ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
According to the media, Johnson told the Tories’ 1922 committee yesterday that “the reason Britain had secured such large vaccine supplies before other countries was because of ‘greed’. He is understood to have told his MPs: ‘The reason for our vaccine success is capitalism — greed, my friends’” (today’s Times.
His PR people have since tried to row back on this but it confirms that the UK government got Astra Zeneca to give it priority over the EU by offering them a higher price.
So what is it: vaccine capitalism or vaccine nationalism?
I don’t think I said that state capitalism was the way forward for Russia (that was Lenin) but that in the circumstances capitalism in one firm or another was the only way forward. The circumstances being of course that workers neither in Russia nor, crucially, in the industrialised parts of the world wanted socialism. For economically backward and isolated Russia capitalism was the only way. Obviously socialism on a world scale was the only real way out but unfortunately that wasn’t on the cards — only if the rest of Europe and North America had gone socialist could Russia have avoided capitalism.
We can only speculate now on what alternatives to what actually happened there might have been, ideally I suppose one which allowed the working class trade Union and socialist movement some margin to develop. But it wasn’t to be. I don’t know what you think could/should have happened “in the circumstances”?
Talking of democracy, I am not sure what you mean by “anarchist type base democracy” where you don’t have to put bits of paper in a ballot box. I thought the first Kronstadt demand was for new elections to the Soviet’s with a secret ballot.
In any event, under the ideal soviet (council) system the “base” only gets one chance to vote — when electing the local soviet. Elections above that level (wider geographical area) are made up delegates from lower (smaller) soviets. Which could mean that those on the supreme (nationwide) soviet might be 5 or 6 times separate from the base one.
I am not sure that this is more democratic than directly electing the members of the region-wide decision-making body. But not up to us today to lay down or decide.
I think you are right, Wez. The absurdity of our feathered friend’s conclusion (that, in Hegelian terms, Nature has no independent existence but is a manifestation of Man’s essence) means that he has got something seriously wrong somewhere.
He is clearly out of his philosophical depth though I must confess that I am not too confident myself in interpreting (or even a fan of) Hegelian philosophy and its terminology. So put me right if I go wrong.
In that passage Marx is arguing against the view that Man and Nature are the creation of God and so are expressions of its essence; which would make them “unreal” in the sense of “inessential” (not being their own “essence”).
To refute this view, he argues that sense-experience shows that Man and Nature have no need of an alien (outside, external) “essence” to explain them. The sense-perceived existence of Man shows the existence of Nature and the sense-perceived existence of Nature shows the existence of Man. Both are therefore “essential”, ie “real”. Equally real.
Hence Marx’s conclusion that socialism (as a theory, a doctrine)
“starts from the practical and theoretical sense-perception of man and nature as the true reality” (McLelland translation).
Or, in the Marx Engels Collected Works translation, which sticks more closely to the Hegelian terminology, socialism
“proceeds from the practically and theoretically sensuous consciousness of man and nature as the essence.”
Both Man and Nature, together, are “real”. They are the “ultimate reality”. Not God. Thus Marx refutes Creationism (philosophically).
Our feathered friend is making Marx say that only Man is real in this sense, with Nature as a manifestation of Man’s essence.
This is a possible philosophical position but an odd one (a sort of collective human solipsism – collective Man thinking that everything they experience is what they have created just as an individual might think that only he or she exists). But it wasn’t Marx’s. He was a materialist in the sense that he thought that (the rest of) Nature was just as real as Man.
Here is David McLellan’s translation of that passage in the 1844 Paris Manuscripts where Marx is arguing against Creationism:
“But since for socialist man what is called world history is nothing but the creation of man by human labour and the development of nature for man, he has the observable and irrefutable proof of his self-creation and the process of his origin. Once the essential reality of man in nature, man as the existence of nature for man, and nature for man as the existence of man, has become evident in practical life and sense experience, then the question of an alien being, of a being above nature and man — a question that implies an admission of the unreality of nature and man — has become possible in practice. Atheism as a denial of this unreality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is the denial of God and tries to assert through this negation the existence of man; but socialism as such no longer needs this mediation; it starts from the theoretical and practical sense-perception of man and nature as the true reality.” (Early Texts, pp. 156-7)
In his “Karl Marx. His Life and Thought” McLellan comments on this passage:
“Thus for socialist man the question of an alien being beyond man and nature whose existence would imply their unreality had become impossible. For him the mutual interdependence of man and nature was what was essential and anything else seemed unreal.” (pp. 122-3)
Just because something wasn’t socialist doesn’t mean that it was useless. The demands for free elections, freedom of speech, assembly etc and against a one-party dictatorship were good, as a degree of political democracy is essential for the growth of the working class trade union movement and the socialist movement. As you might agree (or, perhaps as an anarchist, not). The economic demands, for freedom of activity for small peasants and artisans, were realistic in the circumstances but were not socialism.
There’s nothing to be gained from describing something as socialist that wasn’t.
Here’s the Daily Express denouncing the noble Earl as “woke”:
I’m not sure I’m in the right thread.
Another gem from the 1920s.
The Party has a proud tradition of standing up to leftie student bullies. This, from 1973:
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2014/01/eysenck-at-lse-socialist-defends-free.html
Look out for the article on “Cancel Culture” in next month’s Socialist Standard. If you want to order extra copies to sell outside your local students Union contact Head Office. Just be careful they don’t report you to your local Job Centre to try to get your benefits cancelled.
Didn’t they used to be called “the Loony Left”? But this lot seem really loony in implying that only a hunchback should be allowed to play Richard III. And they are more dangerous as they are open opponents of free speech and work to get people whose views they dislike sacked.
For those interested in a contemporary socialist commentary and analysis of events in 1921 all the issues of the Socialist Standard for that year are online here:
https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1921/
The suppression of the mutiny in Kronstadt doesn’t seem to have been given much publicity at the time. It was publicised later as a stick to beat Trotsky and the Bolsheviks — and a good one too as it showed how ruthless they were prepared to be to hold on to power and maintain their dictatorship. But I don’t think it can be said to have had any socialist content.
It was one of the events that forced Lenin to realise that the only way forward for Russia in the circumstances was the development of capitalism in one form or another and to adopt the New Economic Policy of what he called “state capitalism” as the development of capitalism in Russia under the control of the so-called “proletarian state”. That change of policy is commented on in detail in the series of articles on “Where Russia Stands”.
By coincidence in the course of scanning articles from the Socialist Standards of the 1920s I have just done one from August 1925 in which an opponent makes this criticism:
“Fifty years ago — which was an age of triumphant Science — it was widely believed that in matter and motion there had at last been placed in man’s hands the key to the interpretation of the universe and all its contents, including man himself. Fifty years ago that was ; but time in the interval has wrought many changes. Science, now wiser and less confident, recognises its limitations and confines itself to a description of things as they appear to us, being silent about them as in their ultimate nature they are. Materialism is no longer regarded as a truth of science.
Neither is materialism an established truth of philosophy. It amounts to no more than a philosophic speculation; and it is endorsed to-day by few thinkers of repute. The main reason for this, briefly expressed, is that the theory cannot reach its starting-point. Thought itself bars the way. You can never get to a position beyond thought where you are face to face with matter per se — where you have matter pure and simple — and then show thought evolving from it. Matter in its primordial form — the atom with its electrons — is always matter with an element of thought already present in it. Anyone who grasps the significance of this statement will at once see how precarious a basis materialism is for Socialism.”
