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Meanwhile Zelensky is in Washington to call for more US weapons for the Russo-NATO War. He says it’s a war for democracy. Back to the Cold War period when anybody anti-Russia was for “democracy” like Salazar in Portugal, the Greek colonels and the Turkish generals. So why not the Ukrainian oligarchs and ethnic cleansers?
He doesn’t seem to have convinced everybody:
https://www.newsweek.com/zelensky-ukraine-russia-critics-congress-1768921?piano_t=1
Just got round to reading this. It’s not bad but I am not sure that his views should be described as “Russian thought”. He was of course from Russia but his anarchist-communist views were formed when living in France and the French-speaking part of Switzerland. You could more accurately describe his views as an expression of “French thought”, which partly explains why, to his shame, he took the French side in the WW1 and urged workers to die for the French state
Like most anarchists, Kropotkin tended to identify the state with central government so that any central body, even if unarmed, was still a state.
That might be behind the author’s distinction between the state and government (which he claims Kropotkin was not opposed to as such). Engels’s distinction between “government” (over people) and “administration” (of things) was better. Even we balk at talking about government in socialism. Plus anarchiste que les anarchistes.
I should have added of course that another distinguishing point is that we say that socialism can only be establishment democratically, both in the sense that a majority want and understand it and of using the ballot box. Obviously at the m moment there are too few people who want socialism. That’s the problem but not a reason for abandoning campaigning for socialism in favour of campaigning for reforms within capitalism.
Anyway, you now know exactly where we are coming from !
If by “resource-based economy” you mean the moneyless society of abundance as envisaged by Peter Joseph and Zeitgeist then we both do have more or less the same aim. But what has distinguished the SP from others aiming at this is:
1. A denial that state capitalism (Nationalisation) is a step towards this goal, and
2. A denial that capitalism can gradually be transformed from capitalism into such a society.
We have said this from the beginning on theoretical grounds which the failure of both Nationalisation and gradualism in the last century has amply confirmed.
We are not in favour of repeating this failure in the 21st century. That would only postpone socialism longer.
Incremental change in society’s belief systems, yes, as long as it’s towards understanding that socialism (a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources, with production directly to mean people’s needs not sale or profit) is both desirable and possible and that capitalism cannot be reformed to work for the majority. In a sense, that’s what we are in to. That is the real issue in what you call the “ideological war”.
Incremental change to remove capitalism begs the question by assuming that capitalism can be changed incrementally into either into socialism or to work in the interest of the wage working majority. Experience as well as theory have shown neither to be the case. The Social Democratic and Labour parties of Europe tried to gradually change capitalism but ended up by being gradually changed, by the experience of running capitalism, into common or garden parties of capitalism (as you have recognised happened with the Labour Party).
A campaign to get people to change their belief system to believe that capitalism can be reformed in their interest would, if successful, lead to disappointment and bitterness because capitalism can’t be reformed in that way. It would have better been spent in trying to incrementally change people’s ideas towards understanding and wanting socialism.
Infrastructure projects (roads, etc) could be paid for from taxes but are more usually financed by the government borrowing the money, ie by selling interest-bearing government bonds to investors. So, even in that case, the idle rich are getting a share.
I have found that William Child Currey left a long document called “Thoughts on Thinking” that was published in the Western Socialist in 14 instalments from the end of 1948 and the beginning of 1952. It deals the views of Marx, Hegel and Dietzgen.
Currey makes the following criticism of 18th century materialism as expounded by Voltaire, Holbach and Godwin that you refer to.
“The 18th Century materialists ascribed all change to the movement of physical events, the psychic condition of man glowing passively as an ideal reflection of them. This conception left them quite at a loss to account for why, if human consciousness only followed changes in the material world, they themselves could be in advance of their time and agitating for a new social order. It is an inconsistent kind of materialism that sweeps the gods out of an invisible sky only to enthrone them in corporeal matter.”
(Or, like Sabine H., in the Big Bang. Even so, it was still a big step forward to eliminate god as a superior being).
Currey goes on:
“On the one hand were the idealists contending that mind, an emanation of the divine intelligence, was the ultimate reality; on the other, the early materialists, bent on their investigation of things, declaring that mind was a condition of matter, reducible to mechanical laws, the dependent child of its creator the physical universe. Out of the conflict of these contrary opinions Marx discovered the median principle of social evolution. The solution lay in recognizing the true nature of mind. Thought was discovered not to be passive as the materialists had claimed, but active. ‘It is the whole man who thinks,” says Marx. Thought is a function of living, it comes into existence by doing something, it manifests itself in action. The existence of social institutions generates certain human needs, the effort aroused to satisfy these needs produces an altered form of consciousness; there is a conflict between the mind of man, expressed in action, and the opposed conditions. Out of the contest ensue changed conditions and a different consciousness expressing itself in further action.” (WS July-August 1951).
Earlier he had written:
“Marx refused to divide social experience into two mutually exclusive compartments and classify one, the external world, “cause,” and the other, consciousness, “effect.” On the contrary he showed that social change resulted from the interactions of nature, society and human intelligence. That the conventionally accepted “effect,” consciousness, was itself as much a cause as the laws of nature and society, and that vice versa, the assigned causes were in turn effects.” (WS March-April 1950).
These last two points seem better, as an answer to the claim that the future is already determined, than your introduction of competing “motives”. “Motive” is a philosophical, not a scientific concept. It suggests different sets of neurons fighting each other to see which is the “mightiest”, which I am not sure that neurology says.
So, I suppose we could say that, while there is no such thing as Free Will, there is still an active will but not one that is completely “free”. Humans make history but only out of the cloth available as Marx once put it.
But All profit under Nationalised industry is used to reduce costs to the public and to reinvest to improve services.
That’s not the case. Nationalisation, as practised by Labour (and Tory and Liberal for that matter) governments, involves the government buying out the shareholders. A alternative name for this was “state purchase”.
Typically, the shareholders were paid (“compensated”) by being given interest-bearing government bonds. So, instead of receiving dividends on shares they received interest on bonds. They continued to draw a property income from the exploitation of the workers in the nationalised industries. Or they could sell the bonds and use the money to invest in sone private business.
These “compensation” payments were a financial burden on the nationalised industries. When taken into account, they reduced the profits made by the coal industry and the railways, even turning an operating profit into an overall loss.
Nationalisation is state capitalism where the profit changes form from dividends on shares to interest on government bonds.
Apologies Thomas. Actually I don’t think you are a fatalist just a bit inconsistent.
I have found that article. Nothing wrong with it. Just a straightforward article refuting the theological argument that humans have Free Will (so as to decide whether or not to obey god) and making the point that what we decide to do depends on material circumstances.
Wikipedia has “necessitarian”. “Necessarian” seems to be an earlier (and more elegant) form. If it just means that human behaviour is subject to the social and material environment then all materialists are necessarians. I am too. So is the Party.
I think Currey was a pre-ww2 member of the Socialist Party of Canada and wrote other articles on materialism and philosophy. I will try and track them down.
Thanks, TS, but can you give which issue of the Western Socialist that article occurred.
Not that, from the extracts you quote, it is taking a “necessitarian” position. It is denying that humans have a “free and absolute choice” as to what they do, on the grounds that “from conception to the crematorium the human animal continues to adjust itself to the compulsions acting on it from within and without” (and not that everything was already determined at the Big Bang).
Ok, TS, as you say Sabine Hossenfelder seems to be a “necessitarian” which I see Wikipedia defines as harder than a “hard determinist”:
“Necessitarianism is a metaphysical principle that denies all mere possibility; there is exactly one way for the world to be.… Necessitarianism is stronger than hard determinism, because even the hard determinist would grant that the causal chain constituting the world might have been different as a whole, even though each member of that series could not have been different, given its antecedent causes.”
(Not sure what this distinction is unless it’s that some are saying that the Big Bang could have been different.)
The question is : are you one?
Nobody is saying that humans are outside the universe or are not subject to its laws but that doesn’t commit you to the view that “the whole story of the Universe in every single detail was determined already at the Big Bang. We are just watching it play out.”
That sounds like fatalism to me. In any event, we are not just watching it play out. We are participating in it (even if, on this metaphysical theory, as puppets).
You have described “What will be will be” and “I am what I am” as deep thought but in fact they are just trite truisms. Actually the whole thing is a trite truism which is not going to have any effect of what happens or be of any use in even telling what is going to happen. Even Hossenfelder admits this.
That’s why metaphysics went out with the 18th century (except amongst theologians) was replaced by empirically-based science, in this case neurology.
I know, TS, you want to avoid being a fatalist and I was only trying to help you out of the hole you had dug yourself into by insisting that “what did not happen could not have happened simply because it didn’t happen” and the implications of this for what is going to happen in the future.
I have listened a number of times to what Sabine Hoffenfelder says at the beginning of the talk you posted here where she is presenting the case against the doctrine Free Will (which I am not defending). At one point near the beginning she says;
“This means in a nutshell that the whole story of the Universe in every single detail was determined already at the Big Bang. We are just watching it play out.”
I take this to mean that the future is already determined and that we can do nothing about it (in fact that what all of us are going to do is part of this predetermined future). In less philosophical language, what will be be, must be.
What do you think she means?
Covvie, the problem is not the Tories, it’s capitalism.
Do you really think a Labour government is going to make any difference? They are just the alternative management team for British capitalism and will run it in the future in the way they did in the past — in the only way it can be, as a profit system in the interest of the profit-takers not the wage-earners.
A blast of satire from the past:
Interesting. With her Austro-Bavarian accent and interest in astrophysics it could even have been Lizzie herself. But it couldn’t have been as it wasn’t.
What I am interested in is not defending a will free from natural causes but in avoiding fatalism. I think that at the end she provides the answer when she says that what people think and do depends on the information they receive. It is our object to provide people with information as why capitalism cannot work in their interest and why only socialism can — even if, of course, socialist ideas have arisen out of the material conditions of capitalism and are, objectively, factual.
Otherwise, we might as well just sit back and see whether or not Socialism will or will not come.
