The WSM and nationalisation...

Whatever, man.

Shouldn't you be masterbating in the mirror or something?

Yeah yeah. Your early descent into "abuse" demonstrates how vacuous the case for nationalisation is. As if whatever problems you imagine we face can be even partially mitigated by the stroke of a bourgeois’ pen. I’m not even sure such a nationalisation is legally possible within the EU, and Ireland’s oil would just about keep it in bananas if it decided to re-establish the punt. I'm struggling to see what Irish oil industry it is that your proposing should be nationalised anyway, have they even discovered an economic field yet? If they did nationalise oil production your Irish taxpayers would be lumbered with contractual debts to private exploration companies rather than awash with Euros for a programme of public works.

I know...I know.

To be fair, I've basically been trying very hard not to use that last line since the first time I read one of your posts...this time your verbosely inane, self-indulgent ramblings just made me throw up my hands since you seem intent on avoiding anything near reasonable discussion (in English, at least).

That's stupid. You act as if every official act is devoid of context and can be reduced to a photo finish...the Magna Carta was, after all, just the stroke of a rich cunt's pen, right?

There you go...an actual substantive argument that means something!

I sure as fuck don't know...I'm from Texas...and neither do the folks who are vitrolically attacking the idea. I didn't really enter the fray to say that this particular proposal in this particular case is viable or 'correct' but rather to counter the knee-jerk ideological opposition to the thing on principle.

Right. The Chartists were certainly sold a dummy, a mythological power attributed to a rare document, like a holy icon. There’s more power in Alice in Wonderland, it certainly sets out the absurdity of existence more articulately than any treaties or agreements between the great and the good.

The point is...we shouldn't go about drawing hard and fast distinctions between the bit of paper and the knife at the throat of the person signing it.

Who says we shouldn't? Is it not our place? These rules exist only your mind. There's no point making threats or demanding this-or-that because the bourgeoisie can't give us anything we can't already do.

Antieverything

If you're looking for a blueprint from me I don't claim to have one - ultimately it will be the working class as a whole that builds the new society, not me or even a million people like me. But in terms of principle, there will have to be a series of council-like organs directly elected by the mass of the working class who have the responsibility for co-ordinating these issues on a local, regional, and global scale. These councils will evolve from the organs created by the working class to manage its revolution against capital - they will depend for their efficacy on the class consciousness of the proletariat.

There will obviously be disagreements on how to allocate resources. As Trotsky put it: "People will divide into “parties” over the question of a new gigantic canal, or the distribution of oases in the Sahara (such a question will exist too), over the regulation of the weather and the climate, over a new theater, over chemical hypotheses, over two competing tendencies in music, and over a best system of sports." He goes on to say that these disagreements will have an ideological, not economic basis. "All will be equally interested in the success of the whole."

In a society of atomised individuals, the individual producer, or even one divided into regional communes trading with each other it's impossible for any true vision of the whole to come to the fore. Each individual economic actor behaves according to its own interest, regardless of the good of the whole. If the interests of the whole are served, this is by accident not by design. Whether it's called "market socialism" or just "the market", a society ruled by unconscious exchange is always destined to be dominated by its economy rather than controlling it. All the problems engendered by the "anarchy of production" (as Marx put it) will remain. The logic of capitalism will inevitably reassert itself as a product of commodity exchange.

There is an important political implication here: communism has always been seen to be international precisely because of the division of capitalism into discrete economic entities that nonetheless trade with each other (i.e. nations). The commodity is the product of this division. Internationalism isn't just a slogan - by confronting the nation, it contains within it an implicit confrontation with the commodity, a demand for its abolition. Once we accept the presence of the commodity, there is no reason at all why you can't have "socialism in one country" as long as that country can trade happily with all the others.

You think I haven't heard all of this before a million times? I'm not a newbie to socialism! I've simply moved past the tired, religious dogmatism that characterizes the Left.

Again...there is this statement presented again and again that 'the good of all' will in every case trump individual self-interest or, at least, that the two will never clash. I doubt this very much and aside from the abolition of scarcity (which, like I said, would take a very long time in terms of restructuring material, economic forces) this seems very silly as the basis for an immediately post-revolutionary society.

Then give some counter-arguments. I'm sure I'll have heard all of those, too, but I'll respond to them.

Then we're back Alf's point earlier about what period are we talking about? I'm talking primarily about a more developed form of communism, but if you want to talk immediately post-revolutionary society that's a difficult animal. It's obviously going to be impossible to eliminate the market, wage labour, commodities, the state, etc. immediately. In fact, this is the main dividing line between classical anarchism and communists - the latter accepts that there are going to be hangovers from the previous society. But, unlike what you seem to be saying, we don't accept this as a permanent condition. Right away, we're going to have to confront all these phenomenona in an organised and conscious way with the ultimate view to annihilating them, even if this can't be done overnight. No-one claims that this is going to be easy and this period will be fraught with dangers.

But lets look a bit more at your doubts that the "the good of all" will trump individual self-interest. What else but this happens in the appearance of a strike? In order to come together in the first place, workers must be able to sacrifice their immediate individual needs in order to set their sights on a future, collective benefit. Bourgeois ideology, of course, cannot comprehend this and for this reason cannot imagine real workers' self-activity. For them, it must be the work of "trouble-makers", "stirring things up", workers falling "under the influence" of "dangerous ideas", etc. This is why they were so frightened by the Russian Revolution and console themselves that it must have been coup d'etat organised by those wicked Bolshies. Even the simplest strike completely confounds this view but the revolutionary process has the potential to annihilate the individualism at a far deeper level. This is why revolution is essential for the creation of communism: if the workers were handed the keys to the world tomorrow without being forced to unite against the bourgeoisie, there would be no chance for communism.

That seems like a silly thing to do...

Which is why this is far more important to address than the illusory 'pure' system that at the very least is a hundred years after a global revolution...which if possible is still many decades from now!

I didn't say permanent...I said long-term and hence of utmost importance if the gooshy utopian stuff is ever to come to fruition! We need a system that would work immediately while offering transitional opportunities to expand the sphere of free, unmediated production and exchange, something that will come as much from willful decentralization as through a massive, global shift in the distribution of productive forces.

Why are you so rigidly dividing 'collective benefit' from 'individual needs'? Can't there be shared individual needs that themselves constitute the collective intererst? If we aren't clear about that, we are just creating illusory categories for the aesthics of the thing (like Rousseau).

Why? If you have no idea about the type of society you want to build, then how do you form any plan for getting there? Start as you mean to go on.

And we're back to the original problem and why the goals must be clarified. What humanity needs is to take full conscious control of its economic activity and resources on a global scale. Wilful decentralisation and the preservation of exchange is a step in the wrong direction. We need to integrate all economic activity into as coherent plan as possible as quickly as possible and shift the emphasis from exchange to distribution equally quickly. But there will be pressing immediate needs that demand this. There are going to be vast regions of the planet completely undeveloped that have nothing to exchange. The world community is going to have to get down to the task of feeding millions of hungry mouths in a period where global agriculture production is going be devastated by the detritus of the revolution/civil war. How is that going to be possible without a carefully co-ordinated plan?

The minute I go on strike I lose pay. I lose pay, I can't pay my rent. Can't pay my rent I'm homeless. Maybe I get sacked for being a trouble-maker and then what the fuck do I do? That's the reality facing most workers. It's certainly not far from my mind. Bourgeois logic dictates that each individual should buckle under the pressure and stay passive - and, to be fair, this is what happens most of the time. But when workers stand up collectively, they can overcome this fear.

The bourgeoisie on the other hand, find it extremely difficult to think like this because their entire economy is based on exchange and commodities. The same economy that you seem to want to preserve in essence under the banner of "market socialism".

Willful decentralization, I think, would be pursued in order to, as much as possible, avoid the problems of exchange. It would be much easier to establish free and umediated systems of production and distribution in a small-scale, local setting such as a community where many of the basic necessities are produced locally and freely accessible to community members...communities would still need a large amount of 'trade' with one another but the structures to deal with the problems that this brings will have to develop from the bottom up. More and more things would be exchanged at-cost (labor-for-labor) or even below once the economic extra-economic benefits were understood (insurance, defense, community-building, etc.)

Ok, fair enough.

True...this should be the first area in which free and umediated production and distribution should take place.

This doesn't address my point. In this case you may as well have said that individual interests can only be forwarded through collective action.

No they don't. Bourgeoisie, nationally and internationally, band together for mutual protection all the time--especially in the face of working-class militance!

Ha ha. You obviously don't know any. The reality facing most workers is bidding for knock off Wii's. Why would they want to go on strike anyway? They've only got the job as some kind of favour in return for good behaviour.

ha!

I also enjoyed the prolier-than-thou approach you took, Demo...Trust me, I would put my shitty situation against anyone else here (in a shitty job-off perhaps).

Antieverything

If you decentralise i.e. have each economic act independently, you are making exchange inevitable and fundamental to the economic function of the whole of society. You all but acknowledge this when you talk about communities requiring large amounts of "trade" - and why the quotation marks, it will be trade in your system because it can't be anything else.

I think we get closer to the heart of the question when you say "the structures to deal with the problems that this brings will have to develop from the bottom up". I agree with this. The point is that this does not preclude centralisation! This is the way the council system functions, after all.

I think I'd get further in understanding you if you defined "free" and "unmediated" and explain how they contradict the idea of having a centralised plan.

Then perhaps I didn't understand your point. The point is that the situation of the proletariat is contradictory. It's clearly not in the immediate interest of an individual worker to go on strike. It's only in the collective that this contradiction can be overcome.

They can co-operate to a certain extent but they can never truly unify. Even within established national bourgeoisies such as those in Britain there are deep divisions that occasional see daylight in the form of the various nationalist and regionalist tendencies. The only "unity" the bourgeoisie can truly achieve is through the iron corset of the state, the domination of the stronger cliques over the weak, etc. This is why bourgeois politics is a continual morass of competition, machiavellianism, etc. Even in their most co-ordinated plots, true unity is never achieved. Despite their de facto alliance in 1918, Ebert and Groner still viewed each other with great suspicion. Once the threat from the proletariat was over they both turned on each other.

I don't understand what you're on about here. Where did I imply I had a worse job than you? I have no clue what you do and that has nothing to do with this discussion.

Ah, Lazy / Carousel, you should come to my place and be a counsellor. I could have done with your help yesterday when the person opposite burst into tears because she can't pay her mortgage. Tips on knock off Wiis would have been just what she needed.

Bless. And there was you thinking all she had to lose were her chains.

Get over yourself man.

Sorry, I'm trying to respond politely but this is frustraiting. Even with the abolition of all nations, resorce management will have to be geographical, because, well, that's how resorces are. The resorces of Ireland shouldn't be cmanaged by say, the population in Botswana or Bangladesh should it?

Please think before you panic.

Neither could a quarry in Belfast be managed by some gypsies in west Cork.

very true, though i think we'll leave the drive tarmaccing in their capable hands.

badly tarmacced drives...

in this country.

I don't think rejecting nationalization is, as some have put it, simply playing anarchist purity. I think its a realization that if your going to put forth effort on a certain issue, you might as well put forth the effort of to explain anarchist ideas and practice. Otherwise, why simply just promote another persons point of view on the issue, especially when you are spending your finite time and resources.

I think too many anarchists have internalized the (sometimes valid) criticism of being out of "touch" with "the masses", and now find themselves chasing after whatever campaign, event, or other plank that has a flash of "popular" support we all run behind. This is nonsense. I mean there are realistic limits to how much time, energy, money, etc that we can pour into specific efforts; so why just become another foot soldier for someone else's cause? So we don't get labeled elitist? Thats an asinine way to go about things.

I don't think it is so much about the fear of 'elitism' or 'being out of touch' as it is with not wanting to waste our time screaming at people for being reformists while we ourselves are left impotent and insignificant.

So wait, let me get this straight. If we back up, and agree to explicitly contradictory positions and actions to our own stated politics, and thus become foot-soldiers for someone elses campaigns, we are somehow no longer "impotent and insignificant". So the more we suppress our own ideas and actions, the stronger we will become? Arbeit macht frei indeed!

I reiterate:

Yes, indeed I read it the first time you posted it. And I disagreed with it then; there are many campaigns that are of a vaguely "grass-roots" nature, and which, more than likely, will result in some mild reform that might be beneficial. And I'm not ideologically super-pure; I am the member of, and generally a supporter of, unions so I'm not stewing in some sectarian bliss.

The question is pushing for what IS a parliamentary reform (regardless of how 'grass-roots' the movement pushing for it) is not an especially good use of what limited resources that anarchist groups in Ireland might have. By the very nature of pushing for what is a legal reform, you limit peoples participation; exactly what exciting new developments could come out of this? Holding signs and writing letters? A realization that corporations suck and governments kowtow to them? I'm not seeing where any "consciousness" could be "built".

You yourself point to an alternative; interacting with the workers in the oil sector. I don't know what the positions and politics of the oil unions in Ireland, but would they be receptive to pushing for a bigger chunk of the pie? Instead of asking for the kind of round about way of taxing and redistribution, anarchists should be advocating the more direct form of higher wages, better benefits, etc etc. If we are to get to the point you deride as currently naive (ie workers control), we need to advocate for workers ASKING for more, not vague, round-a-bout campaigns to "give back to the working class" via oil taxation/nationalization.