ALB
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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.
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 !
