ALB
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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.
I think any invitation or challenge should be done “officially” by the EC. Are they meeting on Saturday 8 January? Mike, can you put it in the agenda?
That could be Democracy’s Seven Deadly Sins.
But if he mentions us we need to take up the challenge even though the book has been out since 2018. We have a tradition and reputation for being anti-socialist killers going back to the pre-WWI Anti-Socialist Union. This one seems easy meat.
I imagine he singled us out as we are the only group calling themselves socialists who present a coherent alternative to capitalism. The anarchist-capitalists did the same in the 1980s because we were the only group arguing for a non-market, non-money society.
Interesting article. Draper wrote some good stuff, for instance on what Marx meant by “dictatorship of the proletariat”, a term we have never thought much of. Must better to speak of “working class rule” while capitalism is abolished, the temporary use of political power by the working class to abolish capitalism and bring in socialism.
But Marx’s article does weaken one of the arguments we have used — that in his day “dictatorship” had not yet acquired the meaning it has today and simply meant a strong government. As Marx described Bolivar as a “dictator” this suggests that it did then have the meaning of an individual exercising unrestrained power.
Still a good reason for not using the term “dictatorship of the proletariat”. No need to use another term that we have to explain all the time what it doesn’t mean, especially as we want to emphasise the necessarily democratic nature of the socialist revolution.
Having read that interview with Gerard Horne (is he — or was he ever — a member of the Communist Party?) I have to agree, DJP, that you are right about CRT. It is not a Black Nationalist or Racist Theory but what you said — an interpretation of US history which explains why discrimination always has been and still is a feature of society and politics there.
It is easy to see why US patriots want it banned from being taught. It doesn’t paint a good history of “their” country even though it is accurate.
Not that the CRT partisans are, or consider themselves to be, unpatriotic Americans. They want the USA to be a discrimination-free capitalist society and state like most other capitalist countries. In fact capitalism isn’t inherently racist so they are not demanding the impossible.
