ALB
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You say: “The case is being made as Stephen S says, to shift power away from the federal level to the state and district.”
I understood him to be saying the opposite but he can clarify this himself. In any event more power in the hands of the federal government is central do his thesis of a “federal dictator” able to use his position as commander in chief to impose his policies on States, as Eisenhower did in 1957 when he ordered the Arkansas national guard to enforce desegregation.
Giving more power to the States will weaken federal power. I haven’t been following the Supreme court case on abortion but didn’t they rule that abortion law was a matter for the States or something to that effect?
The coming of a Latin America type “federal dictator” could only happen if the US Constitution with its touted “checks and balances” were to be infringed or suspended. I can’t see the top military brass agreeing to that given the fetish that is made on the Constitution in US political culture. As I said, it just ain’t going to happen. To think that it might is to engage in wild political fiction.
Of course capitalism can, does and has existed under totalitarian and authoritarian political regimes. But that is it not the point.
The point is whether or not this is best type of political superstructure for capitalism. Is it the best political framework for the operation of capitalist economic system of production for profit? The collapse of the USSR and the relaxation of state economic control in China suggests that it is not.
There are various reasons why “bourgeois democracy” (for want of a better term) is best, such as one-party control allowing the party’s leaders to plunder capitalist profits which a system of ins and outs and “the rule of law” avoid; and modern technology requiring an educated working class and a degree of willing participation not simply dumb acquiescence.
The big test of this theory is admittedly China but the jury is still out on this. China’s GDP has gone up quite fast but this always happens when subsistence farmers producing for their own needs are incorporated into the capitalist economy since GDP measures precisely economic exchanges. But I suggest that it is more likely that China will be less of a dictatorship in 2030 than that the USA will be a dictatorship.
I wasn’t necessarily thinking of a Trump dictatorship but of any dictatorship. I listed those states because they were the most politically and industrially developed parts of the USA and a modern capitalist industrial system cannot be run, at least not for long or efficiently, as a political or military dictatorship.
I am prepared to take on a bet with you: that in 2030 (if both Trump and me are still around) the USA won’t be a political dictatorship (ie. no elections, opposition parties banned including us, political opponents in jail, press and media censorship, etc).
How much will you wager that it will be?
I don’t think we can give much credence to this “political scientist”. He is ignoring the fact that the USA still has many federal features and that this means its central government is comparatively weaker than its European counterparts. A federal government controlled by a dictator would not be able to impose its will on those states such as California, New York and New England which could be expected to oppose a dictatorship. It ain’t going to happen. Yet another scare story.
Just occurred to me that Harrison will probably also take the view that socialism, as we understand it, is evil.
The observation I thought was sensible was the one about veganism muddying the waters of the climate change issue. It is of course true that biologically humans are omnivores (even if not obligate ones) but that wasn’t the point I was wanting to make.
I had no problem to cut and paste from the version of the pamphlet on that site. Here’s the passage in full:
“The article shows that what the Stalinists are building is not Socialism but a social form of industrial organisation based upon the exploitation of wage-labour with many objectionable features practiced by Nazis, Fascists and the British Labour Parties alike.
An absolute necessity for Socialism is a highly developed industry and industrial technique. That necessary development of industry was carried out by capitalism between 1775 and 1900, that is to say, the period of the industrial revolution. But the same industrial stage had not been reached by Russia in 1917. In any case, therefore, Socialism could not have been established there at that time. The Bolsheviks had to set to work to develop Russia’s industry as a matter of compulsion. The system they have built up is, in fact, better described as a form of industrial feudalism.”Very odd, though, that they should describe a system they admit to be based on the exploitation of wage-labour as some kind of feudalism rather than of capitalism.
Read this for instance. Or if you can’t plough your way through it, jump to the conclusion:
“The other type of human is the one that still lives in the forests, in the hills, or on the plains, avoiding the advances of civilization. But their existence is precarious and is becoming more fragile with each passing day. These peoples are the last humans.”
I came across these anarcho-primitivists in France in the 1970s and 1980s. They liked the writings of Zerzan. They had also emerged from the ultra-left. One of them told me that at one point Camette had become a nutarian ie someone who would only eat fruit and nuts that had fallen from a tree. I don’t know if that was true but he certainly became a nut.
There was an echo of this in our companion party in the US a few years ago when a number left because they had come to the conclusion that the problem was not capitalism but “civilisation”. They were known as the Caveman Tendency.
For suggesting that anything useful could come from debating this Peter Harrison character. He seems to be a disillusioned ex-Bordigist who toys with the idea of “primitivism” (ie of going back to living in caves).
Alan, I never said that the capitalist state will not pay a conditional income to lots of people nor an unconditional income to some — both happen at present. What I said was that the state is not going to pay an unconditional income of a significant amount to everyone as envisaged by full UBIers.
The furlough scheme (which was neither universal nor unconditional of course) had a capitalist rationale — to allow employers to retain their workforce while production was temporarily interrupted and so not having to end their contract of employment and then recruit and train anew. Fullscale UBI does not.
“ Unlike universal unconditional proposals, which would have covered everybody, new city-based programs are small in scale, typically serving several hundred families, and are aimed only at low-income people.”
Precisely ! I think we can confidently say that UBI, in the sense of the state paying an unconditional income to everybody, will never happen. It’s pie in the sky as far as capitalism is concerned. And it won’t make sense in socialism.
We need to tell this to those who advocate it. It’s a question of how we tell them. Do we tell them that they are wasting their time and everybody else’s and so delaying the solution to the problem they think it will solve? Or do we hold back and say that they are on the right track — of wanting to separate a person’s access to what they need from their contribution in terms of work — but that “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” can only be achieved on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources?
As to the various small-scale experiments that are often mistakenly described as trying UBI, even they are unlikely to be adopted unless they can be shown to save money on administrative costs.
