Would the police force exist in a Socialist world?

[ALB]

Here's the view of an actual Professor of Anthropology:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/world-socialist-movement/marx-anthropologistGood stuff.

[steve colborn]

How about starting a new thread, primitive communist societies? Steve.

[twc]

Myths change because they are actual processes. Change of form is a given.I was considering the persistent abstraction of actual processes:the signature “thingness” that characterizes them all,the abstract invariant that survives their actual transience.That abstraction is the consciousness born of common ownership of the means of primitive social reproduction.Many actual implementations of primitive common ownership are possible — but all appear to take the form of a modified family. Nurture is a natural focus for social coalescing and foundation for social cohesion. Hence the common ownership and control relations in the form of inter-dependent “kinship” groupings.Egalitarianism is a Capitalist StandardIt is contrary to the materialist conception of history to judge a society as socialist by how well it conforms to abstract egalitarianism. Common ownership and democratic control constitute the only scientific criterion. How else can anyone scientifically comprehend the social implications of socialism?Egalitarianism is a bourgeois “right” we all now enjoy, even though most of us abuse its great advantage to the working class — equal suffrage — by perpetuating the system that implements it.Humans are not and never will be equal as humans. [Only quantum particles are identical. Macroscopic entities, like humans, always differ. Amazingly, even tiny macroscopic objects like snowflake crystals differ. No two snowflakes are identical — physicists are confident that this is ever so, even throughout all of Earth’s history.]Anyone who desires socialism out of notions of Égalité — i.e. in order to restrict, limit, constrain, unify, destroy, cripple, curtail, outlaw human diversity — misconceives socialism in capitalist terms.Diverse socialism retorts: Vive la différence!That’s why Marx, in his critique of capitalist thought, governance, jurisprudence and ethics — everything the capitalist philosophers, politicians, jurists and ethicists hold dear — hurled at social-democrat “egalitarians” the unanswerable riposte:“Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal)…”“Equal right is therefore a right of inequality like every right.”I fail to be impressed by arguments against primitive socialism based on notions of inequality.Murder and the Whole CalamitySimilarly, applying bourgeois criteria to primitive murder, warfare, rape, or whatever you want, in order to claim that a society based on common ownership can’t be a socialist society, is simply not scientific.One must follow the science fearlessly where it leads, and not where you want to lead it. Science is solely there to wield.One must explain primitive behaviour in terms of primitive socialism, and not by abandoning it.It strikes me as not at all difficult to explain primitive murder, warfare and rape within primitive socialism. Primitive consciousness inhabits a mythical world alien to ours, which it is crucial to understand scientifically.Reinterpreting the Silenced PastThe unalloyed past is now lost. Reinterpretation is therefore reconstruction. I assert that the only way forward is through the materialist conception of history.

[ALB]

Interesting, and relevant, news item today about the police using so-called "restorative justice" instead of the law (and getting a bollocking for it from the flog-em-and-hang-em brigade represented by Ed Miliband out vote-catching):http://mancunianmatters.co.uk/content/300410237-manchester-police-chief-defends-10000-apologies-and-community-resolutions-dished-o

[twc]

Enjoyed Brian Morris's excellent Marx as Anthropologist talk.Wonderful to hear it "like it is/was" from an erstwhile hunter–gatherer himself.[Yes, Steve. We do need a new thread, but I had not read your post when I drafted my reply off-line on the tram.]

[Anonymous]

twc wrote:

Enjoyed Brian Morris's excellent Marx as Anthropologist talk.

Indeed, and delivered entirely without notes of any description.  Impressive.

[Hud955]

 Some good points twc.  I think we have to be very wary of romanticising hunter-gatherers, as well as drawing inappropriate conclusions from them, even if we would like to claim that of itself common ownership gives rise to harmonious social behaviour.   From a practical propagandist point of view, however, I doubt, for example, whether any woman is going to be reassured by the argument that ‘rape’ in socialistic hunter-gatherer societies is merely a mistaken bourgeois appellation.  I think she is going to be much more impressed by the fact that rape is in reality extremely rare within such societies.  Unfortunately we cannot say the same about the murder rate (or in-group killings, if you prefer.)   But, I agree,  we have to explain hunter gatherer behavour not try to reimagine them .I'm not sure that 'primitive consciousness' as far as we can infer it is as entirely alien as you suggest.  From what I've read it doesn't appear to be that alien at all.  Hunter gatherers perform stupendous feats of collective logistical reasoning (of a kind we can appreciate and understand very clearly) in their daily lives, and their mythologies are simply explanatory models.  Even their fear or witchcraft isn't all that hard to understand in a culture that sustains horoscopes in all the popular dailies, and that touches wood, and takes care to walk around black cats. 

[twc]

Buckley’s ChanceThe most explicit account of Australian Aboriginal “murder” comes from a European who lived amongst them — separated by 1000 km from the nearest European settlement in Sydney and environs — for 32 years.Convict William Buckley, aged 23 years, escaped from an exploration camp near Melbourne in 1802, and managed, despite overwhelming odds, to assimilate into the Wathaurung tribes until their dissolution following the 1835 actual settlement of Melbourne. The improbability of his survival has entered the vernacular in the phrase Buckley’s chance.The Wathaurung called Buckley “returned from the dead” because his skin was white. He explains, when describing a tree-platform death-and-cremation ceremony, “the fire cheers and warms the dead man. All things being completed, one word was uttered … The dead is gone to be made a white man”.Buckley, 6ft 7in Cheshire farmer, apprenticed builder, regimental foot-soldier, recipient of stolen goods, transported convict, escapee, hunter–gatherer, became uniquely placed anthropologist:

Quote:

I have seen a race of children grow up into women and men, and many of the old people die away, and (by my harmless and peaceable manner amongst them) I had acquired great influence in settling their disputes.

Primitive “Murder”Buckley found Aboriginal warfare to be more terrifying than his campaign with the “King’s Own” Foot in the French Revolutionary Wars.Over three decades he witnessed 50 killings. Members of his own clan were summarily killed for their imagined implication in a fatal snake bite.Warner summarizes traditional violence thus: “Special factors contributing to high Aboriginal death rates were constant raiding for women, never-ending chains of payback killings, and the belief that most deaths (except for those of infants and elders) resulted from an enemy’s sorcery and must be avenged.” [W. I. Warner, A Black Civilization: 1937]Buckley recounts:

Quote:

Numbers of murderous fights I prevented by my interference, which was received by them as being well meant; so much so, that they would often allow me to go amongst them before a battle, and take away their spears and boomerangs.

On the payback killing of one of his own adopted or biological children:

Quote:

The dead man’s family forced my poor blind boy away from me, and killed him on the spot, merely because he had happened to be in the same hut in which their sick young man had died, believing that the blind boy must have been in some way responsible for his [untimely] death.I managed to escape with his little sister, moving on, and on, until meeting up with the tribe of her future husband, to whom she had been promised in infancy. They immediately vowed vengeance, and two or three of them set out for the purpose of murder, returning in a few days with the intelligence that they had killed two of the children of their enemies.

Buckley describes a world of interminable retribution killings that determines his periodic retreat to the seclusion of his famous estuarine fishing hut where he is later joined by a “wife”. [So it seems possible to live on the fringes of hunter-gatherer society — but then Buckley was always a unique phenomenon within that society].And yet most of the time, harmony prevails. One wonders just what his imaginative Aboriginal clan, feasting on kangaroo around the campfire at night, made of his tall tales of horses and carriages on the city streets of London.Expanding FrontierEuropean settlement in 1835 focused Aboriginal retaliation against the European rape of their traditional absolutely-indispensable means of social reproduction. Necessity of a new alien mode of social reproduction supervened upon their ancestral own.  Broome [Aboriginal Australians, 1994] estimates 1000 Aboriginal and 80 European deaths in border skirmishes over the subsequent 15 years of European expansion into Victoria.“A settler taking up a new country is obliged to act towards its original occupiers in this manner [murder] or abandon it.” [settler Neil Black, Geelong, 1840].ImplicationsI see no reason to abandon the materialist conception of history in the very domain where it can most readily be tested. But that’s matter for another thread.Suffice to say here that, if we treat the materialist conception of history as only “a guiding principle”, we remain scientifically bankrupt — bereft of any definite principle on how to proceed other than by what suits us.Moreover, Marx didn’t say that the materialist conception of history was a guiding principle of his studies. He said it was the guiding principle of his studies. That tiny the, in Robert Frost’s estimation, makes “all the difference”.

[Hud955]

twc wrote:

"I see no reason to abandon the materialist conception of history in the very domain where it can most readily be tested. But that’s matter for another thread.Suffice to say here that, if we treat the materialist conception of history as only “a guiding principle”, we remain scientifically bankrupt — bereft of any definite principle on how to proceed other than by what suits us.Moreover, Marx didn’t say that the materialist conception of history was a guiding principle of his studies. He said it was the guiding principle of his studies. That tiny the, in Robert Frost’s estimation, makes “all the difference”.

 No I see no reason to abandon the materialist conception of history either, nor to treat it as anything other than the fundamental principal of socialist analysis, but that still leaves open the question of how we apply it.   Marx's own use of it was to oppose the dialectical to the aetiological, the materially specific to the abstract, and the historical to the evolutionary.  Beyond that he has left us a wide open road.  We know though that the MCH can't be used deterministically.  But this is no argument against it.  Scientific theories do not have to be deterministic at all levels of organisation. According to the MCH, man makes his own history and is not a mechanical puppet whose strings are being pulled  by some (impossible) meta-historical process. At some point we have to come out of our heads, drop theory and start to function as practical socialists, ie as actors and agents within history and not theorists of it.  And though these two aspects of our existence as socialists in a capitalist society are related, they do not make exactly the same demands on us.  So the way we understand the behaviour of hunter gatherers requires one approach.  The way we treat information about them as socialist propagandists requires another.  If we find, therefore, that band hunter gatherer society is egalitarian then we value and make use of that.  It gives us an uncomplicated way of promoting our case as well as enabling us to dismantle many of the myths of capitalist ideology.  Within an emergent historical process, such things may be of no little significance. 

[ALB]

Zeitgeist Peter Joseph's latest video is very good on this. In 30 minutes he says what we've been saying for ages about crime:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeswJY0o2uA

[twc]

Hud955 wrote:

According to the MCH, man makes his own history and is not a mechanical puppet whose strings are being pulled by some (impossible) meta-historical process.

It can equally be said that man does not make his own history — just as it can equally be said that workers don’t run capitalism. Both do what they must under compulsion.The assertion that man does not make his own history is surprisingly the essential slant of the materialist conception of history.Firstly, man does not make his own history “out of the whole cloth”. He is compelled to accept the historical fabric handed down to him by his former self, and make what he can out of it. Man’s making of his own history is thwarted by a historical fabric of his own making.This is a constraint recognized by the materialist conception of history that is imposed upon man’s making of his own history. It limits what man can do. It is the fundamental argument against voluntarism.It is also the first determinism [considered here] that acts upon man in the making of his own history — the determinism of his transmitted world.Secondly, to the extent that man doesn’t comprehend the warp and weft of his own history, man cannot be said to make it consciously at all. On the contrary, history can be said to make an unconscious tailor out of him.In an uncomprehended historical process man is quite correctly characterized as mere puppet controlled by the process of uncomprehended history, even though he is its necessary agent — even though he actively imagines that he controls history.That is a second determinism [considered here] that acts upon man in the making of his own history — the determinism of false consciousness.These are two powerful determinisms that limit man’s freedom over the making of his own history.Thus we come to perceive Marx rapidly marshaling determinisms of the materialist conception of history in a few compelling lines of his “Brumaire”.Sure, man for Marx is definitely not the same “mechanical” puppet he is for the French philosophes, whose materialist world view Marx absorbed in his teens and later discarded in favour of the materialist conception of history.Sure, the historical process for Marx is definitely not the “meta-historical” process of World Spirit it is for Hegel, whose idealist world view Marx absorbed at university and later discarded in favour of the materialist conception of history.Yet, perhaps surprisingly, Marx does come close to considering social man in pre-socialist society as akin to a conscious puppet [until now unconscious of his own historical process]. Isn’t that a reasonable characterization of the blind capitalist personas we find around us, directed by the needs of capital to the detriment of the needs of society?That mankind behaves like puppets is a critique of the conditions that call forth such behaviour — not a slur upon our species but upon our conditions.Of course, the most fundamental determinism of the materialist conception of history is that man’s social being determines his consciousness.At the very moment when man becomes conscious of the historical process — conscious that he is “determining the course of history” [as in our achievement of socialism] — his consciousness is most subservient to the determinism of his social being.He hears his social being crying out in agony to him for action to realize what it cannot because in substance it is after all man who “makes his own history”. The contradictory assertions of making and not making our own history are here most urgent, and here explained.We find that, when man is supreme determiner of history, he is its supreme puppet. He is in thrall to that most paradoxical of circumstances in which the determiner [the puppeteer social being] determines the determined [the conscious puppet man] to determine the determiner [to change the puppeteer social being].Man can never ever fully free himself from the necessity of playing puppet to the puppeteer — his social being. He can only come to understand it, and to comprehend the necessities it imposes upon him to control it.The bourgeoisie understand the need to control the social being they blindly constructed, but they must fight a parasitic process they built upon the essential social process.[As Hud955 suggests, primitives had a direct social process to control but, as I suggest, their inability to understand their social process scientifically left them prey to mythologizing it.]To return to social revolution. Even when freeing himself from one form of social subservience man necessarily enchains himself to another.That’s where social subservience to our Object “common ownership and democratic control of the substance of social reproduction” cuts in to determine our consciously-social socialist being.I assert that the essential difference between primitive and future world socialism is the historical product, among which the most important conscious acquisition is Marx’s materialist conception of history that finally permits us to understand and so control our social being.

[Hud955]

Hi twcIf there were no material ‘constraints’ on humanity’s ability to make its own history, then there would be no materialist conception of history.  For socialists, this is a given and we don’t need to elaborate on it.  But it is not legitimate to slide from talking of ‘constraints’ to talking of ‘compulsions’ or from the idea of being ‘constrained’ to that of being ‘thwarted.  The one does not imply the other. Material constraints restrict the range of human agency in both its activity and effect but they do not compel or thwart. To speak of man making his own history is to claim only that the active agent of human history is the human race itself operating within a material and social environment.  It makes no claims about whether the actions of men and women are themselves caused or uncaused, compelled or free.  The force of this statement lies in its inference that the material constraints placed upon humanity, the necessary production and reproduction of real life, the dead hand of past societies, and so on, are not deterministic in the strong sense of that word.Marx, in fact, very rarely speaks in the language of causation.  In the Ethnological Notebooks for example, he analyses pre-state and state societies materially and dialectically.  He searches for their inner connections and identifes their  ‘contradictions.’  He does not analyse them for their causes and effects.  He points out, for example, that ‘common usage’ cannot exist unchallenged alongside state-imposed law, and that communal property cannot long exist alongside a patriarchal form of social organisation.  By elucidating ‘contradictions’, he also discovers possibile trajectories of development.  And it's because material conditions offer possibilities not tram lines that the human race can make its own history.  Nowhere that I know of in Marx is there any sense of an evolutionary or determinist theory of history.  Nowhere does he say, for example, that this form of society must follow that one as a matter of necessity.  He always treats forms of social organisation as individual and specific.  If they share common features, he may identify these, but he never abstracts those features to build them into a typology.It’s also illegitimate to slide from the idea of a human race that 'makes its own history' to one that 'controls its own history'.  The players in a game of cricket are the agents that collectively 'make' each individual match.  Though each match follows certain rules and has certain regularities, no two games are identical.  Yet, despite making the game, the players don't control the outcome.  If they did, we would soon see bookies going out of business.  I agree, of course, that the greater our conscious understanding of our own social (as well as our physical) environment, the greater the freedom with which we can carve out our lives from our material environments, but it does not follow that because we do not consciously control our own history that we are not the agents that make it.  I think two distinct ideas are being conflated here.I would also contest generalising and universalising statements about the ability of foraging groups to consciously comprehend and manage their own social processes. There is always a matter of degree.   If by ‘primitive’ you mean ‘first’, or ‘earliest’ and are referring to peope who lived in pre-class groups before the modern human era  (the only accurate use of the term ‘primitive’, I think), then there is little we can definitely say about how conscious they were of their own social processes because, despite the ingenuity of archaeologists,  they have left little evidence behind them that we can ‘read’.  We can’t project the results of modern hunter gatherer studies back onto ancestral societies, but, we can use our knowledge of them to raise a few hypotheses.  Although you are right that modern hunter gatherer societies understand themselves and their world partly through the medium of myth, that is by no means the only way they understand it.  All of these groups appear to have a deeply ‘rational’  understanding not just of their physical environment but also of their own social processes, and that gives them the ability to manage their communities in very subtle and complex ways.  I suspect socialists could learn something from how they go about this.

[twc]

Hud955 wrote:

Marx, in fact, very rarely speaks in the language of causation.

Nonsense.Materialists hold that man is the product of his environment. Marx holds that social being determines consciousness. If materialism isn't causal, what is its point? If Marx "very rarely speaks in the language of causation" what is his point?If you hardly ever hear "the language of causation" in Marx, it's because a fixed abstraction of "causation" — something that transcends specific actual instances of it — is effacing the varied concrete forms it takes in different contexts. [Celebrated forms of causality include those of classical physics, quantum physics, Darwinian evolution and the materialist conception of history.]Socialism must be materially caused or it remains forever unattainable. Socialism must reproduce itself causally, or it is totally unsustainable.Socialists have little choice but to "speak in the language of causation" at all times. What alternative language should we be talking in?

[Hud955]

"Socialism must be materially caused or it remains forever unattainable. Socialism must reproduce itself causally, or it is totally unsustainable."That's a grand, abstract statement, twc, and one that is gnomic enough to make it impossible for me to respond to it with any clarity.  One problem is that I'm unclear how you are using the word 'determines' which has a strong and a weak sense, and 'causal', which has an accurate and loose meaning.Marx establishes a number of global axioms, such as 'social being determines consciousness' founded on the claims of historical materialism and then, holding these as his principles of enquiry, goes on to observe, at a certain level of generality,  historical movements within specific societies, those movements being explined through the interconnections of  property, classes and class struggle.   Strictly causal (ie deterministic in its strong sense) explanations are not possible at this level of generalisation.  Society is a complex system, and strictly causal explanations would be beyond us.What Marx does do, is to investigate the developing inner connections within actual historical movements and shows, in particular, where they 'contradict'.  In other words he shows the material forces which have shaped the historical route actually taken.   I can find nothing in Marx's writing, however, which suggests that he believes this actual historical pattern of events was inevitable,  that historical contingencies (determined or undertermined beyond the scope of his or anyone else's investigations) did not play a part within the actual progress of history, or that the class struggle might not have taken a different turn.  it is one thing to analyse the past, another to predict the future.  There is nothing in the MCH, for example,  that in his own time, would have allowed Marx to predict the occurrence and course of the Bolshevik revolution as the form of capitalist revolution in Russia.That means there is no determinacy about socialism either.  On a materialist analysis we have reason to believe that material forces in society: the class struggle and workers' day-to-day experience within it; will tend to shift worker's consciousness in that direction, but how long that will take, what countervailing forces might arise, and how it will play out we have no idea.  We know nothing about how material historical contingencies may affect or even derail this social movement.  Nuclear war or the results of climate change, for example, have the potential to take us on a lengthy detour or set the class struggle off on a different trajectory altogether.  And while the materialist conception of history has the capacity to free us in some degree  from 'necessity', that can only happen if the working class comes to adopt and understand it.So socialism is not materially caused (in the accurate sense), at least at any level that we can comprehend, since the MCH is not deterministic.  It does however give us grounds for believing that it is possible and even likely, because certain material forces that we can comprehend are tending in that direction.  And those of us who are conscious of them can in the meantime act to further social understanding.  An all or nothing –  determinism or bust –  prescription is unnecessary and, indeed, fallacious. 

[twc]

Hud955 wrote:

I'm unclear how you are using the word ‘determines’

In the sense of “social being determines consciousness”.In the sense of “general, abstract determinants which obtain in more or less all forms of society” [Grundrisse, Ch. 1, ‘Method of Political Economy’].In the sense of an abstraction whose concrete utility can be tested by “the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete [which is precisely] the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind” [Grundrisse, ibid].

Hud955 wrote:

the word 'determines' has a strong and a weak sense

If you choose to sterilize determinism by imagining it in a ‘weak sense’, it ceases to be deterministic. Emasculated determinism loses its procreative powers.You, like all of us, have found the received abstraction of “determinism” at loggerheads with social reality. So did Marx. But he saw no reason for a subservient abstraction to take the knife to recalcitrant reality, and castrate it, in our minds.The received mechanical abstraction of “determinism” that applies, after a fashion, to billiard balls does not hold for quantum mechanics, nor for evolution, nor for the materialist conception of history, nor for any complex system, which is what reality (including real billiard balls) happens to be.

Hud955 wrote:

the materialist conception of history has the capacity to free us in some degree from 'necessity'

First, whence your ‘necessity’ if for you there’s no such thing as social causality “(in the accurate sense), at least at any level that we can comprehend”?My case will always be [subject to someone proving convincingly that our Object and Declaration of Principles are mistaken] that it is precisely the causality that can be comprehended by the materialist conception of history that can free us from the necessity of capitalism and secure us the necessity of socialism.

Hud955 wrote:

The materialist conception of history does give us grounds for believing that it is both possible and even, perhaps, likely, because certain material forces that we can comprehend are tending in the direction of socialism. And those of us who are conscious of it can in the meantime act to further that social understanding.

How low have we sunk, after a century of global abuse against Marx, socialist theory and the materialist conception of history, to parade this abysmally “weak” claim that there may be “grounds for believing” not even in socialism! Only the eunuch’s hope that restoration of virility is “possible and even, perhaps, likely”.And why do we hold out such forlorn hope? Not out of social necessity, not out of determinism, and especially not out of causality. No, we hold out such hope simply because “certain material forces that we can comprehend [sic] are tending in the direction of socialism”. How demoralizing!

[Author]

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