ALB
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”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.
That’s what I’d call a real UBI scheme, not just tweaking the welfare system by paying that sort of money instead of existing paments. The trouble is that it is only intended to last for a year or so (but if it was permanent, an annual state hand-out of $12,000 would begin to exert a downward pressure on wages) and the capitalist state is not going to pay for it (and if recourse was had to the printing press this would depreciate its value through roaring inflation).
If these leftwing Democrats want to propose something realistic why don’t they propose socialism, the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources and production and distribution on the principle of “from each their ability, to each their needs” ?
Yes, Marxism is rather less voluntaristic than anarchism. There are economic laws out there and they cannot be overcome by acts of will. The sad fact is that as long as capitalism is the dominant world system there is no way out on a national scale for people anywhere, not even in the capitalistically developed parts of the world and certainly not elsewhere. This means that people in parts of the world in the same position as Russia was in 1917 are going to have to suffer capitalist development. There is nothing they can do to avoid it; the most they can do is to try to ensure that this takes place in conditions of political democracy. “Think global, act local” sounds ok at first sight but, when you analyse it, it doesn’t turn out to be that sensible. Not that some local acts can’t bring some relief within the system for some.
I never said that industrial development in Russia was needed under capitalist conditions and certainly not in the form it took under Stalin. If socialism had been established in the rest of the world in 1917 or 1921 or before, any industrialisation of a part of the world in the same condition as Russia then was could have taken place under the quite different conditions of socialism.
My argument was, given that world socialism wasn’t established (because the great majority of the workers of the world didn’t want it), then industrialisation under capitalist conditions was inevitable in Russia. It was going to happen, though it could have taken a different form, with more private capitalism, than it did. So there was some historical leeway.
But could some sort of non-capitalist society have been established in Russia on its own if a majority there had wanted it? It’s a bit of an academic question now since it didn’t happen so there’s little point in asking you what it might have been like. But I doubt it.
What isn’t academic is the situation today. Is further capitalist industrialisation needed in the the largely non-industrialised parts of the world? I say No. But how to avoid it? By world socialism or by some attempt to establish some sort of non-capitalist society in one country or region? What should revolutionaries like us be aiming for the workers to do?
More on the struggle for profits amongst Big Pharma companies supported by their governments.
From another article in today’s Times headed “why did Americans take jab at Astra?”
“It’s too trite to suggest it’s to protect US alternatives developed for profit by Pfizer and Moderna, shooting for $15 billion and €18.4 billion in sales this year.”
Because AstraZeneca is not aiming at a maximum profit for the time being, selling its vaccine at cost price (actually a bit above this but still below what they could charge) the author assumes that they are doing it “for no profit to help the world”.
How naive can you get! He doesn’t mention that this is only for the duration of the current pandemic. They are playing a longer game, using their vaccine as a loss leader and shooting for billions of dollars in the longer term when they have calculated that vaccines will still be needed.
Another case of vaccine capitalism.
A Guardian-reader noted this in their paper a few days ago about which political parties claimed furlough:
“The British National party may no longer have any councillors but it claimed up to £10,000. A spokesperson for the party, led by Adam Walker, said its employees “should not be discriminated against because some people may hold different political views than their employer”.
Very few other political parties made claims but they include Brexit Party Ltd, which is owned by Nigel Farage, and the Socialist party. Each claimed up to £10,000.”So Trotskyist professional revolutionaries are now paid by the capitalist state.
