Welcome to Gaia! ::

The way I see the history of humankind is that each breakthrough or important event is a stride in the infinite road to enlightenment. And the United States' war for independence and representative democracy was a major stride in the enlightenment of humanity (influencing the later revolutions that would follow it).

And the Soviet Union (well actually the RSFSR) also enlightened the human people (or at least tried to) by creating the first constitutionally socialist republic.

And plus both fought against some kind of king, and both would later expand geographically. For the US it was manifest destiny, and for the SU it was for the unity of the SSRs

I don't really think they are comparable even in that sense. Yes, they influenced future events of a similar nature. However both events were intrinsically different due to their aims and results. The American war of independence was purely that: something that aimed to be independent from the English. As Jana said it "is like comparing apples and oranges since they were not transitioning to socialism". By comparison, the russian revolution not only had different stages but also had different aims. Both served as inspiration, but they have different impact and aims. Not only that, but the constitutions that they gave birth to are radically different from each other. I don't see how both events can possibly be compared.

I admit that you are all making very good points against me, however I still disagree that the American and Russian revolutions are incomparable.

Due to the fact that Marx wad not even born during the American revolution there was obviously no socialist philosophies in which to inspire the Americans. The Russians, on the other hand used had all the Marxism they wanted to use in their constitution and to influence their revolution. The Americans no doubt would have been inspired by Marx if he actually was alive , but instead used philosophers like Locke, Roussou, and such.

And are Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happieness not also communistic ideals. Matter of fact the original quote was Life, Liberty, and the right to Property which was changed in the constitution. Bit of a coincidence that the mention of private ownership was removed from the American constitution.

I may be wrong but it seems like the United States was a bit more politically and socially advanced for its time. Perhaps it could be argued that it was more socialist than the other world powers at that time.

ALL of them? Why not employ lottery? At the very least, in legislatures, the use of the lot seems to me to be indispensible.



This needs to be qualified. Would bourgeois parties be allowed to field candidates for these positions? "Restrictions" also pertains to negative liberty. Shall the parties have equal positive liberty - that is, capacity to engage in propaganda, etc? If so, how to achieve this.



Frankly - even though it was part of the Commune and was endorsed by Marx himself - this plank is verging dangerously close to being a shibboleth at this date. Taken literally it isn't even doable. A delegate is obviously entitled to some amount of time to prove or falsify his own competence for the position in question, so "at any time" is false even to the letter of its words. More to the point is procedure. A badly designed procedure can very easily devolve into a farce, with positions becoming political footballs. I'd hate to see a worker's state version of the California gubernatorial recall, for example. So, this principle can be invaluable or hugely counterproductive depending on how it's implemented.



This can be passed over without comment because it's unobjectionable qua principle.



There's really little reason to single out administrative work for such a criterion. There's really nothing all that special, or pernicious about administrative work in and of itself that calls for such a treatment. The previous four planks can be implemented relatively immediately but this one cannot. It will only have relevance when there is no such thing as a "full time job", be it in direct production or administration or what have you - i.e. when people are "all-rounded individuals". Unfortunately, what we inherit from capitalism is the opposite of that. To implement the plank prematurely will only lead to a decline in quality of service, hence necessitating more administrators if anything. The task of the working class in power is to take various things: directly productive labour, decision/policy formulation, opinion-forming power, etc - and strip them of being class attributes. Declassing a bourgeois is easy, all you do is give Donald Trump a mop and tell him to clean up the floor. The problematic part is the constructive portion of the task.

What makes administation liable to decline into bureaucracy, is (apart from historical or class factors) that there is such a thing as too much administration. Fortunately, there is a scientific definition of such.given by Stafford Beer in his works. Administration is "metasystemic" work, and the amount of necessary metasystemic work is that which does not exceed the autopoesis of the systems to which the administration is "meta" to. That is, metasystems should not exhibit any independent autopoeitic behaviour. There is no point in making all administrators part-timers if this is forgotten.

Additionally, not all "paper-pushing" is functionally equal. Some of it is basic grunt work. This could be presumably be subjected to rotation and part-time ness early on. But what's important is the decision making/policy component. What's between these two layers is what executes the functions on a day-to-day basis, and is conducted by specialized individuals. What's important to prioritize in terms of change is the policy making component (and only start working on the middle layer when this step has been completed, or at least on its way to completion). How long people serve on boards, too, is less important than changing the class composition of that board. Incentives will need to be introduced to reward such boards in proportion that they are representative of the class composition of the broader society. This will ensure worker control of those boards, intrinsically. It will also be an edifying spectacle to see the bourgeois who made up the whole board before the revolution fight amongst themselves to see who gets the one seat left on it that reflects their wider proportionality.

The last consideration is remuneration. If someone is going to work only 2 months a year at such a job, then they're only going to receive 2 months worth of average worker's salary. So implementing this plank also presupposes complete confidence in the population that there is a workable, full-employment economy. Otherwise few people will want to assume these functions - namely, the few people who are used to them already.



That too fall under the category of long-term and non-immediate policies.



Actually, that's far from self-evident, as evinced from the debate on worker's control after the October Revolution. Management by trade union, factory committee, local soviet or central government all had some claim to be worker's control of production.



It's true that the whole class is not going to start the ball we call "the revolution" moving, but the revolution isn't something static. The merely political phase can be made by the vanguard, but the revolution as a whole process is bigger than the political part and the role of the working class must broaden and deepen as the the revolution progresses. If the revolution doesn't snowball in this way, it perishes.

And it's not definitionally adequate that the vanguard is merely "the political active part of the class". First, even merely voting in an election is political activity, but nobody would claim that the millions of working class people in bourgeois countries are a vanguard. You can't even define them as just the leaders, either, because by that definition the Economist faction of Russian Social-Democracy in their day were a vanguard, or an even better example, the English trade-unionist leaders in the day of the IWMA who literally sold out to the bourgeoisie. At some point we're going to have to include "class-conscious" in the definition, even though that opens up a whole new can of worms.



Well, the correct ideas can only be found in struggle. But the working class has a perennial problem of finding leaders who actually will struggle, not to mention its own perception of the need for struggle. Again, it all comes back to class-consciousness and how to foster it.



Well, the trick is basically to find where the workers are conducting the class struggle against the capitalists, even if it's at a very low level, and work to generalize these struggles, raise them to a higher level and broaden class-consciousness without succumbing to tailist and sectarian temptations. I'm going by how Hal Draper puts it in numerous places.

The complication is that while this is the basic decription of what a vanguard organization does before the revolution, after the revolution there is a crisis of identity/purpose: it's not as clear as to what the purpose of the vanguard is after it. Mutatis mutandis, this also applies to merely reformist Social Democrat parties, as history has demonstrated.



I'm not really too sanguine about the "soviet" mode of personnel selection, though likely it's not to be totally disregarded.

What determines the level of coordination between areas certainly isn't "the ability to produce more stuff", but systemic purpose. No system in history has managed to be able to make more stuff than capitalism, but its necessity to coordinate has if anything, grown. In fact, it's the ABC of Marxism that it's the necessity to coordinate beyond what the capitalist system can tolerate that puts socialism on the agenda.

Well if you cannot measure economic coordination in "the ability to produce more stuff", how do you measure economic coordination? And how do you suppose a communist economy be organised since you don't approve of the "soviet method of personal selection"?

I think you mean how do you measure the need for a given degree of economic coordination. Well, what comes to mind immediately is that if you lessen the degree of coordination and the economy as whole and the parts suffer in their functioning, then you've just did.



Selection by lot, perhaps. Direct elections to each level. It's not like the soviet method is some sort of sacred cow.

Ok I see what you're saying now. And I agree that the need for economic coordination is a fundamental aspect of Marxism. The question is, what is the best way to meet this need? This leads me to the soviet method.



Is this not how the soviet system under Lenin was originally organised? People would be elected into each soviet to manage their community or, as the level increased, their nation.

Cybersyn today would be a whole different animal. Think of IBM's Watson or an even better A.I.