ALB
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Yes, the word “exploitation” is used very loosely in Leftwing and reformist circles. Often “oppression” or “bad treatment” would be better. In an economic context they use it to describe lower than normal wages (as opposed to “fair” wages). Similarly, they are not opposed to profits, only to “profiteering” ie to higher than normal profits.
Basically, they see nothing wrong with the wages-profits system as long as wages are fair and profits are normal. They only criticise capitalism’s excesses not the system itself.
The US is never really going to default of course. Going to the brink about this has just become part of the US political gane.
So it now says(just looked it up, didn’t see the first version):
“Who’s exploited?
June 5, 2023
UK children’s charity Barnado’s says that a record number of children are in danger of online ‘exploitation’ as parents struggle with the cost of living and can’t afford summer break activities or holidays (Guardian).By ‘exploitation’ they mean specifically criminal activity (drug dealing) or sexual abuse via online grooming. The treatment of children in capitalism is often appalling, especially when there’s money to be made out of them. But the term ‘exploitation’ should not be confined to cases of extreme abuse. In fact, all workers are exploited. Otherwise there can never be any profit for employers.Ever. Exploitation isn’t just a cruel and unusual feature of ‘bad’ capitalism, it’s built in.”
I suppose the objection to the original wording was that it was ambiguous as it could have been interpreted as saying that workers are exploited by not being paid the full value of what they are selling (their labour power, or capacity to work). Whereas in most cases they are but, despite this, they are still exploited as this is less than what they produce for their employer.
To return to the your point, just because those who vote for parties that support capitalism doesn’t mean that they therefore consider capitalism to be in their interest.
They could (and some will) just be accepting that capitalism is the only game in town and voting for one or other of the capitalist parties in the hope of getting a slightly better deal under capitalism; making the best of a bad deal. I would hazard a guess that up to as much as 20 percent think that the profit system is not in their best interest. It’s only a guess but I don’t think that those who vote for a non-socialist candidate can all be said to think that the present system is in their interest.
And then there are those who don’t vote — 70 percent in local elections as in Folkestone, some 1 in 3 in national elections. They have come to realise that “changing governments changes nothing”. How can they be counted as people who consider the profit system to be in their interest?
When I said that capitalism cannot be made to work in the interest of the working class, I was using “interest” to mean their interest is solving the problems they face — as over wages, pensions, benefits, housing, health care, transport, education, etc, etc — and which the vote-catching politicians are always promising to solve; that capitalism cannot satisfy their material needs properly. I was not talking about their interest in getting rid of capitalism as it’s a system based on their exploitation for profit and replacing it by socialism and production directly for use not profit.
I would say that our view that capitalism cannot be reformed so as to work for the benefit of the wage-working majority was the strongest and most irrefutable part of our case. It’s been confirmed time and time again as even reformist government have been forced by the economic laws of capitalism to put profits first, to the detriment of the majority of wage workers and their dependents.
Capitalism is a system that runs in profits; which is why making profits always comes first, before meeting people’s needs properly. It is the cause of the problem wage workers face that the politicians try in vain to solve.
You are missing that in these local elections voters have more than one vote (two in one of the wards and three in the other). The number of ballot papers returned, representing the number of individual voters, was 1471 in one the case and 2501 in the other. This is the figure to be used to calculate how many voters cast one for their votes for the socialist party candidate.
You don’t need to tell us that most workers (who vote) currently vote for candidates who support capitalism but I don’t know where you get that figure of 0.12 percent from.
As you can see from the results in the two wards that we contested, in the one 1471 people voted (45 of whom used one of their two votes to vote for us) and in the other 2501 voted (81 of whom used one of their three votes to for us). I make that 3 percent and 3.2 percent respectively.
Put differently, that’s 1 in every 33 voters. Not as bad as your figure of 1 in a 1000.
It seems, then, that the CWO are being a bit disingenuous in quoting what was possibly the only passage in which Mattick expressed a view similar to their conception of a vanguard party.
Actually, in practice the CWO are doing the same sort of thing as us — a “group of opinion” propagandising for socialism (as we both understand it) but in their case tied to the dangerous idea that a vanguard party is needed to lead workers there because under capitalism workers as a class are not capable of advancing beyond trade union consciousness.
Ironically, when it comes to participating in the day to day struggle, because they take up an anti-trade union position, their members are probably less active in it than ours.
I see you are a partisan of the theory of science from someone who came from your part of the world, Karl Popper. I imagine that that’s what they teach people studying the “natural sciences”: that a proposition is not even a hypothesis (but “unscientific”) unless it can be falsified; in fact that all scientific theories are hypotheses that are either being confirmed or falsified.
That makes sense for the “natural sciences” but is more problematic for the “social sciences”. Even so, socialist propositions are falsifiable in Popper’s sense. For example, the proposition that capitalism cannot be made to work in the interest of the working class. This is falsifiable even though in fact it is being continually confirmed.
The proposition that only socialism can solve the problems facing the working class is also falsifiable in principle, though it could only be tested once socialism is established. If socialism did not solve the housing problem or the poverty problem or war, etc, etc then it would be falsified. So it is at least a scientific hypothesis even if not yet a confirmed theory.
If all you were trying to say was that accurate predictions in physics and astrophysics are easier than in fields which involve human action then you are not saying anything new. But if historical materialism is “unscientific” on that account, then so are a lot of other theories, including the view that capitalism will be the only game in town for ever or at least for the next million years.
The “collision” between those two galaxies is more certain than the other two futures to socialism that you mention (nuclear annihilation, climate catastrophe — you forgot to mention, an asteroid hitting earth or, the latest, a super-intelligent robot killing off the human race). Does that mean they have to be discounted as “unscientific”?
Anyway, none of these would invalidate historical materialism even if they made socialism impossible. It would still be the case that the basis of any human society would be how its members are organised to survive and the means at their disposal to do so, and that societies change as this does, especially technology.
Other planets? Mars would be the obvious one in our solar system but I was thinking more of some of the planets in other solar systems that astrophysicists are always identifying. After all, you were talking of something that will happen in billions of years. Humans haven’t existed even for a half a million years. I imagine that even in a million years it should be possible for humans to visit some of those planets (don’t ask me how). In fact, they might even find that socialism already exists in some of them. So obvious is it that the absence of private property over productive resources and cooperative production and allocation of wealth directly to meet the needs of society’s members is the best way for a technologically-advanced society to survive
I think that’s scheduled for sone 50 billion years, isn’t it? You can’t really think that capitalism can last that long. Given that world socialism is the only way forward beyond capitalism, I would have thought that we can be fairly certain that socialism will have been established — on other planets besides Earth — tens of billions of years before that.
Paul Lafargue was good in this sort of thing as in the appendixes to his The Religion of Capital”:
Don’t worry. It’s in English.
What we are discussing (though perhaps there should be a separate thread on this) is what a minority of workers who have come to want and understand socialism should be doing.
The SPGB has developed the position that at present this should be propagandistic. Socialists should organise themselves — in a ‘party’, if you like — to propagate socialism. That is all the party should do at the moment. It should not itself get involved in the ‘immediate demands’, not even over wages and working conditions. Of course it expresses general support for struggles against employers and its members can and should take part in them but as workers involved in the struggle not as a party. Such struggles should be run by the workers involved.
Mattick’s position in that extract was written on behalf of an organisation which actually called itself a ‘party’ (the United Workers Party of America). One passage starts well enough
“It does not seek to lead the workers, but tells the workers to use their own initiative. It is a propaganda organization for Communism,”
But then adds
“and shows by example how to fight in action.” (His emphasis).
The passage about the party engaging in the struggle for immediate demands is in the following paragraph.
The difference, then, with the SPGB position is that Mattick is saying that the party itself should get involved in such struggles.
Pannekoek’s position seems to have been nearer to ours. He was certainly opposed to “Council Communists” organising in such a party as Mattick envisaged and did. In the article discussed in the Socialist Standard, Pannekoek wrote (part of which the article quoted):
“If, in this situation, persons with the same fundamental conceptions unite for the discussion of practical steps and seek clarification through discussions and propagandize their conclusions, such groups might be called parties, but they would be parties in an entirely different sense from those of today . . . In this lies the great importance of such parties or groups based on opinions: that they bring clarity in their conflicts, discussions and propaganda. They are the organs of the self-enlightenment of the working class by means of which the workers find their way to freedom.“
In fact that would be a good description of what we we are — “an organ of self-enlightenment of the working class.”
The difference between Pannekoek and Mattick (in 1934) would seem to be that Pannekoek thought that a ‘party’ should be a group “based on opinion” and propagating those opinions, while Mattick thought more in terms of a group getting involved as well in day-to-day struggles (which has enabled the vanguardist CWO to claim him as one of theirs).
Of course, the conclusion we draw and propagate differs from both of theirs. For instance, we are not opposed to workers organising in the existing trade unions nor do we dismiss the vote as useless or worse. In fact, we say that at some future point workers will need to organise themselves into a mass socialist political party with a view to wresting political control from the capitalist class as a prelude to establishing socialism. That’s the opinion we propagandise.
Last June’s Socialist Standard was a special issue on AI in which the point, among others, was made that
“The idea of the whole working class being replaced by intelligent robots is also a fantasy. AI equipment, like all machines, does not create any new value (transfer any new labour to the product) and so no surplus value; it just transfers gradually the labour expended from start to finish to make it. If production were fully automated, no surplus value would be produced, so there would be no profits and capitalism would no longer exist. Not that there is any chance of capitalism evolving into a ‘fully automated’ economy. This could only come into being if, at some point in the future after the abolition of capitalism, socialist society were to decide to go down that route (not an evident decision) and establish ‘fully automated luxury communism’. At the present time, given the low level of productivity compared to what it would need to be for that, this is science fiction. Humans are still going to have to have a substantial direct input into production for a long time to come, even after socialism has been established.”
There is nothing wrong with AI as such. Any danger will come from capitalism’s misuse of the technology as it has done over nuclear energy and drones.
If the AI scientists are concerned about the threat of human extinction they’d be better concentrating on the less remote possibility that one of capitalism’s inevitable war ends up being nuclear. That could happen now while their imagined extinction of humans by intelligent robots would be centuries away.
There is also this more recent article:
