alanjjohnstone
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Just what is the difference between Utopian Socialism and Scientific Socialism?
Is the latter often misinterpreted as determinism when we discuss the necessary material conditions to establish socialism and how revolutionary consciousness arises?
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
Has technology such as social media really alienated people? Perhaps the gig economy and Uber work practices has undermined the collective factory unionisation. But the examples of fast food workers and cleaners have re-organised their methods of resistance. Even Uber drivers recently had a coordinated strike.
Perhaps it does feel as we have become atomised but I noticed that all the recent mass protests are organised through various social media platforms. The World Wide Web has globalised social movements in real time.
Are we less cooperative than before? Where is the evidence?
I suggest the opposite is true. Hence how parochial nationalists are intent upon opposing such things as open borders and invented their enemy – the nefarious undefinable globalists to thwart that growing tendency.
We have to face reality. While there has been a growth and development in social consciousness a la environment activists and Sanderistas/Corbynistas despite all the very obvious weaknesses in them, there has not been an accompanying rise in our membership, nor in those who are generally considered to be our fellow-travellers in the Thin Red Line.
We should examine why we have that disconnect with those who are in the process of discovering the relationship between their politics and capitalism rather than express a dismissive attitude.
“Free access to them is a product of technological advance”
Correct me if I am wrong but wasn’t socialism a product of capitalism technological advances? Wasn’t the whole concept of socialism a consequence of capitalist industrialisation
And that capitalism’s production and distribution processes is still making socialism even more increasingly feasible and practicable and at the same time exposing its social production but anti-social ownership contradictions?
Do we ignore robotics, automation and Artificial Intelligence from how free access can be put into being? Aren’t we intending to take the knowledge and skills, the supply chains and logistics of globalisation, and the tools and equipment and machinery that is being used now or can be used, to create a society that is based on from each according to ability – to each according to need.
If we do not reach out to those who share our objective, just who do we appeal to?
Yes, I understand many share our aim … the Left say it is their ultimate goal…the religious say they too seek heaven on earth. Our disagreement is on HOW we achieve socialism.
Perhaps, we can have more substance upon how MFP and TZM intend to implement the RBE and in what way they are incompatible with our strategy rather than anecdotal accusations.
If we understand where we disagree and agree, it makes dialogue so much easier. We can then tailor our arguments at resolving the differences.
I see no point in squabbling about who is the bigger fish in our very small pond.
One for John Oswald
You’re Not So Different From an Octopus: Rethinking Our Relationship to Animals
“We are on the cusp of either destroying this sweet, green Earth — or revolutionizing the way we understand the rest of animate creation,” Montgomery said. “It’s an important time to be writing about the connections we share with our fellow creatures.”
Bristol isn’t that too far away from Cardiff, is it? Maybe even within range of SWRB.
Couldn’t we organise a joint event…a money-free forum.
Not a formal adversarial debate but more a round-table comradely discussion meeting, explaining where we agree and where we differ and let the audience choose which case is the better one.
Perhaps two get-togethers, one on our home turf and another on Nick’s. I recall Howard’s approach to Ian Bone was not too hostile. Important would be the social interaction in the pub or restaurant afterwards
Didn’t ALB contribute a chapter to a book Life Without Money which shows that we don’t require 100% adherence to collaborate with others who hold similar outlooks to ourselves. This time it could be a video we could share with MFP.
So contesting elections and free delivery of leaflets is the cheaper option.
Perhaps a re-design of the election leaflet…A larger perforated free-post reply section for instance. What about including a short survey questionnaire in it, too, if Royal Mail regulations permit.
Perhaps someone can explore those local free-sheets I mentioned and the costs of much more localised inserts, particular in relation to the prospective wards we will probably contest in the next round of council elections. Should be less labour intensive and save weary legs, sore feet and fingers being snapped at by feral letter-boxes.
Come COP26 in Glasgow, I think the inserts will be the most effective means, than a few elderly members standing around handing out leaflets. They should be hosting the street stalls, engaging in discussions, wearing SPGB themed baseball caps since it won’t be the weather for t-shirts with our logo.
So what were the respective costs for each project? Overall and per reply?
Cost of having a candidate standing isn’t the biggest outlay, is it? Its the tens of thousands of leaflets we produce to go along with it.
I think the free delivery of the leaflets to every constituency household is off-set by the price of printing, by a large margin.
So is the answer perhaps to engage in elections for the reasons you outline but not take advantage of the Royal Mail leaflet delivery and instead re-direct the money to a press campaign, running parallel with the candidates standing?
One question is, can we single out more effectively a particular constituency with a targeted media campaign ?
I recall those free sheets always carried inserts for the local carry-outs etc. Something to investigate?
Or would that be too scatter-gun as well?
To echo someone’s comments elsewhere in the forum…should we be aiming at “intellectuals” as you infer by “readers of a non-Tory serious newspaper”?
Just some idle thoughts…
We could experiment with various strategies when the next series of local elections arise and the issue of free delivery isn’t relevant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_Free_Party
Emerged from The Zeitgeist Movement. JO
The two MFP candidates, without the extensive resources that we possessed, performed very slightly better than ourselves. (on vote count …I never worked out the %)
But i agree it is confirmation that the way we express ourselves and our limited propaganda efforts are not suffice to make a breakthrough. But nor does it mean neither of those cannot be improved upon.
How are the reply rate going? Is the newspaper ad still the better response than the election leaflet?
“as soon as “socialism” or “Marx” are mentioned, no one wants to listen,”
A few years ago I recall those millennial surveys and Marx was declared the a most prominent figure
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/461545.stm
And there were many others with similar results confirming his importance.
And the polls in the USA that more people are increasingly interested in socialist ideas.
And from anecdotal evidence eco-socialist is increasingly a popular term within the environmentalist movement.
What distances us is not our message (although it could be presented in language which might be resonate more receptively) but that we are not present at the climate protests and our voice is not being heard. We have no audience to listen to us. Despite our valiant efforts, our spoken word, our writings, our social media is ineffectual. We’re out-shouted.
Sad truth is that we are invisible. Even sadder is what people think is Marxism and what is socialism is not what we mean by the terms.
How to convey that understanding without being accused of being pedantic is still something we need to fully work out
Is JO leading us down the path of those Greens who advocate degrowth? (Bookchin did a debunking of the Deep Greens and eco-primitivists)
If so then we do agree…BUT…ONLY when we have raised the living standards of all peoples to a decent level acceptable to them and for a short while…”rightly for OUR time”… that means raising production and output expending increased resources and materials and labour. However, this will be balanced by the reduction of socially wasteful production such as defence and armaments and all the paraphernalia of the buying and selling economy.
We will then reach what Marx called ” simple reproduction” but what is now described as a steady-state economy or zero-growth.
I’m not an expert on economics, Ricardo or Marx, and nor am I Camus scholar.
But i did try to research further
“(Ricardo)…wants production for production’s sake, and this is right…Production for production’s sake means nothing but the development of human productive powers, i.e. the development of the wealth of human nature as a goal in itself”
Or, as Marx puts it in the Grundrisse, “the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour no longer appears as labour, but as the full development of activity itself”…
…The “full development of activity itself”, in the above quote from the Grundrisse, is the “practical” realization of actual infinity. It means that every specific activity is always the “external” expression of a more fundamental general activity, having an expanded version of itself as its own goal, just as Marx says of “production for production’s sake” in his critique of Ricardo. In such a social condition, the immediate productive activity of freely- associated individuals would always be in reality self-(re)production aimed at the multiplication of human powers, including the innovation of new powers. Every activity relates back to the actor. “Actual infinity” in this sense is the practical presence of the general in every specific activity in the here and now. For the Enlightenment, including for spinoffs of the Enlightenment such as Ricardo, an object was merely a thing; for Hegel and above all for Marx, an object is a (self) relationship, mediated by a thing:
“…When the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive powers, etc. of individuals, produced in universal exchange? What, if not the full development of human control over the forces of nature–those of his own nature as well as those of so-called “nature”? What, if not the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions, without any preconditions other than antecedent historical evolution which makes the totality of this evolution–i.e. the evolution of all human powers as such, unmeasured by any previously established yardstick, an end in itself? What is this, if not a situation where man does not produce himself in any determined form, but produces his totality? Where he does not seek to remain something formed by the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming?”Marx, Hegel, Ricardo: The “Inverted World” In the Heart of the Critique of Political Economy
Can’t say I fully understand but it dos seems a bit more than the simple soundbite of The Rebel
You are right ALB,
Rather than have its roots in some sort of Eastern mysticism, more likely it derived from travelling carnival slang.
“The Fakir,” an old slang expression for the carnival shill or the street-corner pitchman.
https://anthonybalducci.blogspot.com/2015/11/charles-kenna-street-fakir.html
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) now accepts as standard English the use of “fakir” to mean an impostor or a swindler.
Merriam-Webster’s gives two examples of the usage: “a traveling carnival that was run by fakirs preying on small-town rubes” and “a fakir peddling patent medicines that were mostly liquor and sugar.”“with the new mega publication many new writings are going to be revealed”
What is this? Can you give more details
We already witnessed https://www.marxists.org/ lose access to much of Marx and Engels writings because of copyright issues. Is this going to compensate?
I’m not sure what “bourgeois” Marx really means?
And there is enough evidence in his writings to demonstrate he was an environmentalist.
If you are suggesting that there is an over-emphasis on the traditional class struggle analysis as the motor of social change perhaps that is true.
But that does not mean it is not a class issue…after all, as you say, it is the capitalist class imperative to obey the economic law of capital accumulation. It means ecologists cannot escape the conclusion that only anti-capitalism and a post-capitalist society can solve the environmental emergency.
The reality is that most eco-activists are already adopting anti-capitalist language but have little awareness of what post-capitalism actually is.
That is where we come in…
