ALB
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I have now got and read the new translation. It’s only a pamphlet of less than 40 pages. It has led me to revise my opinion of its content. It’s a brilliant satire, on a par with Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon , of the obsession with work to keep the capitalist economy going and of the workers’ demand to be given work by capitalists as a “right”.
There are some mistakes in the translation, the worst of which is translating “femmes galloises” as “Welsh women” rather than “Gallic women”. Not sure if it is a complement or an insult to Welsh women to say that they are as fierce as Asterix’s female Gauls.
Also, the introduction takes too literally Lafargue’s description of what an “idleness regime” would look like, as if that was what he was advocating.
But anyway hopefully this will introduce more people to socialist/communist ideas (Lafargue uses the word “communist”).
He keeps on referring to the so-called National Debt being “our” debt and thst “we” have to pay the interest on it. But it is not our debt, something the working class owes. It is the debt of the capitalist state. Its function, within the capitalist economy, is to cover government spending which would otherwise have to be covered by higher taxation. Parenti seems to imply that it could be covered by the government simply creating more money. The government could do this — and governments have — but this doesn’t create any new wealth. If overdone it depreciates the unit in which wealth is expressed (inflation) and so causes a rise in the general price level. Which, if tax thresholds remain the same, amounts to an increase in taxation.
I have always thought that the best thing about this pamphlet was its English title. It was meant as a criticism of the “Right to Work” (The Right to be Exploited) rather than, as the article suggests, part of the campaign for an 8-hour day, which still wouldn’t leave much time to be lazy. Eight hours for the usual six-and-a-half days at the time = a 52-hour week.
We must get a copy of the new translation to see if reads better than the pre-WW1 one. Ordering it now.
This seems plausible (even if it comes from a Trotskyist site). Ukrainian nationalism has always been nasty and there’s nothing like a war for making nationalism nastier.
“…There is no substitute for a robust private sector, creating wealth in every community.”
Somebody else who thinks that capitalism is the only game in town.
It appears that Just Stop Oil are going to continue their self-indulgent, irritating and counter-productive tactics — counter-productive because most people are already convinced that something needs to be done about climate change, so they are not even raising consciousness about the issue. In fact, as they believe that a way-out can be found without getting rid of the market system they are themselves contributing to the confusion about what needs to be done.
Maybe they have decided to go for broke because they are convinced that the situation is getting worse and that the urgent thing now is to topple the government and replace it with a different regime that will take drastic, immediate measures to deal with climate change.
I don’t know to what extent Roger Hallam is still one of the leaders of XR (maybe Just Stop Oil was just a front for them rather than the breakaway it appeared to be), though the police will. But here is how he set out, in his 2019 manifesto Common Sense in the 21st Century, subtitled “Only Nonviolent Rebellion Can Now Stop Climate Breakdown And Social Collapse”, how a non-violent “rebellion” could topple a government.
“We must adopt the most successful model for regime change shown by the social scientific research – the civil resistance model. This involves mass participation civil disobedience: tens and hundreds of thousands of people blocking the centres of cities to demand change. There are a number of tactical options, but the main process is as follows:
• The people conduct mass mobilisation – thousands need to take part.
• They amass in a capital city where the elites in business, government and the media are located.
• They break the law – they cross the Rubicon. Examples include blocking the roads and transport systems.
• They maintain a strictly nonviolent discipline even, and especially, under conditions of state repression.
• They focus on the government, not intermediate targets – government is the institution that make the rules of society and has the monopoly of coercion to enforce them.
• They continue their action day after day – one-day actions, however big, rarely impose the necessary economic cost to bring the authorities to the table.
• The actions can have a fun atmosphere– most people respond to what is cultural and celebratory rather than political and solemn.
After one or two weeks following this plan, historical records show that a regime is highly likely to collapse or is forced to enact major structural change.”The 21 April is the beginning of the weekend of our Annual Conference, so we will be there to witness the inevitable failure of this crackpot strategy.
I think it will be due to the German word Geist meaning both “spiritual” and “mental”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geist
I imagine that in his writings in German (and Dutch) Pannekoek used the corresponding adjective. Some translators have translated it as “spiritual” when it could have been better translated as “mental” or “intellectual”. Even perhaps Pannekoek himself, when he wrote in English or translated his articles into English, did not grasp the connotation of the English word “spirtual”.
I think we can be sure that he did not have in mind a sort of religious revival but meant what we mean by a change in consciousness; workers had to change their ideas and a majority of them had to come to want and understand socialism before they could bring it about.
On “spiritually”, during the break I am reading Rachel Holmes 500-page biography of Eleanor Marx. At the end of chapter 20 she writes that Marx
“was famously critical of the tyranny of all religions but was sympathetic to the spiritual impulse.”
A footnote refers the reader to pages 55-6 of Francis Wheen’s biography of Karl Marx. When you check, Wheen is referring to the anti-Semitic insults Marx used in some of his letters to Engels such as referring to Lassalle as a “Yid” and worse.
It looks as if Holmes has got her notes mixed up. In any event, she produces no other evidence was sympathetic to “the spiritual impulse” (whatever that might be), though she does quote Karl Marx as saying:
“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
She describes Eleanor Marx “a resolute secularist and atheist”.
Her book is quite good.
Interesting (but unfortunate name — when I saw “Christian List on Free Will” I thought I had gone to a religious site).
I don’t think that TM here was denying that humans are “intentional agents” (have “wills”) or have “causal control” (that what they do causes something to happen). He was denying that humans can choose between “alternative possibilities” — that when you go into a cafe your choice whether to order tea or coffee is not a free one, that if you chose tea that was the only possibility (as shown by you choosing it)
A difficult position to maintain unless you are prepared to argue that everything that happens (and is going to happen) was predetermined at the time of the Big Bang. Or, as List points out, unless you think that the only reality is the movement of physical particles and that everything can (and should?) be explained in terms of this. In other words, “mechanical materialism”.
I have finally got round to watching that video on so-called “free will”. Alex presents his case well enough. See post #238723.
But what he is actually arguing against is the claim that people are free to decide to do something they don’t want to do. This is because he assumes, by definition, that what you do (unless coerced) is what you want to do. So whatever you do do, you wanted to do, otherwise you wouldn’t have done it.
It’s a bit of a sophist’s argument rather like the subject of a student study essay I once had to write: if good is what you want, can you want to do bad?
What about at a factual level? Most people will agree that at least some of what they want to do does depend on external factors such as the past and present experiences such as the way they were brought and the type of society they are living in.
But agreed, they will still want to say that they can freely choose between different options on simple everyday matters such as to what clothes to wear or what to eat for breakfast.
Alex says this is an illusion (because everything that happens anywhere in the universe at one moment is determined by everything that happened before right back to the Big Bang). Maybe it is in that unhelpful sense (unhelpful because it doesn’t explain anything). Or maybe “free will” is the (unhelpful) name given to that illusion?
Yes, the German Greens are a bunch of Scheißer. But not so much for keeping nuclear plants going as for being war-mongers over Ukraine. Quite unconcerned about the carbon footprint of the Russo-NATO war.
“air (spiritus)”
I wonder if that’s where the term
“airy fairy” comes from?But, seriously, what has air being material (as it is) got to do with “spirituality”? They are two different things. As an emotion “spirituality” is also material and can be studied by materialist science too.
As to Sagan, I saw the tv series and have got the book. They were good. Sagan was ok, except he was a bit soft on religion. I’m with Dawkins on that.
More Russia Ukraine, Same Refrain:
“The coercive regulation envisaged by the bill and in the hands of a regulator totally controlled by the government is worthy of the worst authoritarian regimes.”
https://news.yahoo.com/zelensky-signs-media-law-criticized-224451134.html
