ALB
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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.
Listened to a radio programme a couple of days ago which made me realise that what we have been discussing here is NFTs rather than the “metaverse”.
The “metaverse” seems to be a possibly useful technological advance making long distance meetings easier or at least more congenial. In any event, it is not as such a scam.
Maybe some CRT theorists are just criticising discrimination (like we do) but I assumed that they were saying rather more than that.
I still say CRT is racist because it promotes the idea of “white privilege” with its suggestion that all whites are somehow privileged. This sees the struggle in society as being “blacks” against “whites”. Here is an example found at random.
We mustn’t be put off criticising it just because their counterparts, the “white” racists, don’t like it.
The struggle in society is not between “blacks” and “whites” but between workers and capitalists.
One reason I wrote “if” is because that Maoist article says of one school of CRT:
“Realism rejects that structural racism can be eliminated through class solidarity because the contradiction between white working class and black working class is an antagonistic contradiction (or very close to being one)” (While Maoism says it’s only a non-antagonistic contradiction).
If CRT is just pointing to the “legal codification” of racism, fair enough — though I don’t think that racism is “codified” in law in the US, is it? After all the law didn’t prevent a “black” president being elected or a “black” head of the armed forces being appointed. If they are talking about legal practice rather than what it says on paper, that’s another matter of course. As you say, discrimination on the basis of skin colour is still a big issue in the US.
