ALB
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Perhaps surprisingly Rees-Mogg has defended the jury system. Or perhaps not surprisingly as he likes old things and the jury system goes back a long way.
That the attorney general (who is supposed to be the government’s lawyer and give them independent advice) should be joining in the knee jerk Tory reaction just shows how Johnson’s has filled the post with an arse-licking crony rather than an independent-minded lawyer.
It remains to be seen if the case will be referred to the Court of Appeal but it won’t make any difference to the verdict or, I would have thought, to future jury decisions. Juries won’t like being told by governments what decision to make.
I have just read the Haskins book, or rather pamphlet as it’s only 90 pages. He does seem to have studied our case and portrays it accurately as us defining socialism as a classless, stateless, frontierless, moneyless world society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by the whole people.
He says that this is what Marx too envisaged as the post-capitalist future and that the terms ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ both refer to it. He accepts that socialism has to be democratic and has not been established anywhere and that the various authoritarian regimes that have called themselves or have been called socialism aren’t because they were not democratic.
His approach to criticising socialism is different from that of his fellow anti-socialists who attack it as undemocratic on the basis of what happened in Russia, China, Cambodia, etc. He criticises it precisely because it would be democratic, extending democracy to the production and distribution of wealth.
He doesn’t think that such a society is possible but his objections here are bog standard: that it’s against human nature and What About the Lazy Man, Who Will Do the Dirty Work, What If Everyone Wanted to Live in Malibu, etc, etc, which we have often met and refuted.
His main point is that socialism in our and Marx’s sense is not just impossible but is ‘evil’ on the grounds that it would oblige people to share responsibility for something that was against their moral principles.
This is the old ‘tyranny of the majority’ argument deployed by individualist anarchists against socialism (Haskins seems to be some sort of moderate anarcho-capitalist). His argument is that, because what is to be produced is democratically decided, if a majority decide to raise cattle or pigs to eat this would be ‘evil’ because it would force Hindus, Muslims, Jews and Vegans to accept this despite voting against it.
Although he accepts that what he calls ‘European-style Socialism’ isn’t really socialism, he makes the same charge against a Public Health Service like the NHS. This too is ‘evil’ because it forces, for instance, strict Roman Catholics to accept decisions to provide contraception and abortion if it is decided that these should be provided.
He would have a case if a majority were to decide that everybody had to eat meat but of course what people should eat or should not eat (or how they should dress, what they should read, etc) is not something that would be decided or would need to be decided by a vote but could and would be left to individual choice. There are limits to what can be decided by a majority decision.
In any event, it is an argument against majority decision-making as such rather than just against socialism. Maybe his next book will be called ‘Why Democracy is Evil’.
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).
