ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Now you are exaggerating (not about being a bad anarchist but about “bourgeois democracy” in Britain “becoming indistinguishable” from red or brown fascism). Even you don’t believe that. Where is the supreme Leader? Where are the mass rallies? Where are the internment camps? Where is the Single Party? Where the monolithic state ideology?
Here, the expression of a very wide range of political views is permitted as is criticism and mockery of the government. We still exist, hold meetings and publish literature. So does the ACG.
For more on Big Brother and on the new Bill on demonstrations wait for next month’s Standard (out next week)
It might make for a more interesting and relevant discussion if you developed this hypothesis that you advanced (assuming that it is not a case of “I like annoying people in this way“):
“The traditional view of an educated, historically aware working class must then be abandoned, to be replaced with a different scenario: some kind of spontaneous explosion whereby the historically ignorant become united through necessity, not knowledge.”
All of the articles in the Socialist Standards of 1920-23 and 1927-29 are now online. Also those from February-May and December 1925 and from March-June and August and September 1926.
This was the decade of the industrial unrest after WW1, the General Strike, the first Labour Government and the development of state capitalism in Russia. Also recorded are the reformism of the ILP and the antics of the CPGB. Nationalisation is exposed as a fraud from a working class point of view. For Marxist theory in English, apart from Engels, members had to rely on Plekhanov and Lafargue.
The articles can be found here.
I still don’t know what the purpose of this thread is. It seems to be just to allow TM to self-indulgently moan about how dumb those he meets are (and by how clever he is). You try to broaden the subject but he just returns to grumbling.
Any chance of it going the same way as the “woke” thread?
I would have thought we expect most of the majority needed before socialism can come into being will be materialists in the sense of being non-religious. After all, socialism is a practical project to make things better down here on Earth for the one and only life we all have.
I don’t know about the extent of the historical theory and knowledge they will need to have. Certainly not a degree in history or even O level history (but I don’t think that exists any more now that the good old days have gone?). I can’t see why it would need to be all that extensive, just that capitalism came into existence some centuries ago, couldn’t solve the problems it caused working class in particular and humanity in general and is about to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
”the rule of law, democracy, civil society is a thin veil over the brutal reign of capital.
As an anarchist you would say that, wouldn’t you? That’s an important difference between anarchists and socialists. We recognise that, for all its limitations, the vote is a potential weapon that can (and should) be used in the course of ending capitalism. Also that “bourgeois democracy” provides the best framework within which the working class and socialist movement can develop and so is not to be rejected as a thin veil or useless façade.
If the outcome is to be socialism, your “historically ignorant” masses would still have to want and understand socialism. This would only require an understanding that (1) capitalism does not work and cannot be made to work for them and (2) that the way-out is a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources and that this requires their active participation to work.
If you think that workers today are so “dumbed down” that they can’t understand this then you may as well give up and concentrate on grumbling about how bad modern times are.
“would it not be fair to conclude that the case for capitalism brings social change is much more tenuous than one might expect.”
No, not unless you regard regard Whabbism, Ayatollahism, the Taleban and ISIS as capitalist ideologies whereas self-confessedly they are imposing a legal code from pre-capitalist times.
What is a tenuous, faced with such pre-capitalist ideologies, is the social change that capitalism brings.
I am not (of course) arguing for the further development of capitalism in those parts of the world but merely pointing out that the “progress” of capitalism there is not entirely negative as you suggested, to the extent that it undermines the pre-capitalist ideologies and practices that still survive there.
Capitalism is only concerned with exploiting wage-labour and is not bothered about the skin colour, sex, nationality or language of the bearer of the labour-power they purchase. In this sense it is naturally and logically secular and non-discriminatory, as is now reflected in the legal systems in the capitalistically-advanced parts of the world.
Incidentally, I think you are wrong about Afghanistan, at least in the areas controlled by the government.
Of course not. In countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran women are clearly oppressed. It’s the law. In time the development of capitalism will undermine this just as it did here where there is now no longer any state oppression of women.
Richard Dawkins has this to say on this subject in an interview today in the Times (of London) on his 80th birthday:
“As to transgenderism, although when he meets a transgender person he is happy to use the pronoun of their choice, he worries about a ‘cult of transgenderism’ that encourages children to know what they are doing to announce that they are transgender and perhaps seek hormonal or surgical intervention.
“Will the biology textbooks have to be rewritten to separate gender from sex? ‘Yes. I think if you are talking about biology, then you have to say it’s a semantic question. You use the word ‘male’ when you’re a biologist in the case of mammals for individuals with CY chromosomes and ‘female’ for chromosomes. In the case of birds it’s the other way round.You won’t get far as a biologist if you start messing about with fluid genders and things like that. That unit biology.’”I thought there was a danger of us feeding a troll here but it has turned out to be giving a man enough rope.
Another demolition job on MMT, this time from a perhaps unexpected source, the Von Mises Institute (or perhaps not so unexpected as they, like us, are pre-Kenesians). It is quite good actually, but a pity, though inevitable given who they are, that at one point they describe MMT as “soialist”:
I’m surprised that an anarchist should object to being described as “voluntarist”. I thought this was what anarchism was all about. Traditionally, they have accused Marxists of being “determinist”.
Incidentally I never argued that Russia had to develop capitalism just because workers there didn’t want socialism. It was because socialism isn’t possible in one country, and especially not in an industrially backward one. Capitalism would have had to develop there even if a majority had wanted socialism. There’s determinism if you !
I am not sure that the development of capitalism in parts of the world where elements of pre-capitalist class societies survive is necessarily bad for socialism. At least capitalism will spread education and lessen the oppression of women in those parts of the world. But that’s a matter for another thread.
There is an interview in today’s Times with Richard Dawkins on his 80th birthday in which the interviewer writes:
“My all-time favourite Dawkins tweet is from 2019: ‘Accosted in restaurant by Flat Earth zealot who intrusively talked at us while friend & I were trying to enjoy our meal. Finally I lost it and said, ‘You are an ignorant lunatic’”.
We know the feeling.
