ALB
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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.”
You’d get more sense arguing with a flat-earther. A vote of all humanity to decide the nature of reality or the laws of physics or even if the Earth is flat. What a nutter.
Here’s the new birdie song
Or refer to a committee of linguistic experts, I don’t think. Simply let people use either as both are perfectly understandable. No need to choose which one is the “true” usage.
Yes, Robbo, he really has scored an own goal with that statement that future socialist society can democratically decide when a referendum would not be needed to decide some issue. Of course. That’s our case conceded.
Obviously the democratic decision-making and administrative structure of socialist society — its “constitution” if you like — will be decided democratically. Personally I don’t think it likely that it will be decided that referendums should be the only or even the main way of making decisions on social natters. Most issues are not of a simple yes-or-no nature and would be better decided by some council or committee which can go into the matter in more detail. Also, the procedures for choosing the members of such councils can be expected to be different in different parts of the world depending on their political traditions (elections, by lot, citizens assemblies, etc). But however chosen they will be answerable to the community concerned.
I can’t see people deciding that issues such as the definition of “matter” or whether the Sun goes round the Earth or vice versa should be decided by a world referendum. Of course someone might propose this but they probably wouldn’t find a seconder and would be laughed out of court.
So now UBI is going to “solve inequality” ! Poverty is going to be abolished by giving the poor a mere $500 a month !
But capitalism is based on the inequality that is the ownership of the means of wealth production by a minority. And, since under capitalism you have to have money to live and for most the only way is get some is to sell your mental and physical energies, those who can’t do this for whatever reason are going to be destitute.
UBI can solve neither inequality nor poverty. The most it might do (as we have noted here) is relieve a little the stress of those forced to be dependent on state hand-outs from having to prove all the time to the authorities that they really have no other income.
You are right (of course). Here’s the exact passage from The Civil War in France, written immediately after the bloody suppression of the Commune of Paris in 1871:
“The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilization! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor. But this is communism, “impossible” communism!”
Marx had also said the same thing is the last but one chapter of Capital first published in 1867:
“The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.”
I think I heard right but the media mentioned “Reclaim the Streets” as behind the court action to overturn the ban on that vigil on Clapham Common (incidentally an unwise move as the law, like it or not, is clear, and I was always told “if you don’t like the answer, don’t ask the question).
Is this the same group as was active in the 1990s in various attempts to stop motorways and by-passes being built (all of which failed)? We even debated with them.
Have they recycled themselves as a feminist group or has someone revived their name?
That’s a good point BD. There are “limits” to socialism as common ownership too. Socialism is the common ownership of the means of producing wealth and not of people’s personnel possessions. When we held outdoor meetings as we used to, we had to repeatedly re-assurance our hecklers that socialism would not mean the common ownership of their tooth brush.
Actually, “common ownership” and “democratic control” are two ways of saying the same thing, from different angles — as if everybody didn’t have an equal opportunity to have a say in deciding how something was used then it wouldn’t be “common” ownership by them (but only by those who did).
So democratic control in socialism does not extend to the what might be called people’s “personnel possessions” (though things which they personally used might be a better term).
In the mid-19th century utopian communist Etienne Cabet’s novel Icaria people were required to wear the same sort of clothes so as to ensure equality. What people chose to wear would be no subject to a vote in socialism anymore than what they chose to eat or what music they chose to listen to, etc — or what to think.
In any event, democracy is not just “the majority having its way and the minority having its say”. It’s more than that. It’s a way of life and a culture which means that there are certain things that should not be decided by a majority decision. Not just what people should eat or wear but much more than that.
A majority might well decide to discriminate against a minority group, but that would infringe the spirit of democracy. In fact, even under the “bourgeois” democracy we know today what a majority can decide is limited by a so-called “bill of rights”. I can’t see the equivalent of that not existing in socialism. Otherwise critics of socialism who criticised it as being “totalitarian democracy” would have a point.
I don’t like the Beatles either but at least they (or a couple of them) composed their own music and lyrics. How many of the others on your list did?
Let’s vote on it then.
