Gawker: Your involvement in electoral campaigns is mainly organizing for progressive Democrats?

John Bachtell: Yes, mainly progressive Democrats and independents at every level, whether it be city council, state rep, Senate, Presidential. I was really active in both Obama campaigns. Actually I was his precinct captain for his Senate campaign in Illinois.

Gawker: What’s been your impression of the Obama administration, and Obama’s record?

JB: When he was first elected we thought that perhaps his presidency could be a transformative moment for the country. I think we underestimated the degree of opposition from the Republicans and sections of Wall Street and monopoly capital. They thwarted him at every turn, and there were also divisions within the Democrats as well. So it was really hard for the administration to do some of what they wanted to do. Nevertheless, we felt that he could have gone further than he did, particularly economically, but the fact is that the Republican obstruction has been full court obstruction of everything...

Now you have a shift in mass public opinion that’s gravitating on a lot of key issues in a very good direction: majorities in support of taxing the rich, in support of immigration reform, you name it. I think that is in some ways allowing the administration to bypass Congress and use executive authority to move forward.

hahahhahah

i mean the only way i can understand these people even bothering to upkeep such a dead organization when they're even to the right of bernie sanders is a sweet paycheck from the FBI every two weeks

stegosaurus posted:

honestly theres nothing wrong with parties owning businesses or buildings or even making investments. imo. you gotta make money now that the ussr isnt writing blank checks to anyone regardless of their revisionism.

Make Righteous use of Unrighteous Mammon.

Or how a message of peace and universal benevolence can survive in not always favorable conditions for centuries upon centuries....

c_man posted:

investing dues money by shorting the market and buying up + forgiving debt seems like it would be at least as helpful to the cause as anything else they could be doing with it

i dont like that honestly. what i like is using dues or inheritances or straight up donations from sympathetic rich people (not unprecedented) to pay organizer salaries or buy housing or whatever. or running a business that pays people fairly that also ploughs money back into the movement.

after all cuba and the soviet union were state capitalist, all communist states or quasi-states or insurrectionary periods have had to make their own deal with global capital. what's wrong with reproducing that on a tiny scale and skimming the profits for worthwhile shit. its certainly better than dumpster diving or requiring everyone in your 'pure' communist movement to work shit jobs for 6 days out of the week to make rent to the point where no one has any energy for investigation or any sort of activism. buying a fucking apple at the supermarket involves you in global finance, you might as well try to get something out of it

Soviet_Salami posted:

I think we're underestimating the difficulty in extracting profit and capital formation.

for you

“In every form of society there is a particular [branch of] production which determines the position and importance of all the others, and the relations obtaining in this branch accordingly determine those in all other branches. It is the general light tingeing all other colours and modifying them in their specific quality; it is a special ether determining the specific gravity of everything found in it..”

(Marx, K. (2010). Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58. Marx & Engels Collected Works. Vol.28. Laurence and Wishart p.43)

"As Lenin pointed out, there were, in the transitional period in the U.S.S.R., the following five forms of economy:

(1) Patriarchal peasant economy.
(2) Petty commodity production.
(3) The private economy of capitalism.
(4) State capitalism.
(5) Socialist economy.

Patriarchal peasant economy, based on personal labour, was a small-scale and largely natural economy. In other words, it produced almost exclusively for its own needs.

Petty commodity production was based on personal labour and connected to a greater or lesser degree with the market. This was primarily the middle-peasant economy, producing the bulk of marketed grain, as well as handicraft production without the use of hired labour. Petty commodity economy embraced the bulk of the population for a considerable part of the transitional period.

The private economy of capitalism was represented by the most numerous of the exploiting classes—the kulaks as well as by the owners of non-nationalised (mainly small and middling), industrial concerns and by traders. The capitalist concerns used hired labour, labour-power was a commodity, exploitation existed and surplus-value was appropriated by the capitalists.

State capitalism took the form mainly of concessions granted by the Soviet Government to foreign capitalists, and of certain State concerns rented to capitalists. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, State capitalism was essentially different from that existing under the domination of the bourgeoisie. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, it is a form of economy which is strictly limited by the proletarian authority and is utilised by it in the struggle with petty-bourgeois disorganising influences and in the building of socialism. State capitalism occupied only a very small place in the economy of the U.S.S.R.

Socialist economy comprised, in the first place, the factories, mills, transport, banks, State farms, trading and other concerns belonging to the Soviet State. In the second place, it included the co-operatives—consumer, supply, credit and producer, including their highest form, the collective farms. The basis of socialist economy was large-scale machine industry. At the very outset of the transitional period, socialist economy, as the most advanced of these economic forms, began to playa leading role in the economy of the country.

In the socialist sector of the economy, labour-power ceased to be a commodity, labour lost the character of hired labour and became labour for the worker himself, for society. Surplus-value disappeared. The transition to planning of the work of nationalised concerns, first in particular industries and subsequently throughout the whole of the State sector, was gradually achieved. As a result of the establishment of social ownership of the means of production, the output of State concerns began to accrue to the State, that is to the whole of the working people, instead of the capitalists."

https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/pe/pe-ch23.htm

“The state capitalism discussed in all books on economics is that which exists under the capitalist system, where the state brings under its direct control certain capitalist enterprises. But ours is a proletarian state it rests on the proletariat; it gives the proletariat all political privileges; and through the medium of the proletariat it attracts to itself the lower ranks of the peasantry (you remember that we began this work through the Poor Peasants Committees). That is why very many people are misled by the term state capitalism. To avoid this we must remember the fundamental thing that state capitalism in the form we have here is not dealt with in any theory, or in any books, for the simple reason that all the usual concepts connected with this term are associated with bourgeois rule in capitalist society. Our society is one which has left the rails of capitalism, but has not yet got on to new rails. The state in this society is not ruled by the bourgeoisie, but by the proletariat. We refuse to understand that when we say “state” we mean ourselves, the proletariat, the vanguard of the working class. State capitalism is capitalism which we shall be able to restrain, and the limits of which we shall be able to fix. This state capitalism is connected with the state, and the state is the workers, the advanced section of the workers, the vanguard. We are the state.”

(Lenin, V.I., Eleventh Congress Of The R.C.P.(B.), Mar 27th – Apr 2nd, 1922, Works, Volume 33, p.278, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1973)

"The state capitalism that we have introduced in our country is of a special kind. It does not agree with the usual conception of state capitalism. We hold all the key positions. We hold the land; it belongs to the state. This is very important, although our opponents try to make out that it is of no importance at all. That is untrue. The fact that the land belongs to the state is extremely important, and economically it is also of great practical purport. This we have achieved, and I must say that all our future activities should develop only within that framework. We have already succeeded in making the peasantry content and in reviving both industry and trade. I have already said that our state capitalism differs from state capitalism in the literal sense of the term in that our proletarian state not only owns the land, but also all the vital branches of industry. To begin with, we have leased only a certain number of the small and medium plants, but all the rest remain in our hands. As regards trade, I want to re-emphasise that we are trying to found mixed companies, that we are already forming them, i.e., companies in which part of the capital belongs to private capitalists—and foreign capitalists at that—and the other part belongs to the state."

(Lenin, V.I., Fourth Congress of the Communist International, November 5th to December 5th, 1922, Works, Volume 33, p.427-428, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1973)

"It is in this field that the main struggle is being waged. Between what elements is this struggle being waged if we are to speak in terms of economic categories such as “state capitalism"? Between the fourth and the fifth in the order in which I have just enumerated them. Of course not. It is not state capitalism that is at war with socialism, but the petty bourgeoisie plus private capitalism fighting together against both state capitalism and socialism. The petty bourgeoisie oppose every kind of state interference, accounting and control, whether it be state capitalist or state socialist. This is an absolutely unquestionable fact of reality, and the root of the economic mistake of the “Left Communists” is that they have failed to understand it. The profiteer, the commercial racketeer, the disrupter of monopoly—these are our principal “internal” enemies, the enemies of the economic measures of Soviet power. A hundred and twenty-five years ago it might have been excusable for the French petty bourgeoisie, the most ardent and sincere revolutionaries, to try to crush the profiteer by executing a few of the “chosen” and by making thunderous declamations. Today, however, the purely rhetorical attitude to this question assumed by some Left Socialist-Revolutionaries can rouse nothing but disgust and revulsion in every politically conscious revolutionary. We know perfectly well that the economic basis of profiteering is both the small proprietors, who are exceptionally widespread in Russia, and private capitalism, of which every petty bourgeois is an agent. We know that the million tentacles of this petty-bourgeois hydra now and again encircle various sections of the workers, that, instead of state monopoly, profiteering forces its way into every pore of our social and economic organism."

Yall need some immortal science in yalls lives, amen