ALB
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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.
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.
