ALB
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“I haven’t read any Marx or Engels beyond index research since my twenties.”
So, you at least were one applicant who had read Marx before applying to join! And I imagine that one of your motivations for joining was that we were “Marxist”.
I don’t think much of your attempt to back up your outrageous slur that Marx “despised” the peoples that “the Europeans colonised for capitalism”. In that passage you have dug up he is not saying that the Chinese are biologically inferior as your italics were presumably meant to imply.
The whole article can be found here so that people can judge for themselves:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/14.htm
Anybody know which events in China in 1853 Marx was referring to as ”the revolution in China?”
I didn’t mean “have to have read” in the sense of a requirement but as a fact. Why on Earth would somebody want to apply to join the Party if they hadn’t familiarised themselves with our case? In any event, to apply to join you have to sign that you agree with the Declaration of Principles which is clear a class struggle document, It also mentions “the order of social evolution”, a reference to the materialist conception of history.
Clearly, to join, you have to accept ideas that are called “Marxist” even if you don’t realise (and don’t need to realise) this. But once you’re in you are encouraged to read Marx and Engels or popularisations of their ideas. Otherwise, how could you be equipped to take part in discussions about the origins of capitalism on the terms in which we are discussing them …
I think you are bending the stick too far the other way, Robbo. Of course you don’t have to have read Marx to join the Party but you do have to have read Party pamphlets and other literature and these do reflect the labour theory of value, the materialist conception of history and that socialism will come about as a result of the class struggle of the working class.
I don’t think anybody would be turned down just because they couldn’t explain the difference between labour and labour power. If, on the other hand, they explicitly stated that they didn’t agree with the LTV but accepted some other theory there might be a problem. If you denied the class struggle you wouldn’t stand a chance. And, as you know, if you are religious and deny materialism then you don’t get in either.
Once in, members are entitled to express what views they like and can criticise the labour theory of value or that the working class will establish socialism. They wouldn’t be accused of acting against the interests of the Party for that. But these will remain personal or minority views. Some views would be unacceptable, racism or sexism for instance.
However, the Socialist Standard, as the Party’s official journal, expresses the majority view and would not publish an article critical of the labour theory of value or of the materialist conception of history. On the contrary, it carries articles supporting and explaining these (like your current series of articles).
So, the Party is clearly in the Marxist tradition even if we (no more than Marx for that matter) don’t really like the word “Marxist” as it suggests that some Great Man thought it all up which of course is against the whole MCH which sees ideas as arising from particular social circumstances. Basically, when we refer to ourselves as Marxists it’s to show that we are not anti-Marxists. Which we aren’t.
TM: “Yet Marx dismissed Chinese civilisation as barbarism and superstition. He appreciated capitalism and Europe, but despised the people and lands the Europeans colonised for capitalism. Millennia of their history and achievements was as nothing to him. For him, capitalism shocked the barbarous, stupid and ignorant into civilisation.”
I agree with Marcos on this one.That’s a vile libel on Marx.
We don’t agree with everything Marx did or said. And when we agree with what he said it is not because he did.
But we don’t blacken his name like die-hard apologists for capitalism who hate the words socialism or communism do, which is where that lie comes from.
Of course Marx didn’t “despise the people and the lands the Europeans colonised for capitalism“. He was a socialist not a racist. That’s a provocation too far.
Apparently a fly won the vice-presidential debate (as the least awful?):
Another shorter article by him here.As I said he seems to know his stuff:
He is called Simon Gilbert and his article can be found here;
He also wrote;
”Land was not state owned, but neither was it dominated by a landed aristocracy on the scale of feudal Europe. Chinese landlords were always subordinate to a state bureaucracy that constantly sought to limit the size of landholdings and hence the landlords’ political power.”
And;
”While a disproportionate number of state officials came from the wealthier sections of society, the bureaucracy developed its own interests often in conflict with those of private landlords. A series of measures were adopted to limit the power of private landholders and to insulate officials from any specific landed interests. The most obvious of these was the abolition of primogeniture.“
I don’t know. I am not China expert and don’t claim to be. All I can do is to refer you to that article by the SWPer that you found (which I thought was very informative). He says;
”Chinese landlords were much smaller scale than their European counterparts, relations with their tenants were also very different. Because of the constant division of land, larger holdings tended to be fragmented. So, Kang Chao suggests, tenants must often have rented from more than one landlord, giving them a degree of independence from each. In some places tenancies could be bought and sold without the approval of the landowner. The relative strength of the tenants’ position is indicated by the high levels of rent default.
Payment of rent was essentially the only obligation of the tenant to the landlord. Labour obligations were to the state in the form of the periodic corvée—compulsory public labour performed outside the crucial sowing and harvesting seasons. It was the landowner, however, who was responsible for paying the land tax.”
He also wrote:
”The bureaucratic state is best understood not as an instrument of the rule of a private landowning class, but as a ruling class in its own right.”
DJP wrote: “Also when we are talking about the origins of capitalism we are going to be talking about more than two classes, it’s only with fully developed capitalism that the landowning and the former middle class get absorbed into each other“
That was a point I have been trying to make but neither side will have it. The one wants to say that the landlords of the tine were feudal and the other that they were “bourgeois”.
Marx of course worked with a three-class analysis, as far as Britain was concerned, in both his economic and political writings. Working class exploited for surplus value by the capitalist class who were forced by the landowners to share some of this with them as ground-rent.
What’s the point of these titbits of information? The MCH does not argue that the objective members of a class all automatically behave in a way that conforms to the overall objective interests of that class. That would be crude economic determinism. An easy Aunt Sally to knock down.
“NO BRETON WILL BE REFUSED”. You mean those people in berets selling onions from their bikes? I suppose that as relatives of the Ancient Britons they have more right to live in Britain than the Anglo-Saxon invaders.
A headline into today’s Times:
”Attenborough: Curb capitalism to save Earth”.
He is quoted as saying in a Radio 5 podcast:
”The excesses the capitalist system has brought us have got to be curbed somehow. That doesn’t mean to say that capitalism is dead. I’m not an economist and I don’t know, but I believe the nations of the world, the ordinary people worldwide, are beginning to realise that greed does not actually lead to joy”
Curbing capitalism — ie slowing down the rate of accumulation — won’t work because capitalism is precisely a system of capital accumulation sourced from profits. What might work is investment in non-fossil fuel energy becoming profitable as seems to be becoming the case, slowly.
Expecting capital accumulation to be curbed — the aim of all environmental pressure groups including XR — is just tilting at windmills. Capitalism can’t be curbed and it’s futile to try.
The only way out is to abolish capitalism altogether by making the Earth’s natural and industrial resources the common heritage of all so production can be geared to meeting people’s needs directly instead of to the accumulation of capital.
