example of this tension within christianity is the season of advent. It's simultaneously a looking forward to the second coming of christ, and the build-up to the cyclical re-marking of the birth of christ. And guess which element dominates?

Hi Devrim. Others have already said much of what I wanted to say, but that won't stop me! For what it’s worth, my understanding of the two points you picked out is as follows.

1

This view stems from the unique nature of the proletariat as history’s first revolutionary class (ie a class that embodies new relations of production) that is also an exploited class.

Previous revolutionary classes replaced one form of the exploitation of man by man with another. Previous revolutionary classes were not exploited classes but exploiting classes.

And, for example, the political victory of the bourgeoisie – its coming to power – followed a more or less prolonged period in which its mode of production had to a great extent already supplanted the old way of doing things. Their political conquest of the state was the necessary ‘icing on the cake’, a political, legal, juridical confirmation of what was already ‘fact’ at the base of society.

Engels put it this way: “The struggle of the bourgeoisie against the feudal nobility is the struggle of town against country, industry against landed property, money economy against natural economy; and the decisive struggle of the bourgeoisie in this struggle was its means of economic power, constantly increasing through the development of industry, first handicraft and then, at a later stage, progressing to manufacture, and through the expansion of commerce. During the whole of this struggle, political force was on the side of the nobility....” (Anti-Duhring, my emphasis).

By contrast, the proletariat does not possess this kind of economic power within the old society. Its coming to power is not the final act of an already economically dominant class, but the first act of a class dispossessed of all economy. This is also why the proletariat has only two weapons in its arsenal – its consciousness and its self-organisation. The communist revolution is not the culmination of the proletariat’s economic success but merely the precondition on a political level for an economic and social transformation.

Let’s put it another way: do we imagine that the workers can benefit from taking possession of machines, whole factories even, within the general framework of the domination of capitalist social relations? Without having confronted and smashed the political power of the bourgeoisie, its state? This was the primary lesson Marx drew from the Paris Commune. To imagine that the working class can begin to ameliorate bourgeois relations - can dismantle wage labour, commodity production, the world market, exchange relations, etc, etc – before having robbed the ruling class of its control over all aspects of society is, IMO, an impossibility, a trap, a mystification. It’s reformism.
2

As opposed to the first point you picked out, which is very much at the heart of Marxism and the ICC’s view of the world, this strikes me much more as the particular view of the book’s author. Nonetheless, and again as far as I understand what is being said, I think I agree with it.

In the first stage of human development, the primitive community knew neither production for sale nor exchange. Human beings still made little or no differentiation between their own evolution and that of the natural forces which surrounded them. This was reflected in the way humans tried to explain the world to themselves: ie that life, like nature, was just a natural cycle, like the seasons, which continually reproduced itself. Echoes of such conceptions can arguably be found in some Buddhist ‘teachings’ and, indeed, there is a degree of truth in them: they expressed the very close relationship between humans and ‘the natural world’, their almost complete dependence on the cycles of nature. What they omitted was man’s place in and effect on this natural world, the fact that he was – or was to become - an active factor.

With the development of agriculture, of the productive forces, of a social surplus (and of classes), this element of man as active factor in his surroundings tends to come to the fore in thought, in consciousness, in however mystified a way. Thus the Hebrew tradition does not primarily see mankind as ‘trapped’ in a timeless, circular void, but posits historical time, a history in which man’s action has an effect, and has a goal. The aim to establish a ‘kingdom of heaven here on earth’ reflects a partial awareness that man makes his own history and corresponds to developments in society and of the productive forces. It is an advance (which is also, in some senses, a loss) over previous magical, mythical and ‘circular’ conceptions, even if it included large elements of these. Amen, end of waffle.

To my limited knowledge Judaism is a religion of the present. The awaited messiah cannot be hurried and as such it is the job of the jew to wait until such a time as the messiah comes. The Old Testament God shows a marked lack of interest in explaining himself and as such you would expect a judaic society to be a conservative one.

As the button has pointed out settled communities tend to see time as cyclical, presumably due to their connection to agriculture, although I would imagine that nomadic peoples would also require knowledge of the seasons so I'm not entirely sure about the point.

But the mediaeval/renaissance concept of translatio studii and imperii, the transfer of knowledge and power (legitimacy) from one empire/civilisation to another is cyclical. You could also further argue that christianity is also a religion based upon aiting for a future event, in this case the day of judgement.

If economic transformation is a weapon in the civil war it is above all politics. It is not what we want to do with the productive forces but is a product of harsh necessity, like the state.

Hmmm, surely there were (are?) people still in the paleolithic, given that it is not something that ended uniformly. Certainly there are remote tropical areas where the way of life could be described as paleolithic and hunter-gatherer.

I agree that there are elements that are likely in common between paleolithic beliefs as far as they can be established and current religions, but there are departures and differences; not least surely is the fact that many paleolithic peoples practised primitive communism. Also the material conditions for hunter gatherer lifestyles changed, at different times around the world, roughly coinciding with mass extinctions. I'd say that the lack of game (after humans had wiped a lot of it out) accounted for the change to a more settled existence and the beginnings of agriculture. After all, who'd work for ages in the fields if you could work for 4 hours a week hunting & gathering? The new agricutlural societies would have needed a rupture of some kind with the earlier hunter gatherer beliefs.

Regards,

Martin

Martin/Jef, given I don't want to hijack this thread from its original, can we split this to prehistory? Is that possible admin - cheers?

Why not? It's not as if prehistoric Paleolithic peoples will not have maintained a wide variety of cultural differences between tribes, regions, languages etc. I think it's not difficult to state that a Paleolithic tribe in Western Europe is likely to have been somewhat different to one in Indonesia, but there would be general similarities.

Surely the only way society can change is through changing the 'structure'?

Isn't that what revolution is - the fundemental changing of the whole social structure, or at least, the beginning of the attempt to do so?

On the title "communism is not a nice idea but a material necessity". It responds in part to the enormous damage done to the communist perspective by the identification of Russian state capitalism with communism. Both Stalinist Russia and the West made massive use of this ideological weapon during the second world war and particularly afterwards. "You want communism" said the bourgeoisie in the West, "then look at Russia, that's communism". I can't overestimate the weight of this ideological hammering on the post-war working class that went on for generations. Many workers in the 70s, 80s and 90s would express the sentiments, 'yes, communism is a good idea in theory.... but look at Russia...' The idea of communism, prior to the Russian abortion, was relatively clearly understood in the working class - it came from the working class. Even with the collapse of the Russian imperialist empire, the bourgeoisie of the West continued to use it as an example of 'failed' communism and for years since 1989, haven't missed many opportunities to slag off communism, Lenin and Marx.

Well its just a really bloody boring, ultra objectivist title, and i feel that it is going to relate to very small amount of people, it doesn't sound like anything new, it sounds like the same grey communist crap i've been hearing throughout my life. On baboons comment, the meaning i attatched to that, or at least the feeling i had of it was something more of the opposite of how you've stated it. It sounded more stalinist than anything (Not saying the ICC are or anything)

I'm not trying to say that social relations can be dismantled in a absolutist sense. What i mean is that it starts there, social change doesn't happen overnight. But one question for you, how can you keep an organization designed to take political power (The party) seperate from the state? And what state are you referring to? Capitalist state? So called workers state?

my point is that it reads like saying communism is a bit shit ("not a nice idea"), but we will be forced into it ("necessity"). i know what you're trying to say, but being forced to do something shit called 'communism' doesn't sound particularly removed from the 'communism = stalinism' equation baboon wants to get away from

i think so, but that's still how it reads

yeah sure, i still don't really like the title though. not that i'm your target market anyway

because i'm a fickle 20-something who judges books by their covers (and titles)

no i'd guess it's aimed at existing lefties so i probably am part of the target market. though i get my dose of ICC on here on the boss' time, i'm not going to pay for it!