Wars and ConflictsΜύ permalink
Overthrown.
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Message 1.Μύ
Posted by youngjerry (U7266788) on Wednesday, 6th May 2009
the british left wing have always claimed that any socialist/communist government elected in the UK would be quickly overthrown by the capitalist class either with or without the help of america.
And that this has been proven in other instances where socialist/communist governments have been elected in the past. Note Spain 1936 right through to Cuba and Chile during the '60's and 70's up to present day.
Therefore they claim that armed struggle is inevitable if socialism/communism is to be elected and held in the UK.
How true is this claim.
youngjerry -
Message 2
Posted by Spruggles (U13892773) on Thursday, 7th May 2009
youngierry,
I suspect that you are playing the Devil's Advocate here. Nonetheless it might be true that socialist governments in Britain were looked at with some suspicion by certain foreign powers and it has been claimed by several prominent socialist MP's that they had been or were being investigated by the security services. I also remember Tony Benn speaking of the difficulties he faced as a minister with the obscurantism of the civil service, but whether that was normal procedure or a more sinister purpose can be promulgated I leave to the conspiracy theorists. As for armed conflict? Absolutely not. That has about as much credence as the old conservative claim that if we got rid of the monarchy, then we would all become communists. I think that beheading one monarch is enough for any aspiring nation. -
Message 3
Posted by youngjerry (U7266788) on Thursday, 7th May 2009
spruggles message 2.
Mmmm, interesting post.
Although I'm not sure, well I mean I haven't worked out yet if it was better being reigned by Charlie or Cromwell.
Oh they all talk about 'socialism' politicians
lecturers students and workers.
But when the politicians get elected to introduce this 'socialism' history proves it's never been delivered.
Thanks for posting. doesn't look as if anyone else could be bothered on this one.
youngjerry -
Message 4
Posted by Sambista (U4068266) on Thursday, 7th May 2009
Which particular left wing espouse the theory of an armed struggle in mainland UK?
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Message 5
Posted by Frank Parker (U7843825) on Thursday, 7th May 2009
Youngjerry,
Are you so young that you are unaware that we once had a government that nationalised hospitals, coal and steel production, gas and electricity production and distribution, road and rail transport, including buses. We weren't invaded as a result nor did the army stage a right-wing coup! -
Message 6
Posted by youngjerry (U7266788) on Thursday, 7th May 2009
Urnungal.
well I would say certainly the student's wing of the Socialist Workers Party. but then maybe it's the whole party policy. i dunno what they really advocate because their manifesto seems so vague.
Hey this is politics...and they'll close the thread down for that...I'm out here...
youngjerry -
Message 7
Posted by Spruggles (U13892773) on Friday, 8th May 2009
No 4,
The simple answer to that is 'Those who think that they would win!' As for Nationalization, I happen to think that at the time, like the NHS, there was a general demand for it. And I still think that those industries that people rely on for basic survival should not be at the mercy of profit making organizations. Does that make me a communist ready for armed insurrection? I think too that there is a difference despite Margaret Thatcher's tenets that there was a clear delineation between British 'Socialism' and Communism, well the Soviet Unions' version anyway. However, I distinctly remember a broadcast by the Socialist Revolutionist Party when certain 'Redgraves' extolled the workers to man the barriers. Oh, how innocent we were then. -
Message 8
Posted by Spruggles (U13892773) on Friday, 8th May 2009
youngierry,
We always said at school (C1950)that you could instantly know a persons political sympathies by asking who they would have supported during the Civil War. Well, for my part, give me Cromwell every time. Divine Right of Kings? (Up Theirs! - to quote Mel Brooks) I think politics is like love. As some clever person once said, Love is like the measles - catch while you're young and you're immune for the rest of your life ... so let it be with politics.
Regards Spruggles. -
Message 9
Posted by cloudyj (U1773646) on Friday, 8th May 2009
Are you so young that you are unaware that we once had a government that nationalised hospitals, coal and steel production, gas and electricity production and distribution, road and rail transport, including buses. Μύ
And that was just the Conservative Party! national ownership of "crucial industries" was a common policy to all parties between the war and probably 1979.
As for a left wing government being overthrown, I think this (and everyone being brain-washed by ring wing papers) is a bit of a myth of the far left to excuse why they don't tend to do so well in free elections. There was a fair bit of resitance on the left to the Labour Party in its early days. The theory being that if elected, it would satisfy the poor's demand for change to the point where they wouldn't be driven to real revolution and Marxism. -
Message 10
Posted by Spruggles (U13892773) on Saturday, 9th May 2009
cloudyj,
Oh yes, I'll drink to that, except I'm not quite sure of that bit about propaganda. I'm pretty long in the tooth and I can recall certain newspapers with great clarion headlines crying out warnings about uncontrolled immigration increases, forthcoming financial ruin, 'Reds under the beds', personal attacks concerning bald heads and alleged financial misconduct by deputies, all just before the proles were sent to the ballot box; funny that don't you think? -
Message 11
Posted by Sambista (U4068266) on Saturday, 9th May 2009
Bit like the Torygraph publishing all the dirt on Labour expenses overclaiming etc just before the Euro & County Council elections, perhaps?
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Message 12
Posted by Spruggles (U13892773) on Sunday, 10th May 2009
Umunntsgal,
Precisely, although I was attempting serrupticious notice to the conduct of the press during the last London Mayoral election, but I do detect the aroma of rodents. -
Message 13
Posted by MB (U177470) on Sunday, 10th May 2009
the british left wing have always claimed that any socialist/communist government elected in the UK would be quickly overthrown by the capitalist class either with or without the help of america.
Μύ
There has never been any evidence of a desire for a extreme socialist or communist government in the UK so they would only get power through manipulation of the political system or violence. So it could be true that democracy would only be regained through violence.
They tried hard enough, some of the obituaries of the union leader who recently died had wild praise for him but it was also pointed out by Oleg Gordievsky that he had been a Comintern agent. I don't think he was alone.
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Message 14
Posted by stanilic (U2347429) on Sunday, 10th May 2009
The election of a left wing government in the UK will lead neither to socialism nor communism. The leading cadres would assume unique privileges, an authoritarian police state would be constructed on the back of a pretext and the economy would end up in financial ruin.
Sound familiar? -
Message 15
Posted by Sambista (U4068266) on Sunday, 10th May 2009
If you are suggesting the current British government is "left-wing" I take issue with you. Authoritarian, incompetent, ending in financial ruin - I grant you those, but left-wing? No way.
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Message 16
Posted by stanilic (U2347429) on Sunday, 10th May 2009
They say they are so it has to be true.
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Message 17
Posted by Sambista (U4068266) on Sunday, 10th May 2009
So the German Democratic Republic was democratic by that measure.
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Message 18
Posted by stanilic (U2347429) on Monday, 11th May 2009
It was indeed, I can still smell the oil used on their democratic machine guns, but it all depends on how you define democracy.
Mikhail Bakunin pointed out to Karl Marx around about 1870 that state socialism would never work. This has been well evidenced by history since then.
To work, socialism needs to discard the state in every sense. So a socialist government is by definition an oxymoron only you can't tell socialists that as they have been in denial for over a century. State socialism is just another form of opportunism. -
Message 19
Posted by Sambista (U4068266) on Monday, 11th May 2009
State socialism is just another form of opportunism.Μύ
Pretty much like Toryism, then. -
Message 20
Posted by Spruggles (U13892773) on Tuesday, 12th May 2009
I don't quite understand why socialism needs to discard the state, could you please explain. And please, which particular form of socialism you referring to?
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Message 21
Posted by stanilic (U2347429) on Tuesday, 12th May 2009
Spruggles
How do you define socialism?
Perhaps the following will help:
`....a social system where economic exploitation and political oppression of the massess of the people by privileged minorities is impossible. A form of society where the producers themselves own and control the means of production and social wealth, so that there can be no masters and no economic monopoly.'
This is a quote from Rudolf Rocker's `London Years', a fascinating autobiography of the former editor of a Yiddish libertarian paper `Arbeter Fraint' printed in London a hundred years ago. He put the words into the mouth of his partner Milly who was being interrogated by a tribunal during the First World War.
Rocker classified himself as an anarchist which in those days had a more specific definition than it does today. However, in his novel `News from Nowhere' William Morris attempts to bridge the gap then developing between the left libertarians, aka anarchists, and the Marxists and social-democrats.
After the suppression of the anarcho-syndicalists in Spain during the Spanish Civil War - see `Homage to Catalonia' by George Orwell - the concept of libertarian socialism was largely ignored within Europe and the wider world due to the predominance of the Moscow-funded Comintern and the social-democrats with their model of a welfare state. So the idea has never developed the modern prominence its long history justifies.
Now that we have seen the collapse of the Marxist-Leninist state in 1989 and the collapse of the social-democratic state in the UK in 2009, it is time for the Left to rediscover these old ideas and apply them.
I was raised very conscious of the spirit of George Orwell. He also gives us a very specific definition of socialism in Homage to Catalonia; which some might prefer to the words of Milly Rocker above.
These ideas do not require revolution or political upheaval to become accepted. The entire point of the word `social-ism' is that it is the normal way people behave towards each other if left alone. I think people who define themselves as socialists can get caught up in the recent historical meaning of the word rather than the simple idea from which it emanates. -
Message 22
Posted by Spruggles (U13892773) on Wednesday, 13th May 2009
Greetings stanilic,
Actually I meant your personal view of the political concept that would ruin the State if applied. I wrote to the Observer once because one of their journalists said that 'Orwell was frightened of Communism' and being like yourself imbued in Orwellism, I observed that he had actually foretold of its collapse and therefore he was hardly frightened of it.
'1984' although seen as the great anti-communistic work was in fact strongly anti-totalitarianism and he knew very well that a society that feeds upon itself cannot survive. Nor did overlook the fact that to trade outside of the Communist Block they would have to adopt Western banking and trade disciplines.
He was a great journalist, and how I wish he were alive today. What a field day he would have!
Incidentally it was only after reading 'Homage to Catalonia' that I grasped the complex issues of the then Spanish politics. -
Message 23
Posted by stanilic (U2347429) on Wednesday, 13th May 2009
Spruggles
I avoid preaching if I can. I am not averse to a bit of teaching though.
My old Dad met Orwell when they were both tied up with Lord Astor just after the war. Dad had gone through a similar experience as Orwell but a bit later and not in Spain. Dad only ordered me once and that was to read Animal Farm and 1984. He said `I don't want your generation to be lied to as mine was.' He had been a Party member in the late Thirties.
Orwell was abused by the Left when he returned from Spain. I think he mentions it in Homage to Catalonia. Some old anarchist friends of mine, now sadly all gone, also went through the same experience. It was this distortion that he was writing about.
I think that if the Left take a breather and do some serious thinking about what they want to achieve then there is some hope. The state needs to be smaller, it has to be smaller but this can only be achieved by allowing local communities the opportunity of controlling their own lives. We need to look back to the older models and the elder dreams - I love News from Nowhere, it is a fantasy but if we can't recover some of that innocence then we will suffer as all cynics must.
What never ceases to amaze me is that when you criticise Labour there are some who always accuse you of being a Tory. I was assiduously courted by Labour when I was a young politics graduate, I still have old friends in the Labour Party, but I am not a social-democrat, never was and that is all there is to it. -
Message 24
Posted by Frank Parker (U7843825) on Wednesday, 13th May 2009
A form of society where the producers themselves own and control the means of production and social wealth, so that there can be no masters and no economic monopoly [and which] is the normal way people behave towards each other if left alone.Μύ
If only that were true! I've just replied to Casseroleon on the "Fighting for Britain" thread. The burden of my argument was that the human propensity to greed and our natural response to fear make the application of such an idealistic society impossible. -
Message 25
Posted by Spruggles (U13892773) on Thursday, 14th May 2009
Plotinlaois,
But you see, human greed if allowed free range will ruin any form of government. Some examples of which are too close for comfort. The question is do you accept the old Greek premise that 'Society should cause as little harm to the most insignificant'(sorry if that is misquoted) or Margaret Thatcher's tenet 'That there is no such thing as society? I happen to believe in the former. I also believe that government should be for the people by the people to use that often abused Americanism. I can't help it if the rich and the powerful keep abusing the system.
One example of State ownership. Many years ago all I had to do was stick a shilling(actually I remember using pennies but I don't want to admit my age)in a meter and-hey presto - lights or gas. Once in a while a man would come round and empty the meter(and have a cup of tea) and give us back a rebate if we'd earned it. It was all so simple then. Now I am constantly bombarded by advertising and house visits by men who want to browbeat me in to changing my supplier. And how many suppliers there are! How long it will be before the men are replaced by scantily dressed young women I wonder? But has anyone ever computed how much extra this is adding to my heating bills? The supply of energy is after all a necessity for life but too many people are falling behind with their bills ... is this the benefit of a 'free market'? -
Message 26
Posted by stanilic (U2347429) on Sunday, 17th May 2009
Plotinlaois
I understand that point entirely. There is always at least one that wants more than what everyone else is happy with who then sets about creating cirucmstances in which they can get more than everyone else. Then once they have that they debauch others into taking less than themselves but more than anyone else. So you end up with a structured hierarchy
However, if I suggest something called public opinion, custom and practice, the will of the majority, peer pressure and so on could such be avoided?
I just don't know, none of us do. What I do draw a lot of hope from is when there is an accident or some sort of tragedy that requires collective energy to resolve, the vast majority gather round and cooperate to provide a solution. What I speak about is not far below the surface we just need to get it to express itself more in everyday life.
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