ALB
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The issue of so-called “Free Will” is a red herring anyway. Even the Christian and Islamic theologians who preach it only see it as applying to the choice or whether or not to follow their god’s commandments. Only a minority of them think their god had written a Grand Scroll on which the whole future was prescribed. Just as only a few materialists do.
No but I think there will be rules and regulations in socialist society and tribunals, juries or whatever for deciding whether or not someone has infringed them. Even in the case of rare violent behaviour I would think the perpetrator would have a chance to argue that they shouldn’t be “restrained”. We are realists, not airy-fairy anarchist philosophers.
But I wasn’t thinking of violent behaviour but rather of the ordinary everyday (mis)behaviour of ordinary people. What the Americans call misdemeanours.
Are you saying that people will be so angelic in socialism as to never deliberately break some of the lesser rules and regulations of socialist society? I myself occasionally drive what would be considered as carelessly, for example not respecting a speed limit. Tens of thousands of others do every day. I imagine you yourself have occasionally jaywalked. Others may have left their dog in a car on a hot day. I am sure people will continue to do such things in socialism.
If I was caught doing this in socialism I would say “fair cop” rather than “I couldn’t help it. I was just a link in a chain of causation”. I doubt if a jury or tribunal would accept that. I must confess, too, that having 6 penalty points on my licence (never had more than that) is an incentive to respect the motorway speed limit.
Not only read him but written about him.
As a matter of fact I was just typing a reply in which I was going to suggest that you had read too much of him and so think that humans are born good and, if freed from authority, would behave just like angels.
Yes, you could be right to some extent. There will still be rules and regulations in socialism and I can’t see “I couldn’t help it, I was just a link in a chain of causation” being accepted as an excuse for careless or dangerous driving, can you?
Which is the episode of Colombo where the murderer says : “You can’t blame me. I was just a link in a chain of causation. I couldn’t help doing what I did”.
Interesting question, but why could not more digital money be made available by the central bank than needed by the economy?
A few years ago Sky News’s economics editor Ed Conway did advocate a cashless society as a way of trying to control consumer spending.
Searching on the internet for who said “the rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs” I see it is widely attributed to Marx but no source is ever given.
Does anyone know if Marx did say this and where? I don’t think he did. Actually, it sounds more like something Tolstoy would have said.
I didn’t see it as being about benign colonialism as about “benign capitalism” and its welfare state. More generally, about any situation where there is a one class that exploits the work of another. A expansion of the saying that the capitalists will do anything for the workers except get off their backs.
This parable by Tolstoy is good but nothing else of his Christian anarchism. Never got round to reading his War and Peace but I am sure somebody here will have.
We should not forget Ukrainian forces shelling of Donbas prior to the Russian invasion.
They are doing it again now, this time with more powerful weapons supplied by NATO. They are shelling the city of Donetsk and other places in the Donbass and hitting civilian targets like schools and hospitals and killing civilians including children. Just like the Russians have been doing to Ukrainian cities. But none of this is being reported in self-censored media in the NATO countries.
Evidently the Zelensky’s regime regards the population of the Donbass not as their own subjects but as Russians who they will inevitably ethnically cleanse of they get their way and conquer the Donbass. All with NATO weapons and money.
And we are being asked to support this as a “defence of democracy”. What hypocrisy !
Jaurès was murdered before the war had actually war started and was killed for calling for a general strike to try to stop it breaking out. It is inconceivable, had he lived until after the war broke out, that he would not have supported the French government and even joined it, as did his long-standing Marxist rival Jules Guesde.
One guess would be that, everywhere, the working class movement tended to grow out of the radical wing of the “bourgeoisie”. In Northern Europe (Britain, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Scandinavia) these were not insurrectionary like they were in Southern Europe (France, Spain, Italy). Another might be that, as Bijou mentions, reformist Social Democracy reflected the attitudes of industrial workers and Anarchism those of artisans and rural workers.
Actually, Kautsky didn’t support the war. That’s a Leninist calumny against him for not supporting the Bolshevik coup and so becoming, in their view, the greatest “renegade” since Judas Iscariot.
He was not a member of the Reichstag and so didn’t vote for the war credits. This is what Wikipedia says about his attitude:
“In 1914, when the German Social-Democrat deputies in the Reichstag voted for war credits, Kautsky (who was not a deputy but attended their meetings) suggested abstaining. Kautsky claimed that Germany was waging a defensive war against the threat of Czarist Russia. However, in June 1915, about ten months after the war had begun and when it had become obvious that this was going to be a sustained, appallingly brutal and costly struggle, he issued an appeal with Eduard Bernstein and Hugo Haase against the pro-war leaders of the SPD and denounced the German government’s annexationist aims. In 1917 he left the SPD for the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) with united socialists who opposed the war.”
I would have thought that Kropotkin would have been Reclus’s Secretary rather than the other way round !
Incidentally, Reclus’s brother Paul was one of the other leading anarchists who signed the Manifesto of the Sixteen calling on workers to get kill and get killed fighting for the French and even the Tsarist state. A reminder that it wasn’t only the leaders of the various “Marxist” parties that betrayed the interests of the workers over that war.
